Becky’s parents called from Tennessee this evening, en route from Buffalo to L.A. for graduation. They will be driving through Oklahoma City tomorrow, and they promised to take pictures if they see any particularly dramatic tornado damage. That became more likely a few hours ago, when the city was hit by another tornado, its second in as many days.

Here is the Daily Oklahoman front page regarding yesterday’s tornado:

Right now, the Zaks are in Brownsville, TN, staying overnight. Brownsville is just 30 miles from Jackson, which got hit by a tornado of its own on Sunday. The Zaks said it was extremely difficult to find a motel room in the area because of all the relief workers and newly homeless residents there.

Tomorrow’s forecast calls for more severe weather in the Midwest, including possibly in Arkansas and Oklahoma, the states the Zaks will be driving through. Stay tuned.

I forgot to mention this earlier today, but there is now officially…

ONE WEEK LEFT TILL GRADUATION!

Apologies to all my fellow seniors who hate these countdown posts. :)

I just witnessed another sterling example of the USC Department of Public Safety’s brilliance. Check this out:

Since 10:00 PM or so, there have been a ton of firecracker-like sounds in our neighborhood. Snap, crackel, smash, boom, etc. I thought maybe somebody had rescheduled the 4th of July without telling me. Well anyway, it went on long enough that I figured I’d better check it out — maybe there was a good photo to be taken! I determined that it sounded like the noise was coming from 27th Street (one block north of us), and I set out to walk in that direction and see what I could see.

Shortly after I began walking down 27th Street toward my estimate of the source of the noise, I noticed a DPS car turning onto the street and heading the same direction. Coincidence? I thought not. Sure enough, the DPS officer got out of his car and walked up to the house where it sounded like there was a party going on. There were no firecrackers going off at this point (duh, they stopped when they saw the cop car), but surely this was the place.

I arrived at the scene just in time to catch the tail end of the officer’s conversation with the partying students. He said “some neighbors called to complain,” but he clearly sympathized with the students, who said they were just celebrating the Lakers’ win. Still, the fun-loving cop asked the kids to cool it…

…”at least for about a half hour, until I get off work.”

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Push the noise violations later into the night, all the while sending the message that fireworks are okay! Great police work, guys!

(I mean, personally, I don’t mind the noise, especially given that it’s a Friday night at the tail end of the school year. But objectively, I’m not sure this speaks well of DPS.)

Anyway, that was 10:30 PM. We shall see whether the firecrackers resume in about 15 minutes…

UPDATE, 11:15 PM: No snaps, crackles, or pops yet from outside.

Meanwhile, about that Lakers game: It seems courtside L.A. fan Jack Nicholson almost got himself ejected from the game. Talk about needing some anger management.

Thanks to Instapundit for linking to this hilarious timeline of Internet history. Among my favorite entries:

1983: Researchers develop TCP/IP, DNS, IAB, and other important internet acronyms.

2001: Blogging invented. Promises to change the way people bore strangers with banal anecdotes about their pets. (Ha!)

2003: After 43.2 million spams, and over 2.3 billion pop-up ads worldwide, someone buys an X-10 mini cam.

Hehe. Read the whole thing, as they say.

Southern California is at serious risk for tsunamis (a.k.a. giant-ass waves) caused by earthquakes and landslides, according to this USC article, which also features this really cool picture:

UPDATE: Andrew correctly points out that the above picture of a breaking wave:
a) does not look anything like a tsunami; and
b) is not “featured” on the same page as the article.
He’s right on both counts, but I’m not totally smoking crack here, people, honest. My wording (”…article, which also features…”) was off, but the picture does accompany the link to the story on both the USC homepage and the USC News directory of stories. Yes, it’s grossly inaccurate. But I never vouched for its accuracy. I just said it was really cool. And I stand by that. :)

UPDATE: Here’s the website of the USC Tsunami Research Group. Here are their video animations of potential Southern California tnsuamis.

