Dusk Through Narrow Streets

Yeah, I think I said I’d update if more happened with the volcano situation up here. Or maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. Whatever the case, there’s been…basically nothing. People are still covering their computers with plastic bags to keep out the ash when it does come, because the stuff’s so fine it will almost certainly get into buildings, but nothing has actually happened. Maybe Mt. Redoubt’s still gearing up for a big one–and I imagine it is, considering the seismic activity hasn’t really settled down and we’re probably due anyway–or maybe it’s going to taper off. (Volcano image is a photo my dad took in 1989, last time Mt. Redoubt went off. Click to enlarge.)

As a recent article at the LA Times website put it, “If Alaska’s Mount Redoubt is going to blow its top, will it hurry up already?” I quite agree, especially since I really, really want a volcano day off school. That would just be…several kinds of awesome, really. (The same article has a couple of priceless comments–one person says, apparently in all sincerity, “the volcano will blow its top on march 14 at 4:57 i had a dream some one on tv said that and it was a mid explosive erruption,” and another commenter responds, “The Volcano will blow Feb 32nd at elleventeen o’clock. Instead of lava, there will be warm strawberry sauce for snowy mountain, which will turn into ice cream. Had a dream about it, its gonna happen. Just you wait.” I love the internet.)

As for other weather stuff, since you all know how much I like complaining about that, it’s got a lot warmer lately–up around 30° and higher–which is nice, I guess, except that it actually means everything is very slick and there’s slush everywhere. So that’s fun.

Wow, this has really been a month for plane crashes or something. (I guess the Hudson River one doesn’t count, seeing as it was in January…although it’s been less than a month since that happened. Whatever.) Just a day or two ago there was the one near Buffalo, NY, and today a plane crashed on landing at London’s City airport.  The really amazing thing there is that only two people were injured and no one died; in fact, everyone had already got out of the plane by the time emergency services got there. Of course they were already on the runway, so it wasn’t anything like as bad a crash as it could be, but…a crash landing is a crash landing, and one you walk away from is pretty darn good.

This doesn’t exactly make me feel better about flying, though. At times I sympathize with my grandpa and uncle, who absolutely refuse to fly.

(Image from Reuters.)

Alaska’s kind of famous for its earthquakes–I imagine the one in ‘64 is relatively familiar to people, if nowhere near as much as, say, any in San Francisco because California is the center of the universe–but I’m not sure how many people connect the plate-tectonic activity we get with earthquakes to the same kind of thing that results in volcanoes. We are part of the Ring of Fire, after all:

So there you go, we get earthquakes and volcanoes. Active ones, particularly out in the Aleutians. Not the sorts of fun, dramatic volcanoes you see in Hawaii (well, in pictures from the 1980s when Pu’u O’o was actually doing things, now it’s more like a trickle into the ocean) with lava fountaining into the air, and thankfully not the sort you hear about every now and then on Montserrat that’s sending pyroclastic flows down onto another village. But we do get plenty of ash from our volcanoes, when they go off, and the current thing is that Mt. Redoubt is gearing up for a good eruption. We’re not talking a Mt. St. Helens-type problem here, but Redoubt’s just across Cook Inlet from Anchorage, so we’d be getting lots of ash while towns like Kenai would get even more. UAA’s been sending out e-mails asking faculty and staff to cover their computers at the end of the day, and people have been doing that where I work; we’ve been doing it at home, even. We’ve got no idea when the thing’s going to go off, but when it does, the ash will be so fine it’ll get in pretty much everywhere. Which reminds me, I should really check to see if I’ve got an extra air filter for my car and some medical masks in the trunk. The last time Mt. Redoubt blew its top, we had smoke and ash disrupting air traffic for five months, plus enormous amounts of dirty snow, apparently (it was in Dec. 1989, so I was maybe three and don’t remember).

To be honest, though, I think the whole thing’s kind of funny–not because I’m not taking it seriously, but because, I mean, you don’t ordinarily associate volcanoes with Alaska, especially not when the main weather problems I’ve kvetched about have involved insanely cold temps and too much snow. Also because a look at Google News shows that Mt. Redoubt’s showing up in the LA Times and the Boston Herald and all kinds of things–heck, there’s even a place in Austria reporting on it. And I do think that’s amusing, because nobody really gives a crap about Alaska unless there’s oil involved–or if we’ve got a volcano about to go off. Then everyone’s interested.

Personally? I’m really hoping for a volcano day off school.

