dianaschnuth

A lot has happened in the world in the past week or so, and I’ve been pretty slow on the uptake. Strangely enough, a lot of the newsworthy items lately have been ones on which I have an opinion—which, honestly, is kind of strange. Sure, the ABC Evening News at my house can seem like MST3K, even though I watch it alone… but most of it isn’t worth blogging about, IMO.

So, in this marathon blog post, I plan to address Terri Schiavo, Pope John Paul II, and Peter Jennings. Perhaps some other things as they occur to me. Feel free to ignore this post if you’re sick of hearing about any or all of these topics; I won’t know any different, so I won’t be offended.
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Holy shit. I never had a teacher go off like this in high school, thank goodness. When Mr. Mantel wants you to stand up for the National Anthem, you’re damn well gonna stand up, or you’ll get your chair pulled out from underneath you.

Teacher freaks out about National Anthem, with Video

Edit: If you’d like to download the video, there’s a torrent here. Apparently all the sites hosting the video are starting to get bogged down. (Go figure.)

I found this idea fascinating: a prominent American geneticist, Dr. Hamer, apparently identified a particular gene that may predispose humans to be religious or spiritual.

Column found in kottke.org.

I’ve included the full article for posterity:
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Things seem to be settling down around BG, finally. The city and university are working to clean up the storm damage, most people’s power is back on, and life is returning to normal.

In case you missed the 11:00 news…

Channel 13 has photos and RealVideo coverage of the carnage in BG.

(Photo at right is of my street, two houses down from ours)

BGSU’s website has a "Campus Storm Update" link off the main page.

Got home from work today and all the clocks were blinking (except the VCR, because it rocks). Seems the power must have gone out today sometime between Aaron leaving for work and me coming home at 7:15pm. Probably had something to do with the nice city workers removing the tree from the power lines (photo above).

As for how this affected others you might know… Beth’s blog indicates that even in Columbus, the proverbial shit hit the fan. Apparently, her power was out for a while, too, though she says that having the roof blown off a nearby gas station sounds a little more traumatic. Eric went out with his BG News posse and took some photos of the insanity. (Would that I hadn’t chosen these few weeks to have my camera serviced. I missed both the Fourth of July and the kickass storm of the decade. Though I’ll be looking forward to having a leak-free, recalibrated camera.)

And if more people would update their blogs, I’d have more to report. Blah.

Seems that campus got pretty fucked up. A wall was blown out of the Field House, a tree fell on the Death Center, the roof blew out of the Moore Musical Arts Center (right above Kobacker Hall, if I’ve heard correctly), giant trees have been uprooted… sounds like a damn mess. I’d been planning to walk around campus this evening to survey the damage, but I opted to stay home like the lazy-ass that I am.

You know, I’ve been in BG for… shit, eight or nine years now… and this is the worst storm I’ve seen yet. I’ve been in a couple of tornado warnings, but nothing like this. And this one didn’t even qualify as an honest-to-god tornado.

Shit, imagine that.

It’s nice having window space in our little corner of the Sky Service Center. We get to see all the crazy storms as they come through. Today, we got to see the sky turn from normal and sunny to dark and brooding, got to watch the clouds swirl overhead, see the rain start up, visibility drop, trees bend, etc.

Then we got to go with the rest of the employees to the interior area of the building, next to the restrooms, to wait out the storm.

At the end of it all, trees were nearly uprooted, the roof was leaking, and the parking lot was flooded in places (the person trying to clean out the drainage pipe was up to her knees in water). Called home, made sure all was well, finished out the day and went home.

Or tried to. The city had my road blocked off. I had to go around the block and just ignore one final roadblock to even get to my driveway. One house over, there’s still yellow "Do Not Cross" tape strung across the road to divert traffic away from the fallen tree limb there. I’m not exactly sure how we still have power, since half of a tree is hanging out on our power lines. Taking up the entire road, curb to curb. Almost fell on someone’s truck.

Oh, and across the street from us, a giant tree fell in between the neighbors’ houses. Right in their shared yard, on the property line. When I got home, the two families were helping one another saw it up and haul it to the curb. The branches I gathered from our yard look like plain old branches; their side looks like a freaking rainforest.

On a completely unrelated note, lookee what I made! I’m so proud of myself.