As many of you know, we’re experiencing some incredible flooding here in Iowa City, though it hasn’t yet become as drastic here as it has in Cedar Rapids or in Des Moines. The University of Iowa has several campus buildings that reside next to the Iowa River and they’ve been evacuating those buildings all week.

This morning Noah & I headed over to the University of Iowa Main Library to help move some of the books that were in Special Collections storage to upper floors. Noah did an incredible amount of moving heavy book carts for over 2 solid hours. Here he is bringing one to me to pass off to the next link in the book brigade.

After we tired of that, we moved back to my office in the Lindquist Center, which is across the street from the Main Library. This was being evacuated, too, so we spent another couple of hours packing up all my computer equipment (and all my toys) and putting them into storage — no one is sure for how long.

I also found out that my house is within the 500 year flood plain, and that this flood may reach those levels over the weekend or early next week. So far, however, the creek that lives across the street from me remains at normal levels.

Here’s hoping there’s no more rain this next week!

This is the National Weather Service forecast for Iowa City this week. It’s been gross out. Muddy. Moist. Drizzly. Every time it drizzles I think, “This should be snow, dammit!” But instead we’re going to have a high of 52 on Friday and Saturday. This is crazy! I mean: yeah, I still get to ride my bike to work, which is great, but the weather really freaks me out. Not to mention the smell of rotting vegetation everywhere because of the moisture (that should be, um, snow). BLECH.

This is how Iowa City looked in winter time in 1913. This is a photo taken in February of that year. I don’t think it’ll ever look like this again, though. Incidentally, all those neat trees have been removed since then.

Which reminds me that last week I saw this interesting graphic about how the wheat crops of the U.S. will shift northwards to Canada, possibly by 2050!

Which means the climate personality of tropical regions south of here are headed this way.

Ugh, I hate humidity, I’m totally moving.

Mid-term elections today. I biked over to my polling place after work: Longfellow elementary school. Thanks to misunderstanding the poll worker’s question, I ended up using an electronic voting machine. It was an iVotronic. Here is a link to a little online demo of how it works.

I have to say that I found the whole experience to be rather ethereal. You were supposed to touch a box and then the machine would draw a little X in the box you had chosen, only it didn’t always do that. I had to be very careful that it put the X in the right box, and after a few tries, I figured out you had to actually touch a little above + to the right of the appropriate box. There were a few times when the machine marked the opposite choice.

At the end of the ballot, I reviewed all my choices for a few minutes. During the entire review period, there is a large, annoying red oval at the top of the machine that says VOTE, and it blinks at you until you push it.

I received no paper receipt, just an on-screen “YOU VOTED” which I really didn’t find all that comforting. Overall, It was an unsatisfying experience. I wanted paper, and I actually wanted to watch the little black voting machine suck in my ballot and then print out another entry on its roll-tape log.
Oh, and it would have been nice had the touch screen been more accurate.

I wonder if it worked or not. In the future, I think I’ll stick with the Scan-Tron style I came to appreciate starting in 4th grade with the ITBS tests we all had to take. I like the solidity of actually filling in the oval with my #2 pencil.

Iowa City is a disaster zone.

Erin + I were finishing dinner at the Red Avocado when it hit; we’re okay, but we came awfully close to walking outside right as the tornado descended upon the neighborhood. The weather was getting really sketchy and we thought we should leave to go home; but one of the women working there convinced us to stay in with them.

Seconds later, the power went out, the air got really weird, it became UTTERLY silent..we 8 folks went into the kitchen and huddled in the cooking area (luckily the Red Avocado is a basement establishment).

The air pressure changed and our ears popped..the hair on my arms prickled. And then suddenly it was like something big went through the room..kind of an invisible entity. It must’ve just been the air pressure changing though. It let out a sigh, during which I brilliantly deduced that, “I think it’s gone!”, and we went to look out the front door. We saw the white funnel cloud skipping eerily away Northast towards I-80 (my dad says that tornadoes always travel Northeast so in a bad situation, run South)

After about 15 minutes of staring out the window and waiting to feel like things were okay, we went outside and there’s utter destruction everywhere. College Green park was decimated, chimneys were in the road..one of my car windows got sucked out, as did that of our friend Frank who happened to be dining with us. Power lines down..rubble all over. people wandering in a daze.

We drove home, wihch was eerie b/c there’s no power in our neighborhood..so no street lights, no traffic lights..totally dark. Eventually we walked downtown with our friends Steve and Allison..we just wandered with the huge crowds. Totally surreal, kind of apocalyptic. You can see photos at The Press Citizen that kind of convey the strangeness.

There was a bad, hours-long gas leak on Iowa Avenue that kept everyone away from there. Trees everywhere just ripped up out of the ground, tops of buildings just gone. Cars turned over, smashed..it’s crazy.

