Mt. St. Helens: A Fact Sheet

The eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 caught the United States volcano experts a little off guard.  It had been 65 years since the last mainland eruption.  It all began on March 20 when noises from the volcano became audible--and worrisome.  Within a week it was spewing magma every day all day accompanied by earthquakes.  People in the area were evacuated eight miles to safety.

It was at this point that Mt. St. Helens became the celebrity volcano, with cameras from all over the world focused on the light show.  TV crews crept too close to provide "film at eleven."  Helicopters by the dozen flew over the top of the mountain, daring the rumbling volcano to show its face.  But like a willful child who won't behave as instructed, Mt. St. Helens took its time deciding what it wanted to do.  News crews stopped their 24/7 coverage--an expensive proposition if the damn thing wasn't going to blow after all.

But then almost a month later on April 19, the northern side of the mountain began bulging threateningly with what should have been read as a forthcoming  lateral blast, but was not.  The experts missed the signs perhaps because the only volcanoes they had observed were in Hawaii, and they did not have lateral bulges and explosions.

Another month passed.  Then on Sunday May 18 at 8:32 in the morning it began.  Bill Bryson described what followed in his Short History of Nearly Everything (2003):  "The north side of the volcano collapsed, sending an enormous avalanche of dirt and rock rushing down the mountain slope at 150 miles an hour.  It was the biggest landslide in human history and carried enough material to bury the whole of Manhattan to a depth of four hundred feet.  A minute later, its flank severely weakened, St. Helens exploded with the force of five hundred Hiroshima-sized bombs, shooting out a murderous hot cloud at up to 650 miles an hour--much too fast, clearly, for anyone nearby to outrace.  Many people who were thought to be in safe areas, often far out of sight of the volcano, were overtaken.  Fifty-seven people were killed.  Twenty-three of the bodies were never found.  The toll would have been much higher except that it was a Sunday.  Had it been a weekday many lumber workers would have been working within the death zone.  As it was, people were killed eighteen miles away."

The facts:  Mt. St. Helens lost 1,300 feet from its peak. 230 square miles of forest were destroyed.  Damage was reported at $2.7 billion. The smoke and ash rose 60,000 feet in ten minutes.  The town of Yakima, Washington, 80 miles away, got covered in ash and smoke an hour and a half after the blast.

                                      At Mt. St. Helens in the Cascade Mountains, 31 years
                                      after the eruption in 1980 that blew 1,300 feet off the
                                      volcano's summit.  Photo by Roberta Cifelli, 2011.

What to be scared of

If Bill Bryson can be trusted (A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003), we should all be afraid of asteroids. Here's why.

The last two hundred years have seen asteroid hunters working at a frantic pace to locate them in the heavens and write them up for future reference..  At the end of the nineteenth century about a thousand of them had been counted up and named, but it was the 20th-Century that improved the method and bookkeeping until by 2001 there were some 26,000 identified.  Which sounds good until you realize that there are about a billion more waiting to be discovered and catalogued, each one on a path that will bring it near to Earth at some point on its regular orbit.  It is inevitable that another impact, possibly of extinction magnitude, will occur.  Some experts think we are far overdue for just that sort of planetary cataclysm. It would be a Doomsday scenario.

Even if a relatively small asteroid, say the size of a house, were to hit, it would destroy a city, and these are much more common than the massive asteroids that would kill all life on the planet.  How many house-sized asteroids are floating around in "Earth-crossing orbits"?   The number "is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions, and they are nearly impossible to track."

A couple of these house-sized asteroids zipped past Earth in 1991 and 1993, missing us by about a hundred thousand miles each, close calls when you talk about space dimensions.  We didn't see either one until it had passed us, which led one expert Timothy Ferris to say, in the words of Bryson, that "such near misses probably happen two or three times a week and go unnoticed."

The Doomsday Asteroid, Meteor, or Comet:

"An asteroid or comet traveling traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earths's atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn't get out of the way. . . .In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor's path--people, houses, factories, cars, would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame.

"One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth's surface. . . . The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases.  Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn't been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. . . .

"For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light, the brightest ever seen by human eyes--followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur:  a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour.  Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. . . .

