Category: Should We Talk About The Weather?

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Should We Talk About The Weather? Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Out in the elements

Last night at work:
Snow
Why I was outside in the middle of that:
Marianly and Everett and snow
One of our reporters wanted me to get a picture of her doing her live shot outside the building in the middle of the snowstorm, so she could show her family. (They apparently know nothing of this “snow” that they only hear about but never see in Miami.) I also got to hold that light stand as steady as I could – the wind is blasting so hard outside that it was like trying to keep a handle on a kite during a tornado.
The drive home was pretty treacherous. I might get my day off after all. (Besides which, I clocked out with over 37 hours – if I can’t make it in tomorrow, I almost have a full week of work in. In four days.)… Read more

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Critters Home Base Should We Talk About The Weather?

Wind and/or wuthering

It’s been an insanely windy 24 hours here. We’re talking sustained 30-40mph winds (and the gusts are worse). Needless to say, my already-battered mailbox has all but been left laying in the ditch by this. The resulting temperature drop – down to around freezing – has accelerated that time of year when Xena becomes a full-time resident inside the house. Which seems to suit Olivia just fine – it means that wagging tail is always just a pounce away, in the comfort of her own home!
Shall we do promos for global thermonuclear war?
At exactly the same time tonight, everyone working for a Hearst Argyle TV station got an automated call on their home or cell phones, testing an automated “emergency response” system to be activated in the event of major emergencies or disasters; I guess it’s there to tell us if the station’s been taken out by a surgical strike (though I can’t imagine who’d want to do that now that Dancing With Or Without The Stars is over), or, more likely, to tell everyone to Report To Work Now Now Now in the event of a 9/11-scale emergency. This system was put in place after Katrina all but wiped out our sister station (and one of the oldest continuously broadcasting stations in the U.S.) WDSU last year. It sounds like the mutant love child resulting from a menage a trois between WOPR, Speak & Spell, and some Commodore 64 text-to-speech program whose name I’ve long since forgotten. It’s like getting a surprise phone call from Stephen Hawking, and he’s calling me “Early Green.” I’ll try to record it off the answering machine later in the day before I delete it, for your amusement.
Twilight Zone Standard Time
I have a small cluster of VCRs which I used for converting international videotapes to domestic formats and vice versa. (If anyone actually still requires this service in the age of DVD, give me a shout – I give good PAL conversion.) One of these VCRs has been routinely slipping into another timestream. For example: the always-accurate clock on my DVD recorder says “4:08A” (I kid you not, the thing is tuned into the atomic clock or something, because I’ve never had to set it once in 3+ years). The JVC VCR, at this moment, says “10:12A.” I’ve come home from work at two in the morning to find the VCR claiming it’s in PM time somewhere. And 12 hours or so later, with no readily apparent explanation, wham, it snaps back into real time. This would be great if I could get it to record stuff from the future, you know? I’d suddenly become an avid (and quite probably much wealthier than I am now) sports fan. Sort of like a slightly more modern version of Early Edition. Minus the yellow cat. Which is probably for the best, Olivia would chase his tail too.… Read more

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Should We Talk About The Weather?

Tornado photos: updated.

Garrison Avenue, Fort Smith - April 20, 2006
I’d been planning on doing this for much of this year, but in the end really only had about half an hour to devote to it. I took a printout of the photos that I took in 1996 after the Fort Smith tornado, drove down to Garrison Avenue for the first time in ages, and then set out on foot – looking really odd running around with my camera and printed-out photos, I’m sure – to recapture as many of the sights (and the sites) as I could from as close as I could get to the same angles. A lot of the differences in camera angles are due simply to the traffic factor – one day after the tornado hit downtown Fort Smith in 1996, the National Guard had Garrison Avenue roped off from the bridge down to the 600 or 700 block, so yeah, you could walk around in the middle of a busy five-line artery leading from Arkansas to Oklahoma without a single smidgeon of fear. Ten years later…well, I hard a hard time finding opportunities to cross the street on foot, let alone get photos from the same out-in-the-middle-of-the-street angles. Anyway, you can see the results (along with commentary and the original 1996 photos of the same locations) here; it’s really quite sobering, actually. Garrison Avenue was already a bit of a poor area ten years ago when I was living in an apartment there; and today I walked past tons of places that were closed, or available for rent or sale, where there used to be at least small businesses.… Read more

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Should We Talk About The Weather?

Another local weather myth.

With the 1996 Fort Smith tornado very much on my mind, and having recently re-read my “tornado diary,” I thought I would offer one major factual correction. The Arkansas River really doesn’t do anything to deflect tornadoes. Not a thing. It can’t stop a supercell thunderstorm from crossing the river and then dropping a funnel right into downtown, or any other part of town. And in the case of the ’96 storm, every once in a while you’re dealing with a storm that’s just too big to be bothered by a little river in the way. Sort of like every once in a while you’ll see a hurricane that tops the levees. So I just wanted to get that correction on the record, before anyone thought it was a true thing – it’s a local weather myth, a meteorological old wives’ tale, and a dangerous one at that because it gets people to let their guard down.
She’s a strange lady, this mother nature.… Read more

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Serious Stuff Should We Talk About The Weather?

Ten years after the night the sky fell.

I’ve gotten a number of e-mails, and even a call from a reporter, in the past week, all related to the 1996 Fort Smith Tornado Journal that I wrote in the pre-blog version of Scribblings almost exactly ten years ago. (I only just realized that I hadn’t ported this rather lengthy article over to the new, more bloggish portion of Scribblings, so I’ve done just that as of last night.) Generally, everyone’s been upbeat about it, glad that there’s some document on the web from someone who was there when it happened, and I’m glad they like it. In its own way, it’s a document of a time and a place and a mindset, and so I guess that since it’s a document of my mindset at a juncture that was less than favorable for me to hang on to all of my marbles, if I’m to be honest, I’m a little bit embarrassed about it. It’s a bit “overwritten” from a stylistic standpoint, and veers a little too close to angsty emotional overload for my tastes these days. But that’s who and where I was at the time, so I’ve managed to resist my urges to edit it or rewrite any of it.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who’s been reading it and letting me know.… Read more

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Should We Talk About The Weather?

Facing my fears…and promptly crapping my pants.

Thursday night was an interesting night at work. We had numerous very close calls with tornadoes forming and never quite touching down in Fort Smith and the surrounding areas. At one point, I was asked to ditch what I was doing and go outside with a camera on my shoulder to see if I could catch some of this action. Unless a flash of lightning helped, I wasn’t going to see crap with that camera, but what the hell, it’s a bit of excitement. So I stood outside, rolled the tape, and aimed at the sky.
A little side note about tornadoes: I’m scared to death of them. Really. My real life up-close-and-personal experiences with them have only cemented that, from my very earliest tornado experiences to the “big one” in 1996. I’m fascinated by them, I’ve tried to educate myself on how and why they happen to try to get rid of some of that fear, and it hasn’t really helped, because all I’ve learned is that they’re an unavoidable, unstoppable force of nature that’ll kill you mighty dead if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and probably destroy you home and everything in it too. It’s rather difficult not to fear that.… Read more