..
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Fierce winds and snow that caused fatal road accidents and shuttered highways in five states, crawled deeper into the Great Plains early Tuesday, with forecasters warning that pre-holiday travel would be difficult if not impossible across the region.
Hotels were filling up quickly along major roadways from eastern New Mexico to Kansas, and nearly 100 rescue calls came in from motorists in the Texas Panhandle as blizzard conditions forced closed part of Interstate 40, a major east-west route, Monday night.
About 10 inches of snow had fallen in western Kansas before dawn Tuesday and several more inches along with strong wind gusts were expected, National Weather Service meteorologist Marc Russell said.
"We're talking about whiteout conditions," he said.
Heather Haltli, 29, and her husband were traveling from their home at Hill Air Force Base in Utah to attend a family funeral in Abilene, Texas, but the storm slowed them down so badly that they had to take refuge at the Comfort Inn in Garden City, Kan.
"We've been traveling about 20 miles per hour all the way from Denver," Haltli said Tuesday. She said they had passed up to 15 wrecks including rollovers, upside down cars and jackknifed trucks as they drove through Colorado.
"I don't think we'll be able to make the funeral, but we'll keep going," she said.
Snowpack and icy conditions forced the closure of roadways across western and southwestern Kansas, including a western section of the I-70, the main thoroughfare that traverses the state.
"Southwest Kansas is pretty much shut down completely," Derek Latham, a dispatcher for the Kansas Highway Patrol in Salina said early Tuesday. "I have one trooper who almost went into a ditch this morning, and he came across four other cars that went into a ditch. That was just this morning."
The storm was blamed for at least six deaths Monday, authorities said. Four people were killed when their vehicle collided with a pickup truck in part of eastern New Mexico where blizzard-like conditions are rare, and a prison guard and inmate died when a prison van crashed along an icy roadway in eastern Colorado.
The late-autumn snowstorm lumbered into the region Monday, turning roads to ice and reducing visibility to zero. The conditions put state road crews on alert and had motorists taking refuge and early exits off major roads across the region.
In northern New Mexico, snow and ice shuttered all roads from Raton to the Texas and Oklahoma borders about 90 miles away. Hotels in Clayton, N.M., just east of where the three states touch, were nearly full.
Linda Pape, general manager of the Clayton Super 8 motel said it was packed with unhappy skiers who had been headed to lodges in Colorado and elsewhere in New Mexico.
"They lost a day or two of skiing, and they had budgeted an amount of money they were going to spend, and now they have to spend more staying somewhere else," she said.
Pape said it's not uncommon for skiers to get stuck in Clayton during the winter, and she keeps two freezers and a refrigerator stocked in case roads are closed.
"They are not happy, but we are not letting them go hungry," she said.
The storm came after much of the country had a relatively mild fall. With the exception of the October snowstorm blamed for 29 deaths on the East Coast, there's been little rain or snow. Many of the areas hit Monday enjoyed relatively balmy 60-degree temperatures just 24 hours earlier.
The snow moved into the Oklahoma Panhandle early Monday, and 1.5 inches accumulated in about an hour, said Vicki Roberts, who owns the Black Mesa Bed and Breakfast in Kenton. Her inn sits at the base of the 4,973-foot-tall Black Mesa, the highest point in Oklahoma. Looking out her window, she couldn't see it.
"I have a mail route and I'm not going," Roberts said. "You just don't get out in this. We'll be socked in here. If we lose power, we'll just read a book in front of the fireplace."
Travel throughout the region was difficult. New Mexico shut down a portion of Interstate 25, the major route heading northeast of Santa Fe into Colorado, and Clayton police dispatcher Cindy Blackwell said her phones were "ringing off the hook" with calls from numerous motorists stuck on rural roads.
Bill Cook, who works at the Best Western in Clayton, said he hadn't seen such a storm since the 1970s, when cattle had to be airlifted with helicopters and the National Guard was called in to help out. His hotel was packed Monday with people "happy they have a room," and some of the children were playing outside in the snow.
Keith Barras, the owner of the Eklund Hotel, a landmark in Clayton since the 1890s, said guests were happily milling around the lobby and he expected to be full by nightfall.
"We have lots of board games, one of our customers has a guitar, we have a piano, so there'll be a party tonight," Barras said.
___
Clausing reported from Albuquerque, N.M. Associated Press writers Terry Wallace in Dallas; Juan Carlos Llorca in El Paso, Texas; and Tim Talley in Oklahoma City contributed to this report.