"But that's just the initial shockwave.  No one can do more than guess what the associative damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global.  The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes.  Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew.  Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores.  Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze.  It is estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. . . .

"And in all likelihood, remember, this would come without warning, out of a clear sky."

Where We Came From--and When

A little more than four and a half billion years ago, when the universe was already nine or ten billion years old, a floating mass of gas and dust some 15 billion miles across began to come together where we are now in the Milky Way galaxy.  More than 99 % of it formed itself into a star, our Sun.  The remainder of the dust and gas, little more than interstellar debris, began collecting in what we call our solar system, and gradually the largest collections of the debris formed into the planets that orbit the Sun.  Including Earth of course.

That all happened in a short space of time, some 200 million years.  Then, still in its planetary infancy, Earth was struck by a huge asteroid or planet which split off a big chunk of its surface and sent it hurtling into space, stopping some 240,000 miles away where it began orbiting the Earth it used to be a part of.  This of course is the moon.

An atmosphere of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane, and sulfur gradually formed above the Earth.  Carbon dioxide, the powerful greenhouse gas we hear so much about today, has a warming effect that threatens to melt Arctic ice caps and raise coastal water levels.  That same carbon dioxide  was also at work in the early years of Earth's formation when warming saved the planet by preventing it from freezing over.  The principal at work here may be that if you wait long enough good turns to bad and bad to good, at least in the case of carbon dioxide--and maybe everything else if you have time to wait and see.

It took another 500 million years before life formed and another four billion years after that before we showed up.  Those thoughts may get their own posting some day, but for now, however, it is remarkable to think even this briefly about where we came from--and when.


With thanks to the brilliant and always entertaining Bill Bryson, this time in his Short History of Nearly Everything (2003).

Robocalls, the 2018 Numbers

"Consumer Reports" (May 2019) published Robocall statistics that bear repeating--here and everywhere--for everyone who has the vague idea or dead certainty that there are more and more of these calls polluting our land lines and cell phones every day, week, month, and year.  You're right.  Here are the most recent robocall numbers from 2018:

1,517 per second
5,461,100 per hour
131,066,390 per day
3,986,602,683 per month
47,839,232,200 per year

With such outrageous impositions on all of us every second of every day, don't think twice ever again about hanging up on them.  It's self-defense.  A duty.  Do it.

Addendum from the Tampa Bay Times, Saturday, June 8:

Phone companies can now block robocalls

The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously Thursday to authorize phone carriers to automatically recognize and block robocalls, a move that could spare Americans from billions of unwanted telemarketing and scam calls each year.

Under the order, which passed 5-0, phone companies will be allowed to enroll customers in robocall-blocking programs by default unless consumers opt out. Previously, some companies had tools to fend off unwanted automated calls, but customers had to opt in to gain the benefits.

Robocalls have skyrocketed in recent years. Last year, Americans received 48 billion robocalls.

It's Called Classical or Symphonic or Orchestral. . . .

Words are clumsy things compared to music.  No contest.  The best poetry quickens the pulse or makes you gasp with sudden recognition, but there is always a barrier between the art and the feeling it evokes.  The words get in the way.

Music has no such barrier.  It sweeps you up and carries you away.  It leaves you limp.  It wears you out.  It enthralls you.  And while you are captured emotionally, helpless under its spell, you are at the same time struck by the underlying structures that you can feel on another level--even if you have little or no sense of what is sometimes called "serious" music.  Experiencing Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, the list is endless, is like being transported to a better place, emotionally and intellectually.

Take for example Pyotr Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet Overture Suite" (1880).  It is sheer magic, like the Shakespeare play it is based on.  But in Tchaikovsky's hands, you can feel the story of star-crossed lovers, the clash of warring families, the gorgeous melodic swelling of pure love.  And you also feel the sudden, shocking violence that bursts early and late before the music can find its painful ending.

But words fail.  The music speaks for itself.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxj8vSS2ELU

Merciless, a Review

My first movie review (slightly edited for its appearance here) ran in The New Jersey Herald on December 26, 1986.  Headline: "No Mercy" Riddled with Cliches and Violence.  With Richard Gere and Kim Basinger.  Herald rating:  C.

