11/11/11!

What will you do with all the eleventosity today?

Something special at 11 a.m. and 11 p.m.?

Are you going to keep talking about turning it up to 11 or are you going to get annoyed at people who are debasing the sublime by continually making the same aged rock-music reference?

For variety: Here's the Grateful Dead playing "The Eleven" in 1968.

But who's into variety, when the whole point is sameness? You've got those ones all lined up. Is that exciting? Are you the kind of person who finds lined up numbers exciting... like 999? Or 666?

If you think 11/11/11 is exciting, imagine how folks wet their pants over November 11, 1111, the most digitally lined-up day in the entire history of the world. Mankind will have to survive — and maintain its numerical system — until 11/11/11111 for there to be another day like that.

Did anything happen on 11/11/1111? Not according to Wikipedia's compendium of things that have happened on November 11ths. Perhaps the most interesting — for us Americans, anyway — event that took place on history's thousands of 11/11s is The Mayflower Compact, in 1620. And in 1930:

1930 – Patent number US1781541 is awarded to Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd for their invention, the Einstein refrigerator.

Albert Einstein invented the refrigerator?!

Speaking of cold, there's only one 11/11/11 event on that list. 11/11/1911, and the event is just that it was a very cold day in the Midwest. Well, it's 30° here in Madison, Wisconsin, and it's supposed to hit 41° at 11 when we reach maximum elevenosity. I think we can handle that.

ADDED: I'm getting justly slaughtered in the comments for not recognizing Veterans Day:



AND: I'm getting cold-shouldered in the comments for minimizing the weather event of 1911. From today's Wisconsin State Journal:

The freakishly warm and humid weather that sunny Saturday set the stage for Rock County's worst weather disaster....

Shortly before 2 p.m., it was 74 degrees. Then, in a matter of minutes, the temperature plummeted 10 degrees in downtown Janesville. By that night, it had fallen to zero.

A massive cold front had slammed into the warm air, unleashing a rash of storms and tornadoes throughout the Midwest.

"We've had blow-downs before, just nothing this size."

One thunderstorm in July felled around 2 million cords of wood in Wisconsin's North Woods.

"If a tornado hits, a tornado is a half-mile to a mile wide and two to three miles long," Ericson said. "Then it lifts and it's done.

"This went on for miles."...

If you cut and stacked the logs on 40-foot logging trailers and included the trucks to haul them, they would stretch 1,700 miles,

"I never imagined it would be this bad... I'm not a bad man. I'm really not."

"We had no intention of stealing TVs, anything that was of value to them, real value. I just seen a couple bottles of liquor there and figured they wouldn't miss it... I didn't know [the cameras] were rolling, so I was caught red handed... I never had no felonies, got a six-year-old daughter I'm taking care of by myself. I'd be pissed if someone came in my house and took some liquor, too... I apologize. I shouldn't have snatched the liquor. I didn't think it was gonna be this big of a deal, really. It's just bottles of liquor, but I'll help you rebuild your house Ms. Robinson. I really want to apologize."

Man — caught on camera looting a house wrecked by a Hurricane Irene tornado — now, on camera again, cries his regrets.

IN THE COMMENTS: pbAndjFellowRepublican said:

That Robinson house tried to seduce him.

At the New Age Café...

... keep your grip on reality.

(Photograph location: Charles City, Iowa.)

ADDED: A reader emails:

I have been following your blog for quite a while, but never posted....

The reason I am writing to you today is to remark that I lived in Charles City, Iowa in 1966-1968. When I lived there, I lived in the house you photographed with the New Age Realty sign in front of it.

A little history about the house. It is a 1 bedroom house with an unfinished attic. I lived there with my 4 brothers and my parents. All 5 of us boys slept in the unfinished attic,

In May of 1968 a very large tornado tore through the town of about 10,000. Over 1/3 of the structures in the town were demolished beyond repair. The little brick house lost some of its roof and all its windows, but the structure survived intact. It has been a business of one sort or another for at least the past 30 years.