One of the slightly more annoying things I noticed in England was that all the lifts talked. (Never mind the confusion about which floor is which: “ground floor” I understand perfectly, and I suppose I can go along with the idea that the ground floor is then floor 0 and what Americans consider the second floor is then floor 1 and so on, meaning any basement levels are floor 01, floor 02, and so on. This isn’t a problem except at UEA where the main part of campus is connected together by raised walkways and in these areas only cars and service deliveries and the like actually use the ground…which means that the “ground” floor in many, but not all, of these buildings is actually the one you enter from the walkway, and not on ground level at all.) Other annoyances aside, for some reason for sure every lift at UEA, and I think those elsewhere (I honestly can’t remember if this was true of the airports but I imagine it was, and I didn’t use much in the way of lifts otherwise), had to talk to you like all the time, in this computerized female British voice, telling you important things like “Doors closing” and “Lift going down”. So for a single ride up two floors, say, you’d get to hear “Doors closing. Lift going up.” *a couple seconds’ precious silence* “Floor two. Doors opening.” Because…it’s handicap-accessible and therefore it’s trying to tell blind people what’s going on? Because England is even more litigation-happy than the US is and maybe people have got hurt in elevators because they couldn’t figure out themselves that the doors were closing? I honestly can’t imagine.

The actual point here is that while I was gone, one of the elevators in a building on the UAA campus was extensively renovated; I can’t say whether it works better or faster (it was a real clunker before, though, and very old), but it sure looks nicer inside. Also it talks. It’s got a computerized female voice (American accent, naturally) that tells you your floor and whether it’s going up or down; it’s not as much as the lifts at UEA, but it’s close enough I wonder if this is just a new thing in making elevators more accessible than they already are (although that begs the question, why choose those messages instead of “doors closing” since the others are much easier to figure out by yourself?) or if, I dunno, some engineer just wanted to copy Britain.

Mostly it makes me think of Douglas Adams’ talking doors on the Heart of Gold.

This comic was printed in a recent issue of The Northern Light, the student-run paper for UAA, and it actually cracked me up (click for the full image):

The comics run in there are mostly okay, but they’re almost all by students, which would be fine except, um, I have this slight grudge because I was sort of assigned find-new-comics duty since we had almost none at that point? And I decided to run with it even though they were maybe partly joking? And I got permission from xkcd, Wondermark, and Ctrl-Alt-Del to print their comics, which kind of took forever? And then nothing ever happened and when I finally asked about it, I was told that no, actually, the paper is trying to run just local comics? Okay. Thanks for telling me NOW.

Regardless, this comic is actually funny, although maybe it wouldn’t seem like it to anyone who doesn’t live here, and a non-Alaskan definitely wouldn’t think of this idea for a comic. But it’s funny because the announcer’s dramatic monologue is more or less what others tend to think about life here, and the students with their Starbucks cups and t-shirts are pretty well representative of UAA students. And the dig at the University of Alaska Fairbanks? Well, I suppose that’s even more of an in-joke, because UAA and UAF have a long-standing rivalry that’s not always a friendly one, based partly on stuff like their changing the name of their team from the UAF Nanooks to the Alaska Nanooks because they want college-sports fans to think of them when they think of sports in Alaska, even though UAA beats UAF at just about everything sports-related. Also the fact that UAF gets more money than UAA does even though UAA is far bigger, or the part where UAA hasn’t actually been allowed to have any PhD programs because we don’t have the “research infrastructure” that UAF does…because we haven’t been given the funding for it. The actual fact is that 1) the University of Alaska statewide administration is based in Fairbanks, so that’s where the power and money is, and 2) if not for the whole “research university” thing, which is kind of bunk because there’s not much they’ve got there that we couldn’t also have, UAF would kind of die off.

Anyway. The other point is that Fairbanks is in the interior of Alaska, and it tends to get insanely cold there–and I say that from the perspective of someone who spent five years in Barrow. Like right now? Well, here in Anchorage, it’s 6° F. That’s cold. In Fairbanks it’s thirty below. (For comparison’s sake, it’s only -21°…but there’s a 15 mph wind, putting the windchill at -46°. You have no idea how glad I am not to be living there now.)

But here in Anchorage, at least, college life isn’t that hugely different from that anywhere else. I mean, it’s different–we get a lot more snow, and pretty much every week there’s a report in the UPD blotter about a moose wandering around campus–but it’s not that different, and the biggest dangers don’t come from things like bears. The biggest problem lately has probably been the weather. Yeah, again. It finally got cold again, right, and just when all the water from the warm period was freezing over again, it snowed. And then it snowed some more. And let me tell you, about the worst thing you can find for slippery walking or driving is snow on top of ice. I slipped and fell twice on Thursday, and the next day I was sore like I’d had a hard workout.

Also, we’re probably going to get a volcano erruption.