Coco’s giving up on getting to come in the house for some reason (her person did finally show up though)…
…and the freezing rain’s coming down pretty good to put a nice coating of ice on top of all this crap. Yay?… Read more
So, if one puts any stock into the Weather Channel’s invented, hurricanesque “storm names” for winter storms – names that are their invention and not recognized or sanctioned (but are, in all likelihood, giggled at) by the actual Weather Service – we are being hit by “Winter Storm Q” right now. (Winter Storm Khan hit another part of the country a few weeks ago.) Right now, we’ve got snow transitioning into something harder and nastier, sleet and little ice pellets. As if my exile to the house needed to be formalized somehow, me and the boy are stuck here for a while. … Read more
So apparently, while we’re all waiting for asteroid 2012 DA14 to zip by in 12 hours or so, a decent-sized meteor we didn’t expect or detect almost made it to the ground in one piece in Russia.
This post is pretty Youtube-heavy. … Read more
Okay, weather service, this isn’t funny any more.
Christmas was marred slightly by one minor thing: a blizzard hit. We had planned to spend the afternoon with friends, stuffing our faces and shooting whatever bulls wandered into our view, but there was already ice falling from the sky by the time we got there. It turned into a meet-and-greet-and-eat-and-get-the-hell-outta-Dodge.
Considering how bad the roads have gotten since then (the whole area’s pretty much been shut down, as thousands of schoolchildren bemoan the fact that this hit during a time of the year that they were out of school anyway), the haste was not premature. … Read more
My son is fascinated by this image over here, depicting Jupiter during Voyager 1’s approach in 1979. The other day, when that astounding, jaw-dropping picture of the huge, hurricane-like storm sitting atop Saturn’s north pole was released, showing a giant cyclonic vortex almost as wide as our entire continent, I showed it to him and he seemed strangely nonplussed. Then I had an idea: maybe it’s not as fascinating because it’s not moving. And that’s a hard thing to remedy, since Cassini is taking still pictures and not video, right? But hey, I’m an old video guy. I can brute-force this thing and “flipbook” it just like NASA and JPL did back in ’79.
I don’t often ask you guys to swallow a 13-meg animated GIF (see note below), but what you’re about to see after the jump is kind of nifty. It might just about be worth it. … Read more
Actually, that bit of tornado terminology is outdated: it should be EF-U. Residents of Cloverfield need to hit the deck pronto. A bit of movie news on Variety.com has me chuckling [LINK]…
Scribe Simon Beaufoy has rewritten New Line’s found-footage tornado project while Jeremy Sumpter has been cast alongside Arlen Escarpeta, Alycia Debnam-Carey and Nathan Kress.
Steven Quale — a longtime associate of James Cameron — signed on earlier this year to direct the tornado pic (formerly titled “Category Six”) […] Shooting will start July 23 in Michigan.
Story, presented through videocameras and cellphones, centers on high schoolers who try to survive a Category 6 tornado.
A “category six tornado”? Really? Really? Hollywood, you do realize, don’t you, that you permanently filled the “severe weather horror movie with shitty science” niche years ago with Twister? There’s really no need to try to top it.
Unless, of course, you don’t realize that “category” is a term exclusive to hurricane warnings and not tornado warnings. Then I guess it’s okay.
While you’re insulting everyone’s intelligence, please make sure to do the gala world premiere in Tuscaloosa or Joplin. That’ll go over well there.… Read more
An intersting and distinctly summer-ish southern sight…
…steam rising, no, billowing up from the recently-lightly-rained-upon road. It was thicker than the picture really makes it look. Zombie hordes could’ve walked out of it and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Well, okay, I wouldn’t have been any more surprised than I’d ususally be with the sudden appearance of zombie hordes. They normally only show up on odd-numbered Mondays.… Read more
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed an occasional fascination with reading up on stuff that scared the hell out of me as a kid, even if the scare-the-hell-out-of-me factor was impossibly silly and irrational. I’ve gotten to where I value reason, and knowing, over knee-jerk emotional reactions. (Let’s face it, in this house, I kinda have to be the one to do that.) Sometimes it’s something as silly as figuring out why a certain movie freaked me out as a kid. Sometimes it’s about figuring out more about a specific sound used to scare the hell out of me. Something like this sound. … Read more
We now go live to the Green family weather center, where Olivia is monitoring the situation closely…
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