If you want to read about my excursion to East Saint Louis today, please read here and look at this website.
As an outtake/addendum that that little anecdote, while I was driving around that sad city, I had a certain Midnight Oil song stuck in my head, the product of going to the Saint Louis record store right before my aimless driving. Rather than explain it any further, just watch the video and imagine how strange it must have been to hear this song while driving around that urban wasteland.
I recently learned that Bernard Vonnegut, brother of Kurt Vonnegut, spent a good portion of his life researching wind and chickens.
When tornadoes slid across the Midwestern United States, into farmhouses and communities, sometimes chickens would get sucked into the vortex, flung far from their original homes, and would walk around for the next few days naked. No feathers.
So the wind ripped the feathers out.
It caused a stir, and a few people were interested in the phenomena. One man even loaded a chicken into a cannon to test how fast it had to move through the air before it lost all its feathers. But it blew up. The chicken, not the cannon.
So Bernard wrote a paper. The paper raked in an Ig Nobel Prize, which is funny. It's funny because Ig Nobel Prizes go to people for their outstanding improbable work. You can look at their Web site here.
His paper was titled, "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed."
While that was undoubtedly a major piece of research, Bernard was best known for discovering that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificially stimulating rain. He never got an astroid named after him for his research, but people still talk about him sometimes.
He passed away, another victim of cancer, in 1997. But you can read about that at Wikipedia.
