Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Big picture

If this tiny video doesn’t blow your mind out, then nothing will:


I like to think that all this is happening just alongside our friendly neighborhood. So, we’re looking in over the back-yard fence, as it were, and wondering what the Joneses might be up to. Well, it so happens that they might well be stirring up shit. But jeez, they’ve been doing that for ages, ever since we moved in. We should have known all along that it wouldn’t be easy, trying to win friends and influence people in that kind of vicious environment. Frankly, I dunno what to do. In any case, I’ve supplied the exact name of the intruder: Laniakea. Maybe somebody might report them to neighborhood watch.

2 comments:

  1. Saw the pix of yr recent deluge on French News. Of course not a whisper about it here from any other media source except www. It looked catastrophic. Thought of you and hoped you haven't been too badly impacted.

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  2. The repetitive flooding of certain regions further to the south (particularly in the Gard and Var departments) has been devastating. In most cases, an insignificant creek or a tiny stream suddenly swells to a disproportionate volume, rips away bridges and adjoining roads, creates torrents of mud, and then invades shop and houses. If more rain happens to fall, a short time later, the land is still saturated with the waters of the earlier flooding, and a new catastrophe can arise rapidly.

    This situation is quite different to the floods of my childhood back on the Clarence River in Grafton. In France, the case of flooding of major rivers seems to be under control… although it would still be possible, for example, for major flooding (of a once-in-a-century kind) to occur in Paris. As far as the sudden catastrophic swelling of small waterways is concerned, I have the impression that local authorities and residents can have disastrously-short memories. A newly-elected mayor might have simply “forgotten” that, once upon a time, creeks in his municipality happened to overflow, say 30 or 40 years ago. So, he authorizes the construction of new neighborhoods in zones that remain theoretically dangerous.

    Here at Choranche, I like to think that my property is safe. The main danger is the possibility that saturated embankments alongside Gamone Creek (which is normally totally dry) might become fragile and start to slide, meaning that we would be stranded for a while, until heavy earth-moving machines came in to repair the damage. The local River Bourne (which I can see from my window, down in the valley a few hundred meters below my house) goes totally mad several times a year, due to melting snows or rain up on the Vercors plateau. But we’ve seen this happen so often that we never fear it. The most spectacular event took place about a decade ago, when the Bourne dumped a few hundred square meters of splendid melon-sized limestone boulders on the riverside park in the middle of Pont-en-Royans. In fact, that was a god-sent gift. I made many trips down there in my car to collect boulders that soon became one of my sturdy garden walls.

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