Dilaudid -- easily confused!
Hike up your fishnets! / if we live to see the other side of this / I will remember your kiss / So do it with your mouth open.
The Mountain Goats seem to have been reduced to repetition of previously explored tropes and tics.
3: You know what song sounds totally like another song by the very same band, which I just noticed today? Bright Eyes' "First day of my life" is a total rip-off, melodically, of "Lua".
Except I guess you're not ripping it off if you wrote both. Still: weird.
Except I guess you're not ripping it off if you wrote both
From the linked wiki:
By May 1927, the Mississippi River below Memphis, Tennessee, reached a width of 60 miles
Holy shit.
I knew about it because I read a lot of books about natural disasters. However, searching for books on natural disasters is how I heard of it; I hadn't heard about the 1927 flood before I saw the book mentioned. It had some pretty interesting bits about the rise of Herbert Hoover in it.
The disaster that I learned about recently that really blew my mind is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1556_Shaanxi_earthquake
I was in St Louis during the 1993 Missouri flood. It was impressive. Most impressive of all was the blasé attitude of St Louis residents: the flood might as well have been in China. Apparently all it takes for smug superiority is for your city to be on a very slight hill.
A grimly entertaining story here about someone who is said to have intentionally pulled sandbags from a levee in 1993. He's still in jail. A stoning as specified in Deuteronomy 21.21 might have been a better fit, though. Clearly, he had it coming.
I have a flood! Of love for you guys! In my pants!
||
Grades are in! High of 70 today!
|>
Old Man - part of Wild Palms by Wm. Faulkner - is set in the 1927 flood.
Later that year, a smaller version was Vermont's greatest natural disaster.
When [Hoover] failed to keep the promise, Moton and other influential African-Americans helped to shift the allegiance of Black Americans from the Republican party to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats.
That's pretty damn fascinating.
Rising Tide has been on my list in a vague way, but I'm clearly going to have to read it now. Megan, or anyone else, do you have a sense of how accurate his interpretations are?
3: With the gravel in your back?! Ouch!
I have no idea how accurate Rising Tide was. I took it as gospel because it is the only thing I've read on the topic and because I don't have independent opinions on things that happen outside California.
It did mention something I've only ever heard of a couple times. I had heard of China using its army as human levees (link arms, stand on the levee and hope the water doesn't rise six more feet), and Rising Tide mentioned using black laborers as human levees (lying down in a barely cresting flood). And shooting black laborers who tried to leave the repair/sandbag crews.
It was a good read, but Under a Flaming Sky is still my top recommendation for "natural" disaster books. (Because leaving hundreds of thousands of acres of logged slag behind to roast in the sun isn't "natural" even if wildfires are.)
I think this PBS "American Experience" documentary from 2001 was where I first got any sense of the scale of the flood. Some good info at the link including the transcript and link to some primary documents. It did lean heavily on Rising Tide as I recall (and I would not be surprised if the publishing of the book prompted the idea of the film.).
But of course you've heard of the The Great Peshtigo Fire, right?
During the last big flood down there I was holed up in a cabin with all my musical instruments and recorded my own version of the Randy Newman. My ex was a bit startled when I was recording the background shrieking.
That's the first I've heard of that fire. Chicago got all the press because they knew the rule. If at all possible, involve a cow.
I swear I read someplace about an earthquake that struck in the middle of a hurricane, someplace in the Caribbean, during the colonial era. But my google skills are failing me, and I cannot pull up the reference. Perhaps I dreamed it all?
19: My father's being from Wisconsin led to us all knowing about the Peshtigo fire and the relative injustice of its obscurity in contrast to Chicago despite many more deaths. The other side of the family being Ohio vallley folk it was always the 1913 and 1937 floods (Pittsburgh's big one was actually 1936--the depression sucked for weather in many different ways, whatever you needed less of you got more of and vice versa)
Under a Flaming Sky mentions Peshtigo, but that's all I know of it.
26: Wasn't that a mighty storm.
Death come howlin' on the ocean
Death come, you gotta go