ArtieShaw

When I was a kid, a neighbor was shot in his garage. There were definitely two stories that went around the neighborhood. One said suicide and the other said “cleaning his gun.” One of those was repeated when kids were around. The other when they thought no one was listening.

Years back, I read was a very odd story about the Korean belief that falling asleep in a closed room with a running fan would result in death. This also seems to be a cover story for suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

That’s so charming! It’s my absolute favorite thing today.

Where I grew up there was an urban legend about radioactive deer. It was pre-internet, the deer were legitimately weird, and they lived in the woods adjacent to one of the US’s earliest nuclear research facilities. Everyone had seen them. The facility was active and well guarded. It seemed… plausible. Very plausible.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/4077627323 https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/july-2016/argonne-national-laboratory/

Yeah - I remember reading about how these signs were laughably easy to “hack” a few years ago.

I thought about it for minute when the city installed one down the street. Then I imagined the weird shame I’d feel when my neighbors inevitably caught me, so never tried it out. Actually, in retrospect, they’d probably have helped.

Out of idle curiosity about your username, I’d like to ask.

Dune, cryptography, or both?

That would be ideal. I’ve also seen a few with weirdly discrete foot pedals. I like that idea, although the ones I’ve encountered haven’t exactly nailed the design.

And Des Plaines, La Salle Street… I always keep telling my husband, “no, that’s not what it’s called” and he keeps getting rationally mad.

If we’re feeling the Indiana, there’s always Terre Haute.

Same. That’s why there’s a pass.

People who live there call it the latter.

Unless you’re Sufjan Stevens. I’ll give him a pass on that

It’s honestly not that bad, assuming the power doesn’t go out. Or that it’s not followed up by freezing rain.

No one goes to work or school for a couple of days. People usually stock up on essentials in the days before the storm. (Milk, bread, butter, eggs… the old joke is that everyone has a sudden urge to eat French Toast.)

Plows usually start early, while the snow is still falling. Plow and salt crews work night and day. They’re on call (and paid a stipend) during winter for this exact reason. The main streets are prioritized. Residential streets are going to wait a couple of days before they’re clear. With nothing else to do, the adults start digging themselves out and helping their neighbors dig out. It’s a hell of a workout and a good reason to check on elderly neighbors.

Basically, you wake up, say “fuck this shit,” call in (or not, because your boss isn’t at work), and go back to sleep for another few hours. Then you start digging.

A city that doesn’t get that much snow can get overwhelmed, though. Mayor Mel famously called in the military to clear snow from Toronto back in 1998-ish. That was only a meter, but the city didn’t have the resources to clear it - or more importantly - any free space to put it.

Buffalo though? Buffalo has their snow systems down.

Pretty much. Buffalo routinely gets hosed by blizzard conditions that don’t usually affect the cities on the northern side of the same lake (Toronto, Mississauga, etc). It’s feature of being on the south side of one of the Great Lakes.

I remember hearing about one year where Buffalo got 6 feet overnight, or some other complete bullshit.

I didn’t really expect anyone to know that, which was sort of the joke. He was very famous in his time, but by now it’s a bit of a deep cut.

Artie Shaw was a clarinetist who ran a jazz band. In addition to that, he was also quite the weirdo. Womanizer, liked math a lot (like more than is natural), was an expert marksman who was nationally ranked in that sort of thing, and really into fly fishing. Also, currently, very dead. And that’s good because otherwise he’d be 114.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artie_Shaw

here’s a sample of his work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_v3GY3ZqdM

Shock: I’m not really Artie Shaw.

I thought there was a tangential reference to that recent question about whether there’s a critical mass of water to corpses that people find objectionable.

The example: There are plenty of corpses in the ocean, but people will swim in it. If there were one corpse in a pool, most people would decline the invite that particular pool party.

Mixed with that very recognizable graphic of Saddam in his hiding hole. And balls, for reasons that escape me.

edit: my friend is also a little confused.

I knew someone this happened to. Several months after moving into their new house they started working on a neglected secondary bathroom on the 2nd floor. They didn’t go back there too frequently because it wasn’t a priority, but it was a really cool space connected to their bedroom via a small dressing room/closet.

One day she noticed a low, humming drone and checked the wall of that closet. She claimed that the whole wall was warm to the touch and vibrating. That was not an easy or cheap job, but we got to make jokes about bees for a couple of months.

If you watch enough old scifi and adventure movies, you’ll learn to welcome the “so that’s where Lucas took that idea from” feeling as an old friend. He lifted a lot.

That’s an interesting but grim point. Ebola, for example, is both very deadly and very infectious, but that combination means that outbreaks tend to burn out before spreading widely. One of the early things that scared me about COVID in late 2019 was the rumors of “asymptomatic spreading” that were coming out of China.

That wasn’t the only “oh shit” thing about COVID and the way things were handled early on, but it was a bad one.

I am against earthquakes on principle.

Oddly enough, I just read something today about newly emerging earthquake detection tech. It involved small variations in movement tracked by GPS transmitters, and would give 2 hours (+/-?) before the quake hit. I like the idea of that.

In recent years we’ve been seeing a scary trend of tornadoes hitting the area overnight. Like at 11:00pm or later. That suuuuccks.

When I was a kid they were almost always a late afternoon or early evening event. Official forecasts were crap, but at least you could look outside and think, “this looks like tornado weather, better check the radio.” Now we’re woken out of sleep in the middle of the night by the simultaneous klaxon of our phone alerts.

They’re also hitting us earlier in the year. My calendar has a repeating reminder for early April: “peak tornado season starts in a few months - start drilling the cats now.” We had one in fucking February this year that took out a barn a few miles down the road.

I wouldn’t blame you. We live in the path, but early spring is a 50/50 chance for rain and clouds vs clear weather.