Cool! I love when stuff like this happens.

New victims of the Joplin tornado have died with a rare fungal infection that is caused by dirt trapped under the skin.

Inadequately cleaned wounds were stitched up quickly, in makeshift facilities:

A week after the tornado, patients began arriving with fungal infections.

"We could visibly see mold in the wounds," Dr. [Uwe] Schmidt said. "It rapidly spread. The tissue dies off and becomes black. It doesn't have any circulation. It has to be removed."...

"This fungus invades the underlying tissue and actually invades the underlying blood vessels and cuts off the circulation to the skin," he said. "It's very invasive."

Tornado.

Audio. From a Fastrip walk-in refrigerator.

ADDED:

"It was a rain-wrapped tornado."

"When it is obscured by rain, you can’t tell what the danger is."

Pictures that survived the tornadoes.

From a huge collection of photos posted on Facebook. The original idea was to reunite the photos with their owners.

8-year-old boy in a tornado: "He said it was like he was floating in the air and then just floated back down."

The grateful dad:

"I was reaching up for him, but my hands never made it. The walls crumpled like paper, and he just went with them...

"Like someone had him on a string and snatched him away real quick...

"It was like a nightmare. I wasn't sure exactly what was happening...I just held on to what I had and asked God for protection...

"I looked up and saw a silhouette, his little shadowy figure walking back over the debris... It was wonderful..."

Obama views...

... tornado destruction.

And gets criticized for failing to respond to wildfire destruction.

Think Progress says: "Storms Kill Over 250 Americans In States Represented By Climate Pollution Deniers."

What a terrible thing even to think of saying!

"I don't know how anyone survived."

"We're used to tornadoes here in Tuscaloosa. It's part of growing up. But when you look at the path of destruction that's likely 5 to 7 miles long in an area half a mile to a mile wide ... it's an amazing scene. There's parts of the city I don't recognize, and that's someone that's lived here his entire life."

"Dozens of tornadoes spawned by a powerful storm system wiped out neighborhoods across a wide swath of the South..."

"... killing at least 201 people in the deadliest outbreak in nearly 40 years... Alabama's state emergency management agency said it had confirmed 131 deaths, while there were 32 in Mississippi, 16 in Tennessee, 13 in Georgia, eight in Virginia and one in Kentucky."

Were you in the path of the storms?

"Joe Meek ... the most important British musician of the Sixties."

"[H]e was a backroom boffin who revolutionized sound, devising new recording techniques and crafting an endless flow of gloriously deranged experimental pop that gave him the right to regard himself as the true creator of the records he worked on. Telstar, by The Tornadoes, is still Meek's best-known single. It was the first record by a British act to reach the top of the American pop charts and, rather unexpectedly, was chosen by Margaret Thatcher as one of her Desert Island Discs. An ode to the dawn of the space age and to what Harold Wilson later called the 'white heat of technology', it's a dizzyingly exciting instrumental full of strange, unclassifiable effects: the rocket-launch sound at the beginning is said to be a toilet flushing in reverse; the sounds evoking radio signals were apparently produced by running a pencil around the rim of an ashtray."

"I'm literally 400 yards in front of it... it's ripping the roof off that building.... debris is everywhere... swirling around...."

Watch how long it takes before the tornado chaser says "I'm way too close."

"Cool it, Fellas! When I'm done let's all get high on the ammonia fumes!!!"

I love the comments thread over at YouTube — the source of the post title.

Cripes! Like they've never seen a white funnel cloud come out of a hot blonde's house!

looks like a 70's porn movie, lol.

:-D Just love that tornado music.

Heh, that one surfer kinda looks like Nicolas Cage! I can remember that tornado (& trippy musical accompaniment) somewhat freaking me out as a child.

I never knew there was a time where a strong ammonia smell was a good thing...

Ha ha. I never knew there would be a time when the stupid things I tried to avoid would be things I would go out of my way to make everyone look at. Or — for insiders only — the things I eschewed would be things I espewed.

