Bleeding Fiction

It's not a very entertaining article, but I love the headline: "Models May Underestimate Climate Swings". Of course the article's talking about how current statistical analysis may have sold short the wide range of climactic conditions that our planet may have experienced before we were around to record such things and the wide range of climactic conditions we may yet encounter ("'Things can get pretty incendiary,' says Thomas Crowley"), but I've got the image of a bunch of Victoria's Secret models, complete with push-up bras and feathered wings, frowning thoughtfully in front of a weather map stuck in my head now.

In other news, my local volcano may erupt soon. I've never had a local volcano before. It's been pleasant, so far. There have apparently been three to four earthquakes every minute around the volcano, but I haven't felt a one. I hope it remains that way. I'm about a two hour drive away, which I'm guessing means about one hundred miles. The parks people have only evacuated a twelve mile radius, so I'm most likely safe. I guess we'll see.

If you want to watch a picture feed from the Mount St. Helen's VolcanoCam, you can do that here, but I warn you: like most things of its type, it's extraordinarily boring. Especially at night.

Lastly, school. I wasn't kicked out today. I'm dropping down to a first-year Japanese course, and probably start in winter quarter. My advisor stressed how difficult it'll be for me to complete the program in only two years by starting at first year Japanese, but said that if it was really necessary, we wouldn't have a choice. I wonder, but only vaguely, if maybe I wouldn't've done better to be kicked out.

(Russian class, by the way, continues to be fun. We had to pick Russian names for ourselves for class discussion; I picked Kostya, for obvious reasons. The name of the girl in today's example dialogue was Lena, which just made the exercise odd.)