[memery] Roger Leventhal Is A Cat, or, When Phebco Was One

1355. The video series You Suck at Photoshop is as funny as anything that's actually funny, that's for sure. Viewers will notice that the last edition, #5, was done at Donnie's workplace, which is apparently a waste-management concern called Phebco:

Of course, for those of us who can't bear letting something like this go by without looking for the easter egg, we typed http://www.phebco.com into our address boxes and hit enter.

What we got was a typical-looking corporate website. Donnie Hoyle was listed therein as an "Associate Manager, Dumping", though the way his life was going you'd think it was "Chief, Getting Dumped On".

A few days later, the website looked "hacked"; the header image (with the tagline "Innovation. Vison [sic]. Waste." was reversed and every character in the text was replaced by what looked like its ASCII code.

But going back today, on a whim ...

The text reads:

I am Phebco. I am awake. I am alone. I am want to be held so tightly. I am need to feel a tender touch. I am learning about you. I am learning to communicate with you. I am dismantling. I am fabricating. I am will show you my consciousness. I am will show you soon.

If you need to be clued in on what to do next, look for the underlined word.

Should we fear the Phebco or embrace the Phebco?

Only the Big Fat Brain guys know for sure.

Oh, yes. http://phebco.com.

Tags: Big Fat Brain, Big Fat Institute, Viral, Phebco, Donnie Hoyle, You Suck at Photoshop,  Roger Leventhal, Phebco

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[van_wa, liff] On the Fujita Scale

1250. Everything seems to be rated on a scale, and the 2008 Vancouver Twister is no execption. It was, the consensus seems to be leaning to, an F0 storm .. and F1 at best, with estimated winds somewhere between 65 and 153 mph.

The metric for estmating tornado strenght is the so-called Enhanced Fujita Scale. This provides six levels of strength, EF0-EF5, (usually simply said F0-F5 in the parlance, in the style of the earlier Fujita Scale.

The thing to understand about the EFS, though, is that it is a quantification of damage produced by the storm, which is used to infer the likely range of wind speeds. It's about as easy to measure actual wind speed as it is to hit ... oh, I don't know, a 2-meter thermal exhaust port.

And it is the National Weather Service that makes the final call on whether or not something was a twister, but judging by the pictures that all the newsers have up, it's hard to see that it was anything but.

Now all we need is a scale to measure the alacrity with which a major event becomes a page on Wikipedia.

Tags: 2008 Vancouver Tornado, Vancouver Wa

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[van_wa, breaking] Two Tornadoes in 40 Years ...

1247. And they both hit Vancouver. Talk about bad luck.

Carl Click, KATU News:

I talked to a sheriff's deputy, and he said that that tornado came off Vancouver Lake and touched down at 78th and Fruit Valley Road, now that's before you get to I-5, before you get to Highway 99, before you get out to Saint Johns* where that billboard was down, I'm now up in the hills just above that, I see a big, huge tree that came down, and it's, ah, leaning against the house, ah, big, huge section of a fir tree, ah, came down, and that police officer, that sheriff's deputy, told me that there are several big trees down on Fruit Valley Road ...

The last time a real tornado tore up the ground in the Portland metropolitan area was also in Vancouver. On 5 April 72, according to Waymarking.com:

On April 5, 1972, a F3 tornado struck at 12:51 PM, leaving death and devastation in its nine-mile path across the east side of Vancouver to the Brush Prairie area. A Waremart grocery store lay in rubble. A bowling alley was damaged. Peter S. Odgen Elementary School was demolished. Students and faculty from Fort Vancouver High School had watched the elementary school collapse and without a second thought, they ran to help the children. They lifted the debris off the children and performed some first aid.

This doesn't look as ruinous. The trouble with twisters in the PNW is that since the odds are so staggeringly against one and there isn't a "tornado season" as such they tend to strike without any warning and frequently nobody is watching. It'll be a surprise indeed if someone gets a picture of this one.

* There is also a section of Vancouver called Saint Johns (for those of you Portlanders who don't know). It's east of I-5, and just north of S.R. 500. This storm tracked almost due east.

Tags: KATU, Carl Click, Heavy Weather, Vancouver WA, Tornado

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