If "No Mercy" fails at the box office, it won't be because the producers missed any of the familiar ploys aimed at insuring its popular success.  The dialogue is coarse and vulgar; the screenplay is formula-driven and riddled with cinematic cliches; and most important, graphic violence is everywhere--accompanied by a short-fused sexual tension that eventually explodes.  "No Mercy" has it all.

The heart of the movie is the down-and-dirty romance between Eddie Jillette (Richard Gere) and Michel Duval (Kim Basinger).  They are, in fact, excellent together, a red-hot romantic duo.  Their combined sensuousness is as steamy as the Louisiana Bayou where, handcuffed together, the two sex symbols escape to.  Directer Richard Pearce nicely develops their sexual chemistry from the outset with soul-searching eye contact that literally promises later fireworks.  And producer Dino Conte has found the Gere-Basinger coupling so cinematically satisfying that he has more work already lined up for them.

Beyond the romance, however, "No Mercy" offers very little.

Before the passionate love scene and wild shoot-out at the end, we are led through an unlikely plot.  Jillette is a Chicago cop who learns of a New Orleans woman (Duval) looking for someone to murder her Louisiana crime lord lover, Losado (played with evil brilliance by Jeroen Krabbe).  Eddie and his partner take the job.  The job is complicated of course because Losado is determined to keep the woman who "belongs" to him.  He establishes his evil credentials by blowing up Michel's confidante and disemboweling Eddie's partner.

The death of his partner provides Eddie with a motive (unimaginative and worn out as it is) for tracking down the mysterious New Orleans crime king.  His job is thus transformed into a love-driven vendetta.

Because "No Mercy" is set in an unreal world, there is never a moment's doubt that Jillette will triumph in the end.  He will have his vengeance and his woman.  But before that triumph can work on screen, the menacing terror of Losado's brutality has to be established.  And it is--over and over again.  His squad of goons loft mortar-like bombs and burst into rooms with shotguns blazing, but it is Losado himself who is the most cold-blooded killer, cutting up his victims with a measured inhumanity.  He is, indeed, a worthy and fearsome adversary.

When Losado and his thugs come gunning for Jillette at movie's end, we are fully prepared for a monumental shootout.  And we get it.  There are booby traps, handguns, shotguns, even a car that explodes in a hotel lobby.  There is also, of course, Losado's ever-present hunting knife.  The final victory comes when Jillette defeats the arch-villain and rescues the slightly soiled maiden from a fate wore than death.  Thus the triumphant ending promised at the outset is dutifully delivered.  Ho hum.  There was never a doubt.

Viewing Guide:  Sex:  No nudity but plenty of sexual language and action.  Violence:  Explicit and insistent, a bloodbath.  Language:  Foul throughout.  Rated R.

The Tampa Bay Rays Do Too Have a Fan Base!

Tommy Pham, an outfielder who was traded by the St. Louis Cardinals to the Tampa Bay Rays in the middle of the 2018 season, said on MLB radio a few days ago that “it sucks going from playing in front of a great fan base to a team with really no fan base at all.”

He got it all wrong.  Tampa-St. Pete actually does have great fans.  The trouble is “our” fans only show up to root against us.  One Yankee player a couple of years ago was so struck by the number of Yankee fans at Tropicana Field that he said it seemed more like a home game than a road game for him.

And the same can be said of games against the Red Sox, Cubs, Orioles, Phillies, Pirates, Tigers and so on.  It’s so embarrassing that I boycott those games and attend only the ones against teams without a strong fan base in the Tampa area, like the Minnesota Twins, the Kansas City Royals, the Colorado Rockies, the Seattle Mariners, and so on.  Those midweek games only  draw 10-12,000, but the ones who do come, root (mostly) for the Rays.

So let’s put the blame where it belongs.  We are losing major league baseball in the Tampa-St. Pete area not because we lack a strong fan base but because the fan base roots against us.  It’s their fault our team will be moving to Montreal, Las Vegas, Portland, wherever.  

There is good news, though, because all it would take to turn things around is for our fan base of replanted Northerners to learn to love the team they're with.  It's a tried and tested process, after all, probably the very same one they used to choose their wives.  As Stephen Stills crooned half a century ago, "If you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with."

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

File this under More Depressing News:  A typical driver, over the course of his lifetime, according to the New York Times, spends some 38,000 hours driving his car.