***

This post is inspired by the poem wonderful Bissage wrote about the sink rainbow.

"When [my hip] popped back in, I was standing up trying to pull bricks off the kids..."

A vivid, articulate account of the tornado that hit the Boy Scout camp. What an impressive 15-year-old.

The E. Clarke and Julie Arnold House and the Richard C. and Berenice Smith House — by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Visited last Saturday on the "Wright & Like" 2008 tour.



That's the E. Clarke and Julie Arnold House in Columbus, Wisconsin, visited at around 11 a.m., when it was a nice, sunny day. This house is composed with lots of diamond shapes.

Later in the day, after spending 2 hours as a docent at the Dr. Maurice and Mrs. Margaret Greenberg House, I hurried down the wooded path as a thunderstorm was about to hit. Secure from electrocution in my car, I enjoyed the fireworks over the rolling Wisconsin farmland. I did wonder about the strength of the wind, which seemed intent on running me off the road. And when I switched from satellite to land radio, after I got out of the really windy area, I was scared retrospectively by the reports of tornadoes. I got a little lost — finding myself on Country Road Z — which was not in my print-out directions from Google, and decided I'd better just try to keep my bearings and head for home. But then I found a road that was on the print-out and the route started to make sense, so I got to the Richard C. and Berenice Smith House in Jefferson, Wisconsin:



It's more interesting from the other side, because it's built around a really large oak tree — a 300-year sort of thing. The red concrete floors — which look just like the driveway seen in my photo — extend throughout the house. After all the rain, those floors were quite wet inside, a classic Frank Lloyd Wright feature (leakiness). It was, to my eye, an unpleasant design. Too many angles. Zig-zags everywhere. But maybe I could settle in and get used to it. The interior walls were all stone, and they zig-zagged around that noble tree. The whole house honored a tree. And the tree deserved it.

I was deeply ensconced in Wisconsin architecture today.

I spent much of the day here:



At the Maurice Greenberg House — which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I put in 2 hours as a docent, posted in the living room, where I pointed out the view and identified the items of furniture that were designed by Wright.

I have more pictures, but I'm I little too tired to do a good job of getting them web-ready. Why should I be tired so early? It's not just from 2 hours of docent work. I also drove many miles around south central Wisconsin, including some grueling time through pouring rain, the kind of rain that renders the windshield wipers useless. And there was another part of the drive where there were thick streaks of lightning and wind so rough I had to grip the wheel to keep from being swerved around. Then I turned the radio on and heard about the tornadoes spotted in this storm. Find sturdy shelter, the warning said. Where? I'm in my car, driving through farmland. I just keep going, trusting in luck and airbags.

"I know I need a small vacation but it don't look like rain..."

Oh, but it do look like rain here in Wichita, where I'm finally on line. It's almost 700 miles from Madison to Wichita, the obvious place to stop on this drive to Austin. And as I reached the final 100 miles, just past Kansas City, crazy rain started, the kind that's such solid water that the windshield wipers make no difference and you struggle just to see the painted lines.

Some cars are pulled over on the shoulder, but I keep going, creeping along at 30 miles an hour, listening to a BBC radio program about lungfish. I start thinking: Kansas!

I have a feeling I am in Kansas. Tornados! How will I know where they are in the dark? If one hits and I'm thrown around in the car, will the airbags save me? I've heard you're supposed to get out of your car and cower somewhere. Where? What's to stop the tornado from picking up the car and slamming it down right on top of me? I'll take my chances driving, slowly, following the red lights on the truck in front of me, keeping my distance, thinking about ten car pile ups, hoping to drive to the end of this crazy rain.

And I'm here now, at a hotel nice enough to have room service until midnight. Ah, there's the knock on the door. A Caesar salad. A glass of wine....

UPDATE: Wine drunk, I Googled for some advice about how to survive a tornado while driving and hit upon this amusing information: "If a tornado seems to be standing still then it is either travelling away from you or heading right for you." All right, then!