..
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
2012
Hi all,
You have undoubtedly noticed the Mayan Long Count calendar in the news this week. Headlines read "Not The End of The World" and similar.
Widely quoted was Sven Gronemeyer who said There's nothing apocalyptic in the date.
Another expert, etchings specialist Erik Velasquez, said There is no prophecy for 2012 - it is a marketing fallacy.
They are both technically correct, for archaeologists are yet to discover any Mayan writings that describe an apocalyptic event for Dec 21, 2012.
I don't know what prompts these experts to make media statements, but they are certainly trying to pre-empt the other 2012 stories that I expect will appear later this month. Do they like to see their name in the newspapers, or are they part of a conspiracy to hide the truth? Or perhaps just a little bit of both?
Regardless of their level of expertise, their comments are only opinion, not fact. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The best evidence of what the Mayans probably believed about the end of their Long Count calendar can be found in the Popol Vuh.
In Mayan mythology (as told in the Popol Vuh) each Long Count cycle is a world age in which the gods attempt to create pious and subservient creatures.
The First Age began with the creation of the Earth, and it had upon it vegetation and living beings. Unfortunately, because they lacked speech, the birds and animals were unable to pay homage to the gods and were destroyed. In the Second and Third Ages the gods created humans of mud and then wood, but these also failed to please and were wiped out. We are currently in the Fourth and Final Age, the age of the modern, fully functional human.
The previous ages all ended with humans being destroyed by a natural disaster. The current age is about to end, just 12 months from now. Would it be fair to presume that the Mayans were expecting another natural disaster? I think so, and the orthodox experts surely know deep down that it is a possibility, but they won't share that with us, in case they get told off for scaremongering.
Regards,
You have undoubtedly noticed the Mayan Long Count calendar in the news this week. Headlines read "Not The End of The World" and similar.
Widely quoted was Sven Gronemeyer who said There's nothing apocalyptic in the date.
Another expert, etchings specialist Erik Velasquez, said There is no prophecy for 2012 - it is a marketing fallacy.
They are both technically correct, for archaeologists are yet to discover any Mayan writings that describe an apocalyptic event for Dec 21, 2012.
I don't know what prompts these experts to make media statements, but they are certainly trying to pre-empt the other 2012 stories that I expect will appear later this month. Do they like to see their name in the newspapers, or are they part of a conspiracy to hide the truth? Or perhaps just a little bit of both?
Regardless of their level of expertise, their comments are only opinion, not fact. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The best evidence of what the Mayans probably believed about the end of their Long Count calendar can be found in the Popol Vuh.
In Mayan mythology (as told in the Popol Vuh) each Long Count cycle is a world age in which the gods attempt to create pious and subservient creatures.
The First Age began with the creation of the Earth, and it had upon it vegetation and living beings. Unfortunately, because they lacked speech, the birds and animals were unable to pay homage to the gods and were destroyed. In the Second and Third Ages the gods created humans of mud and then wood, but these also failed to please and were wiped out. We are currently in the Fourth and Final Age, the age of the modern, fully functional human.
The previous ages all ended with humans being destroyed by a natural disaster. The current age is about to end, just 12 months from now. Would it be fair to presume that the Mayans were expecting another natural disaster? I think so, and the orthodox experts surely know deep down that it is a possibility, but they won't share that with us, in case they get told off for scaremongering.
Regards,
Saturday, December 3, 2011
ZOMBIE-APOCOLYPSE
History
George A. Romero was an early contributor to the genre with his 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead.