That breaks down to 1,583 days, more than four years, or about 5.5% of a lifetime that stretches to 74 years.  What a waste.

All of which is depressing enough, so I hope I never get related statistics on how many hours I've lost waiting on bank and supermarket lines,  mowing the lawn, and praying to a God that doesn't exist in churches that fleeced me clean.

It Ain't the Fall Classic Anymore

It's Tuesday evening, October 23, and the Boston Red Sox are squaring off with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first game of the 2018 World Series.  The Fall Classic.

Temperatures will be in the 40s tonight with a wind-chill factor that will make it feel a lot colder.  Tomorrow night will be colder yet, temps dipping into the upper 30s at game time and the wind-chill factor making it feel in the lower 30s.  And if the series goes seven games, they'll wrap things up in Boston in November--at temps that could drop below freezing.  At the risk of saying the obvious, that's too cold for baseball games.  "Fall Classic" is a classic misnomer.

Of course we began calling the WS the "fall classic" back when it was played and completed in September, when we regularly enjoyed what we called Indian Summer, a late summer warming trend that soon gave way to the much colder weather of October.

But in 1961, the owners extended the season from 154 games to 162, which extended the season by eight games over about a week and a half.  And then beginning in 1969 a second round of post-season play was added, followed by a third round in 1994, and a fourth (the one-game wild-card playoff) in 2012.  And here we are in late October pretending this is baseball at its best--the best of the National League pitted against the best of the American League.  Ridiculous.  Laughable.

The two leagues don't even play the same game.  The AL allows since 1973 designated hitters to hit instead of weak hitting pitchers.  The NL holds on to the game's roots by insisting on pitchers taking their cuts at the plate.  If you were building a baseball team, do you think your roster and philosophy and strategy--your management of a pitching staff, your use of pinch hitters, and your nightly lineup--just to mention a few tactical issues--would be different if you could send up a hitter four times a night instead of a pitcher?  Once again, the situation is ridiculous.  Laughable.

The obvious conclusion is that the two leagues should not play each other at all until they all play the same game under temperature-regulated domed stadiums.  Put the two leagues on an equal standing so they can get back to playing a true World Series once again.  One thing is for sure, this ain't the fall classic anymore.  And it hasn't been for a long time.

Not Exactly an Apology

My new biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's love life, Longfellow in Love, has been out about two months.  Every day I have to fight off the impulse to apologize for it.

The first reason is because the paperback book runs to 261 pages (the notes, bibliography, and index swell it up to 287), yet it costs $45.  The publisher sets the price of course, so I'm not at all responsible, but it's clearly steeper than I'd like it to be.

The second reason is a tad more complicated.  I know my friends and relatives would like to encourage me, but if they can get past the price, they are still looking at a nonfiction title that most of them pass up for books on the fiction list.  And the ones who do read nonfiction, probably are not inclined to biography.  And the ones who do read biography might not want to read about a dead white male poet whose reputation took a nosedive in the 20th century.

So I think many of my friends and relatives will read the book, if they can manage it at all, as a dreary homework assignment.  That is very disappointing.  But there is good news too.

I wrote the book as narrative nonfiction, which means it is driven by fiction techniques, like not revealing the story until the end.  Like building suspense.  Like resolving conflicts.  Like developing characters who speak to each other in words taken directly from their letters and journals.  Like building to a climax, two of them in fact. Like consciously trying to entertain in the story telling.  The substructure is built on dependable scholarship, but the book is written in a narrative style, not an academic one.

My hope is that any reader who picks this book up (friends and relatives included) will be pleasantly surprised at how well it moves along from page to page, chapter to chapter, start to finish.

No need for an apology there.

Keep Your Pocket Comb Holstered

This just in from the New York Times:  A five-year study published in 2001 in something called "Academic Emergency Medicine," reported that "there were an estimated 105,000 injuries related to hair-care products." 

It is now nearly two decades later and the mind reels at the current hair-care casualty figures (not yet released).  I don't think there is any cause for panic, but clearly we need to use caution with these products.  Maybe it's time for the president to name a blue-ribbon national task force to look into the matter and head off future problems.  Let's just call this a word to the wise.