Finally, Some News

Before we start, the song I couldn't think of last time was Blurs - Park Life.  Thanks for the comments.

Unfortunately, the interesting news is only weather related.  Bummer right?

If you look quickly at this website, you can see the typhoon working its merry way up the country, at a rate of about naff all centimetres an hour.  It's not technically a typhoon, the wind speeds are not high enough.

If you look here, you can see a projected path.  I'm nowhere near the actual storm, I'm just getting the offshoots and flak from the cloud.  If it follows the projected path, I may well encounter some of the fifty knot winds, however.

The reason this is interesting news?  I was awoken at 4 AM by the lightning preceding the storm.  It wasn't quite raining yet, but the storm was brewing nicely.

A prototypical European high energy thunderstorm would contain a large number of flashes, with extremely loud bangs over the course of a short period of time.  The rain would also follow a similar pattern, with heavy rainfall in short bursts.

The lightning here follows the pattern of - mayhem, followed by deafening noise and a helping of terror.  The peal that woke me up had a three or four second delay between the flash and bang.  The flash woke me up, with my curtains drawn.  The thunder shook the house.

In all honesty, I thought something had exploded, because nothing else happened for about thirty seconds.  By this time I was in the kitchen getting a drink.

Then, out of nowhere, god defibrillated Tochigi.  This bang had a simultaneous lightning strike and thundering explosion.  My intestines shook and my ears were ringing.  At this point I shat my pants,  I don't mind admitting as much, and as I opened the window to take a look outside (risking the obvious association with metal) the hairs on my arms stood up.  It must have been exceedingly close, although I'll never know exactly where it struck.

If someone was struck in this storm, you wouldn't even know - they'd be vaporised.

So after a few more strikes some miles away, I went back to sleep.  At this point it was raining quite heavily.

After the alarm woke me up, I could hear the rain pouring down.  It had presumably rained non-stop since I went to bed, and it showed as I cycled to work.  After donning as much waterproof gear as possible, I cycled through foot-high waters, being drenched by every passing car.  They don't slow down or stop for individuals on the pavement or riding their bikes.  Mannered people, indeed.

So the upshot is that, despite the best efforts of the Japanese people, I'm quite dry.  Except for my socks, which I've been forced to take off.  I didn't think far enough ahead to bring a spare pair with me.  Also, their play area (I would call it a field, except there's no grass) is under a few inches of water right now.  When do these people close schools?

I can't imagine all the trains will be running, this preponderance of weather would halt even an English train!  Wait, our trains are notoriously hardy right?

Spare a though for the guys working at fukushima, not only are they killing themselves, but now they're doing it in the rain too.  (At least it's still 30 deg C, at basically 99% humidity, eh?)

P.s  I've just read this article about a publication being made/not made public, regarding the RFU.  Someone fill me in, what happened to make the report necessary in the first place?