We went to see St. Pat’s over on Court Street. Apparently there were 70 people at a late mass (Easter weekend, you know) when the sirens went off. The Reverend said people should either go to the rectory or the basement. They chose the basement and then the entire roof of the church got sucked away. The law frim next to the johnson county courthouse..the second story is completely gone, and it was a brick structure. Happy Joe’s is gone, Dairy Queen on Riverside Drive is gone. Menards + Wal-Mart lost their roofs. Starbucks lost its roof, but was still serving lattes this morning. (they were recently shut down by city officials tho!)

When Erin + I walked past the Red Avocado this morning, the building owner guy (and sometimes waiter at RA) said, “ha ha ha! all the local vegan and organic businesses survived! Happy Joes and Dairy Queen are gone! ha ha ha!” He seemed a bit manic, sweeping debris and smoking a huge cigar.

Our little city is all messed up! The trees from College Green Park will be the biggest ultimate loss, I think..at least as far as how the city looks, overall. I put up some pictures from my walk to work, over at Flickr.

I came across an interesting/disconcerting news bit today (via digg); it seems there’s a proposal in the House to use unmanned drones (spy planes) to surveil the United States. The author of the piece seems so matter-of-fact in discussing the possible uses of these planes, monitoring US borders, looking for “terrorist activity” etc. The word ‘privacy’ is mentioned only once, in passing. One disconcerting paragraph even discusses a county in North Carolina where the technology is already being put to use, “The aircraft has been dispatched to monitor gatherings of motorcycle riders at the Gaston County fairgrounds from just a few hundred feet in the air (close enough to identify faces) and many more uses, such as the aerial detection of marijuana fields, are planned.” .

But it was the final paragraph of the article that made me gulp my too hot morning coffee in horror: “It is quite easy to envision a future in which (UAVs), unaffected by pilot fatigue, provide 24-7 border and port surveillance to protect against terrorist intrusion,” said Mike Heintz on behalf of the UNITE Alliance which represents Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. “Other examples are limited only by our imagination.” emphasis mine

If you couple this information with info from another article posted on 365gay.com about ultra conservative Supreme Court Justice Scalia, where it says, “Earlier this month, the governor of South Dakota signed a law that makes it illegal for a woman to have an abortion. It is widely expected that the will be appealed, opening the way for the Supreme Court to revisit Roe v Wade. A similar scenario could also send sodomy back to the high court.”..it doesn’t take long to envision a world where a right-wing “moralist” government is using high tech equipment to spy inside peoples’ homes and where people disappear suddenly in the night, a’la V for Vendetta.

Speaking of which, I saw V last weekend with a bunch of friends. I should mention that I saw the movie, then read the comic, and then saw the movie again (yes, it’s true, I’m a total movie hound). And I have to say, that while I do have some points about the story that I don’t like..overall I really enjoyed it. As one of my friends said gleefully after the show, “I loved the explosions!” And it really was sort of cathartic to see the awful police-state big bro. government fall to bits in a shower of sparks accompanied by crashing Tchaikovsky.

I also have to say that I, personally, enjoyed the movie more than the comic. I’m not a big fan of Alan Moore to begin with, and in this case, I think the W brothers took the revolutionary aspects a lot farther in the movie. And I really appreciated that sentiment.

I, did wonder about V’s line of cash..where did he get it? Extortion? Trust Fund? There’s no back story to the character..in either the movie, or the comic..so you don’t know if he comes from wealth. It shouldn’t matter, though because there’s one tiny bit of dialogue where they explain that “the man in room V” has forgotten who he is..so he should have no need of a “back story”, really. But he had all that stuff, the nice cookware, the zillions of masks.. So is that the only way to have made his revolution feasible? A person really rich and “outside the system” has to inspire it or fund it? I think it would have to be more organic than that, really. But it’s a movie so you take it with a grain, as you do with all of Hollywood. It was quite entertaining.

I liked the queer subtexts and also the gender oddity of the main character. As high-action heroes go, V is different from most. I love the freakness of it. That long polyester hair..the cheek rouge..the performative camp..that’s pretty queer. and the whole bit about Evey falling in love with him..transcending his external presentation, transcending traditional romance. And there’s the whole bit where she reads the lesbian’s notes from the underground, kissing the paper they are written on, falling in love with the author..crying over her story, taking it away with her..living because of it.

Also, I appreciated the nearly transparent pointers to the current administration..tho I think some people actually MISS that, as I’ve heard people say that they see paralells to the Nazis, and not current times. Which how you can miss the obvious references to fear propaganda (terrorism, avian flu, etc) is totally beyond me. Plus there’s a nice implication about “the government being responsible for the deaths of thousands of people” and covering it up. heh. Fox News has been calling for it to be yanked from the theatres because it will incite “terrarism”, etc. IMO, anything that Fox News doesn’t like, I’ll go see (twice).