Nice to be on vacation and actually feel like writing. First thing that comes to mind is the irony of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was created during the years 1943-1945, possibly being consumed by fire. A 50,000 acre forest fire is currently said to be "threatening" the facility, which has been temporarily closed. The town of Los Alamos has been evacuated. The irony is because of the Los Alamos-designed-and-built bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki by fire. These were mainly secondary fires, not the primary fireball of the explosions.
In my blog entry for November 9, I talked about how the large-scale conflagration of Hiroshima was caused by ordinary fires that started after the bomb's fireball instantly incinerated a small area around the ground zero point. This is mentioned in John Hersey's book Hiroshima, but is not widely known. You (and formerly, I) looked at the photos of the utter destruction of the city and thought all that was done by the bomb's fireball. The bomb was powerful, but it wasn't that powerful. If the ordinary fires after the buildings had been knocked down by the shockwave (an unbelievably strong and quick blast of air) could have been extinguished, the destruction would have more resembled the aftermath of the recent tornadoes in Joplin and in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa: buidlings destroyed, flattened, gone, but not burned.
What about the "rain" part of this entry's title? After weeks of hot, dry weather, Pine Bluff and the surrounding areas are getting some cool rain. And wind. There's a severe thunderstorm warning in effect until 7 p.m. Makes a vacation out in the country, at my grandparent's former farmhouse now lived in by my aunt (who, to make things more strange, is in New Mexico, Albuquerque not Los Alamos, but still), that much more enjoyable. The reason I posted the photos below in the previous entry today is because they were there--here, on this computer at the farm.
