On blogs and lightning

The problem is that the newspaper business appears to be going south. At the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, they've cut back the newspaper staff, and I'm afraid that the features they run, like my stuff, will be going with it. And so it's off to this new, odd, format, where successive postings are upside-down and you have no idea if anyone has or ever will look at it.

I am going to try flailing away at magazines once again, so I'm writing a very long article that I will then cut down into something. It is about lightning, and my experiences being sort of a lightning-protection engineer.

Mostly, it's funny, because the history of lightning--or at least everyone's reaction to this utterly random and instantly destructive force of nature has been more amusing than anything else. People, men especially, do not do very well when confronted with random phenomena. There has to be a system, says the gambler with his dice and cards. There has to be a system, says the stock market speculator.

Well, there isn't a system for either of those, and there isn't a system that determines where lightning is going to hit, and it just drives people crazy. This hasn't stopped the the tort lawyers, who hire lightning experts to debate between God, country clubs, and the estates of fried golfers, nor has it prevented the establishment of National Lightning Safety Week, the lore of which must be seen to be believed.

So I'm cranking out this article, about how I got through graduate school having fun in a Frankenstein-like artificial lightning laboratory, and then learned that the legends, literature and people that surround the field of lightning protection are way more interesting than the field itself will ever be. Should be done in maybe a week at the rate I'm going; writing is a way of abolishing depression for me.

M Kinsler