Transition game

Sorry for fixating on the nasty atmospheric phenomena for the last 36 hours, y'all. It's still quite alienating to see campus with half the trees on the north side either uprooted or creatively rearranged. And there's yellow insulation everywhere, for miles, on sidewalks, attached to cars, drooping from power lines.

Links of note: did I forget to mention that Ward Hall houses K-State's nuclear reactor? And yes, it got nailed. Everything's safe, though. (Or so they tell us.) More galleries of Manhattan, Chapman, but if you're like me (and everyone at work) you're approaching tornado burnout.

Also I should turn in my amateur meteorologist badge, because the tornado that hit Chapman's being classified as an EF3, and Manhattan's was actually an EF4. It was a damn skinny EF4, though. (Though a cow-orker says it'd shrunk by the time it got to campus; I believe that. Though most of the buildings on campus are hearty enough to stand up to upper-level tornados, they still have their weak spots -- nuclear reactors, arenas, the late Soil Erosion Lab.)

Okay, less spinny-cloudy-things from here on out. More ephemera. Promise.

WTF

NBC's Tim Russert dead at 58.

A lot of journalists find it hard to balance objectivity with holding people accountable. Russert seemed to excel at it, especially recently. He wasn't perfect, but he was at the top of his game, certainly a voice of reason in an increasingly polarized field. A severe and painful loss to the industry, to politics and to American discourse.

Sorry, sorry, one more

This answers the questions of "How do you feel?" and "How was your week?" and "Which is your favorite of all the storm pictures?" all at the same time.

Car on K-State campus, morning of June 12, 2008. Photo by K-State Web Technologies.

Yeah, it's kinda like that.