The founding work of the genre was Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (1954), which featured a lone survivor named Robert Neville waging a war against a human population transformed into vampires.[1] The novel has been adapted into several screenplays, including The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price, and The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston. A 2007 movie version also titled I Am Legend starred Will Smith in a more contemporary setting.[2] George A. Romero borrowed the idea for his apocalyptic feature Night of the Living Dead (1968) from Matheson, but substituted vampires with shuffling ghouls, identified after its release as zombies.[3]
[edit] Thematic subtext
The literary subtext of a zombie apocalypse is usually that civilization is inherently fragile in the face of truly unprecedented threats and that most individuals cannot be relied upon to support the greater good if the personal cost becomes too high.[4] The narrative of a zombie apocalypse carries strong connections to the turbulent social landscape of the United States in the 1960s when the originator of this genre, the film Night of the Living Dead, was first created.[5][6] Many also feel that zombies allow people to deal with their own anxiety about the end of the world.[7] Kim Paffenroth notes that "more than any other monster, zombies are fully and literally apocalyptic ... they signal the end of the world as we have known it."[8]
[edit] Story elements
There are several common themes and tropes that create a zombie apocalypse:
1.Initial contacts with zombies are extremely traumatic, causing shock, panic, disbelief and possibly denial, hampering survivors' ability to deal with hostile encounters.[9]
2.The response of authorities to the threat is slower than its rate of growth, giving the zombie plague time to expand beyond containment. This results in the collapse of the given society. Zombies take full control while small groups of the living must fight for their survival.[9]
Night of the Living Dead established most of the tropes associated with the genre, including the unintelligent but relentless behavior of zombies.[10]
The stories usually follow a single group of survivors, caught up in the sudden rush of the crisis. The narrative generally progresses from the onset of the zombie plague, then initial attempts to seek the aid of authorities, the failure of those authorities, through to the sudden catastrophic collapse of all large-scale organization and the characters' subsequent attempts to survive on their own. Such stories are often squarely focused on the way their characters react to such an extreme catastrophe, and how their personalities are changed by the stress, often acting on more primal motivations (fear, self-preservation) than they would display in normal life.[9][11]
Generally the zombies in these situations are the slow, lumbering and unintelligent kind first made popular in the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.[10] Motion pictures created within the 2000s, however, have featured zombies that are more agile, vicious, intelligent, and stronger than the traditional zombie.[12] In many cases of "fast" zombies, creators use living humans infected with a pathogen (as in Zombieland and Left 4 Dead)—instead of re-animated corpses—to avoid the "slow death walk" of Romero's variety of zombies. These first came about with the 1985 film "Return of the Living Dead".
[edit]
George A. Romero was an early contributor to the genre with his 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead.
The founding work of the genre was Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (1954), which featured a lone survivor named Robert Neville waging a war against a human population transformed into vampires.[1] The novel has been adapted into several screenplays, including The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price, and The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston. A 2007 movie version also titled I Am Legend starred Will Smith in a more contemporary setting.[2] George A. Romero borrowed the idea for his apocalyptic feature Night of the Living Dead (1968) from Matheson, but substituted vampires with shuffling ghouls, identified after its release as zombies.[3]
[edit] Thematic subtext
The literary subtext of a zombie apocalypse is usually that civilization is inherently fragile in the face of truly unprecedented threats and that most individuals cannot be relied upon to support the greater good if the personal cost becomes too high.[4] The narrative of a zombie apocalypse carries strong connections to the turbulent social landscape of the United States in the 1960s when the originator of this genre, the film Night of the Living Dead, was first created.[5][6] Many also feel that zombies allow people to deal with their own anxiety about the end of the world.[7] Kim Paffenroth notes that "more than any other monster, zombies are fully and literally apocalyptic ... they signal the end of the world as we have known it."[8]
[edit] Story elements
There are several common themes and tropes that create a zombie apocalypse:
1.Initial contacts with zombies are extremely traumatic, causing shock, panic, disbelief and possibly denial, hampering survivors' ability to deal with hostile encounters.[9]
2.The response of authorities to the threat is slower than its rate of growth, giving the zombie plague time to expand beyond containment. This results in the collapse of the given society. Zombies take full control while small groups of the living must fight for their survival.[9]
Night of the Living Dead established most of the tropes associated with the genre, including the unintelligent but relentless behavior of zombies.[10]
The stories usually follow a single group of survivors, caught up in the sudden rush of the crisis. The narrative generally progresses from the onset of the zombie plague, then initial attempts to seek the aid of authorities, the failure of those authorities, through to the sudden catastrophic collapse of all large-scale organization and the characters' subsequent attempts to survive on their own. Such stories are often squarely focused on the way their characters react to such an extreme catastrophe, and how their personalities are changed by the stress, often acting on more primal motivations (fear, self-preservation) than they would display in normal life.[9][11]
Generally the zombies in these situations are the slow, lumbering and unintelligent kind first made popular in the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.[10] Motion pictures created within the 2000s, however, have featured zombies that are more agile, vicious, intelligent, and stronger than the traditional zombie.[12] In many cases of "fast" zombies, creators use living humans infected with a pathogen (as in Zombieland and Left 4 Dead)—instead of re-animated corpses—to avoid the "slow death walk" of Romero's variety of zombies. These first came about with the 1985 film "Return of the Living Dead".
[edit]
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