Random thoughts and questions

It's not the fire engines, it's the station's siren.

Considering proximity, though, it's not nearly as loud as a tornado siren.

In southwest PA, yes. We grew up with a tornado/fire siren too, though everyone ignored it.
In fact, come to think of it, a tornado tore up my home town a year and a half ago:

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/weather/storms/tornadoes/2011-03-24-pennsylvania-tornado_N.htm

We used to get one every few years when I lived there. Fun as heck.

I wonder if Lodi is as bad a place to be stuck as CCR makes it out to be.

Once a month all the air-raid sirens in Paris are tested. If you ever want to bomb the fuck out of Paris, do it at noon on the first Wednesday of the month for maximum effect.

Cali does theirs once a year in August.

Missouri does it in the first week of the month, but the time and day vary (it was Tuesday at 10am where I grew up, and Wednesday at 9am where I went to college).

The first tuesday every month at 2pm the sirens go off here. Not for air raids, but because the industrial area at the other side of town is home to a major chemical plant and in case of accidents we should shut our windows and stay inside.

Somehow I find that a lot more depressing than an air raid siren.

Amazon.com is down. I need to buy stuff. Dammit.

So this is how it ends . . .

Damn it, so do I!

There are a lot of public buildings with Fallout Shelter signs still up in Northern California (I may or may not have acquired one for my apartment from a USAF base that shall remain nameless), so I figured I'd look up what the standards were for those, and I came across this gem.

Now, for a bomb that size, basically one MIRV full of W76 warheads (there are 8-12 of those in your bog-standard MIRV Trident II) 700 meters is the outer edge of what's referred to as the "conflagration" zone - where most exposed flammable material (like, oh, people) will just burst into flames from the heat alone. Plus a full-on lethal dose of neutrons and gamma rays. PLUS an overpressure wave in excess of 140 kilopascals (i.e. punched by The Goddamn Hulk) which begs the question:

What in the fuck is Switzerland using for building materials? - Astromarine, report!

Elemental Materials clearly, it's why they are so valuable.

I have been rechecking the math - at 700 meters for a 12 megaton blast, you're well inside the "nuclear fireball" - everything in that zone basically returns to the quarks and muons from whence it came. When we had our familiarization training on the SADM (the Army's discontinued man-portable atomic munitions device), you can dial that sucker up to a whole 1 kiloton yield. Which will absolutely level everything in about a 250m radius and at 700m you're dealing with third-degree burns to any exposed skin from the thermal radiation alone.

Twelve megatons? That has GOT to be a typo.

The souls of the people who get Swiss banks accounts. (Living outside the country, of course.)

I figured all those shelters are lined with Nazi gold.

Isn't that just a fancy way of saying that Switzerland required every residential building built after 1978 to contain a fridge?

Every Tuesday at noon the air-raid sirens go off in San Francisco. Wigged me out the first few weeks I worked here.

Not if you like red wines. My favorite wine in the megaverse is out of Lodi.

Being stuck in Lenny would possibly be worse.

(obligatory 1999-2000 WCW reference)

It's pretty bad, yes.

True story, I was driving from Berkeley to Santa Barbara with my then-boyfriend in his then-car, a rustbucket of a Fiat that he loved. Suddenly there was a horrible horrible noise and I found myself coasting off the freeway onto an offramp and into a parking lot in... Lodi.

The car was well and truly dead (engine block cracked or something) and we had to wait about 5 hours to get a ride home. It was, in fact, pretty horrible, but being stuck in a big box store parking lot was probably part of the reason.

Also, he still gives me shit for killing his car :(

I JUST DID MY TAXES!
I'M AN ADULT!!

I finally got the last of the documents I need to do ours. SO EXCITED TO DO THEM TOMORROW~

I found this official document, which is basically a building manual for those once obligatory fallout shelters: http://www.bevoelkerungsschutz.admi...ownloadList.63048.DownloadFile.tmp/twp84d.pdf (German)
http://www.bevoelkerungsschutz.admi...ownloadList.17208.DownloadFile.tmp/twp84f.pdf (French)
http://www.bevoelkerungsschutz.admi...ownloadList.88625.DownloadFile.tmp/twp84i.pdf (Italian)

The official site where these are located and loads more requirements, manuals, treatises etc. all concerning this topic:http://www.bevoelkerungsschutz.admi...rlagen_schutzbauten/technische_weisungen.html

After months of reading Soli-chan posts, I still don't know what a smish is but I have deduced that it is a good thing.

"Smishes" has actually made it into my daily vocabulary. As has "shmoopy." <3 this forum.

Is a smish not a follow on to a glomp?

I believe a smish is the sound of a glomping.

I don't appreciate the implication that just because I'm white, I gotta be some Appalachian hick.

Yeah I bought both, motherfucker.

It's amazing how George Harrison had the best solo career of the Beatles.

Oh goodness, the cat must have found that stupid trinket* my mother got the other day. It has this silly little pillow that screams "I LOVE YOU!!!" when it's pressed. I heard it go off about ten times in the other room.
Thanks cat. Between that and you clawing and meowing at my door I'm sure I'll fall asleep in no time.


*Oh great that thing is on the table. That means he's jumping on the table again. ARGH.

Try doing that in a South African township after dark.
Me, so white I'm slightly blueish, a former photomodel turned journalist and $10.000 worth of cameras...
Fun times.

Yikes, that's a whole different level of unpleasant. Lodi is just the musical definition of nowheresville.

Not long ago I was woken up at 5 in the morning by a horrible burning smell and the distant wailing of an air-raid siren. Turns out there had been a massive chemical fire a couple of miles up the road, but it was nothing to worry about (apparently). Still pretty disconcerting. That noise taps pretty deeply into the racial memory of that part of the world.

Weirdly London doesn't seem to actually test the air raid sirens anymore, at least to the best of my knowledge.

Watching a server do an upgrade is the worst. It's like "Will it fail? What will it fail on? Will I be spending my entire fucking weekend rebuilding this thing if it fails or decides to forget all the open directory settings?"

FINISH SO I KNOW IF I'M SCREWED OR NOT, UPGRADE!

Late Christmas this weekend? Aww yiss.

I'm sorry, but "if it's yellow let it mellow" is just not acceptable in a public office bathroom.

[Partridge]"Who's Wings? Only the band the Beatles could have been."[/Partridge]

Plus, wtf "Oriental Mix"? I think it's Asian Mix, you stereotyping packaging assholes.

How are you defining "best"? Paul was definitely the more successful hitmaker, but I know a lot of people don't really like most of his solo stuff.

Criteria included that they weren't in Wings (fuck you Alan,) their best work wasn't pretending to be a train and they didn't die relatively quickly.

(Real criteria is that I just like George Harrison's stuff the best. An entirely personal and subjective opinion.)