From The Onion:

Nation’s Dogs Dangerously Underpetted, Say Dogs
NEW YORK—At a press conference Monday, representatives of the Association of American Dogs announced that the nation’s canines are dangerously underpetted. “Every night, thousands of U.S. dogs go to bed without so much as a scritch behind the ears,” AAD president Banjo said. “If this sort of neglect from our masters continues, it could lead to widespread jumping on the furniture.” Upon his owner’s arrival in the press-conference room, Banjo abruptly ended his speech, frantically barking, leaping, and rolling over on his back in an effort to communicate his need for a vigorous belly rub.

L.A. sucks. Anaheim rules.

A photo from yesterday morning’s transit of Mercury:

Here’s a series of pictures from Long Island, NY, where the transit’s conclusion was visible just after sunrise. The tiny dot on the far right is Mercury.

SpaceWeather.com has a bunch more photos. Space.com has an article and some photos. Google News has links to a bunch of other articles, including many from newspapers in India.

And here’s a movie of the transit.

My monkey alter-ego can kick your monkey alter-ego’s monkey butt!

UPDATE: Who knew? The Dixie Chicks’ monkey alter-ago would kill George Dubya’s!

UPDATE: Now here is a battle for the ages.

UPDATE: The system is obviously flawed.

Ah, that’s better.

UPDATE: This is just too much fun.

Biological weapons: as old as war itself.

Becky’s final history project, a website devoted to evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, is finished (well, almost) and is officially online!

Just finished the paper. 19 pages, plus footnotes.

My last undergraduate paper is now printing. (And Toby is staring at the printer.)

UPDATE, 5:06 PM: I just handed the paper in. My education at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism is officially complete. All I have left now is one political science final exam, next Monday.

One year ago this morning, at just about this very moment, I was awakened when the Amtrak train I was aboard crashed into an abandoned truck.

This picture was taken several hours later, once the wrecked truck was pryed off the train’s front.

Moments after the collision, which happened right around 4:00 AM, I blogged via cell phone:

Just woke up to discover we are stopped dead on the tracks, near the north bank of the Salton Sea. Don’t know why. There’s a police car and two firetrucks on the road parallel to the track, maybe a half-mile ahead. Power just went out on the train. Did we hit a car at a crossing, I wonder? Two more police cars…

I added several more posts, and then, an hour later:

BULLETIN: Amtrak guy says we hit a truck *with no one in it*. They apparently parked it on the track!!! Hmmm… stupid terrorists?

I later speculated:

I’m saying this was a deliberate act of sabotage, not by terrorists but by “inconvenience-ists” … out not to terrorize, but merely to inconvenience, ordinary Americans. :)

We never were told anything else about it, and I couldn’t find anything in a newspaper or online, so to this day I don’t know the actual reason why the truck was there. But it certainly made for an interesting morning on the train. “Only in America, during a Brendan Loy Train ride,” my good friend Tim Stevens wrote in an e-mail after reading about the incident on my website. Tim added that he found himself “wishing a train he was on hit a truck……friggin’ cool.”

The truck incident was the first in a long series of delays that resulted in our arrival to New Orleans being delayed by thirteen hours. Yeah, that was some trip. :) I actually had a great time, though. To view all my blog posts from that cross-country train trip, from Los Angeles to Hartford via New Orleans click here!

Sorry for the blog silence over the past 24 hours. I’ve just been really busy… and, when taking breaks from being busy, really sleepy.

I’m still working on that pesky paper, which now appears it’s going to be about 24 hours late. It isn’t that I couldn’t finish it on time because I started so late; it’s just that I simply couldn’t focus during my quasi-all-nighter last night. I had more than enough time, but I kept getting distracted by random things (like audblog… heh). And, I did eventually doze off for a while, which didn’t help.

Anyway, I’m going to bed now… only to wake up at 8:30 AM to try and finish. Ack!

audblog audio post