Tornados and such

While we were missing the Sierra Madre fire on the one hand, we were also missing the tornadoes at home on the other. Well, nearby tornadoes anyway.

Or so I thought. Apparently they were a lot closer than that.

And yes, purely in the interest of studying the social effects of natural disasters on communities, when we got the chance we moved toward the fire, not away. Kind of like when there's a storm.

UPDATE: Here's a great bit of tornado video, from the camera inside a parked ambulance.

The Wedding

We are just back from our daughter's wedding in Pasadena. Despite what some folks at the reception asked, no we were not the wedding party that had to be airlifted out of the Sierra Madre fire zone.

It was in a park, though, just south of Jet Propulsion Lab. I've posted the video above, and there are some photos loaded at Flickr. My thanks to Michele, who took all the best shots.

The County Budget

Here is why so many of us find government incomprehensible from the get go. I live in a county with a population of about 34,000.

The proposed budget for the county for FY2009 is $122 million dollars. That's seems incredibly large. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea of spending that much money for anything in this county.

Sixty million goes to the school district, which has about 7,000 students. Plus federal dollars.

I know the numbers all add up and make sense, but the sheer scale makes me feel like I'm trying to do my personal finances by counting on my fingers and toes.

And the Government Shall Set You Free

Obama needs to learn to shut up. Fresh off of this -
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Then he says this -

"What is absolutely true is that people don't feel like they're being listened to," the Democratic presidential contender said. "So they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives.

" And what we need is a federal government that is actually paying attention. A government that is fighting for working people day in and day out making sure that we are trying to allow them to live out the American dream and that's what this campaign is about."

You see when people have problems they shouldn't be praying or turning to friends and family. Their first thought should be that the federal government should be doing something for them. That's sure my American dream.

Bringing Up Baby

Parenting is hard enough when everything is going smoothly, but it gets worse when the parents can't agree on "how to raise their kids." Sometimes it can even lead to fights.

When police asked the woman why the two had separated, she said they have "different ideas about how the baby should be raised," according to a police report.

When officer Daniel Swift asked the woman what she meant by that, she said that the two belong to different street gangs. "They could not agree on which gang the baby would claim," Swift said.

How about we all chip in and send them a little bitty prison uniform?

Gobal Warming Causes Volcanic Eruptions

You knew it had to come up eventually.

Increased volcanic activity is linked to ice melted by the effects of global warming, a study has found.

So much ice in Iceland has melted in the past century that the pressure on the land beneath has lessened, which allows more of the rock deep in the ground to turn to magma. Until the ice melted, the pressure was so intense that the rock remained solid.

Carolina Pagli, of the University of Leeds, led research which calculated that over the past century the production of magma had increased by 10 per cent.

The research team, reporting their findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, said an extra 1.4 cu km of magma has been created under the Vatnajökull ice-cap in the past 100 years.

Since 1890 the ice-cap has lost 10 per cent of its mass, which has allowed the land to rise by up to 25m (82ft) a year.

Son of a B! The area where this ice cap was has risen 25 meters per year for the last 118 years? Where there was a flat plain before, now there's a mountain nearly 10,000 feet tall? That in itself ought to pretty well accommodate a measly 1.4 cu km (0.34 cu mile) of magma. But what a great tourist attraction!