The Last Thing God Made

 h/t CW

"Don't you know that women are the only works of art?" - Don Henley
(This pic embiggens. Try not to fall in. We dare you.)

We don't expect to find anything better to look at than this picture at CW's place, or write anything more profound than the captions we supplied. Not quite a haiku, but it'll do for now. So we're quitting while we're ahead, and knocking off until later.

Weather Report

Those of you with UHD monitors should know that the above video is the kind of thing for which you bought it.

The Weather Channel and Discovery should be throwing baskets of money at Mike Olbinski and his musician Peter Nanasi, and telling them to just do nothing else but crank out this kind of stuff year around, instead of as a side gig between weddings, and they'll buy it for station breaks, filler, and program transitions forever. He's already got an Emmy. AMPAS should have him up for short subject Oscars pretty much annually until they give him one.

He's got a Vimeo channel too, if you want it in better res.

This kind of thing is why we make cameras and soundtracks.

He's about due for putting another one out for this year. I can hardly stand the wait.

Everybody Talks About The Weather

...but nobody does anything about it.

But some people do one helluva job documenting it.

Sometimes, you want to slow something down to understand it.
With weather, you want to do just the opposite.
Proof of that is seen in some magnificent videos on Vimeo and YouTube by Mike Olbinski.
He's a stormchaser who lives in AZ, and shot it from Texas to Montana across the Great Plains for three months this spring.

So far, I've watched Pulse, Vorticity , and his newest, the truly breathtaking Pursuit:

If I were in AMPAS, that last would get an Oscar short film nomination; it's incredible.

They're fascinating to watch, whether you see it as the finger of God, or the incredibly complex workings of the weather machine as a cog in our tiny corner of an infinite universe.
They are almost (if not quite, for purists), a substitute for church on Sunday.

The technical skills and behind-the-scenes mechanics would be no less fascinating, as he had to find vantage points where one could see the storms coming and going for miles (hence the plains state preponderance) while simultaneously avoiding getting blown away, lightning-struck, or sucked up in documenting the majesty and raw power of something as otherwise mundane as a springtime rainstorm.

One summer night, watching the border for crossings from a mountaintop roost one midnight, I got to see a thunderstorm several miles away through NVGs. You and I are used to seeing the lightning every several seconds, when it strikes. I'm here to tell you that the time-lapse view in these videos is how it looks for real, in real time, when you can see the machinegun staccato of lightning going on inside a storm every second, when seen with thousands of times your eyes' normal light sensitivity. But Olbinski's videos, mostly in color and with appropriate soundtrack, are the virtuoso exposition of the concept, and much better than a grainy green goggle-view.

Watching these workings of varied temperatures of warm and cold air interact should be a must-view for meteorologists and students of same, aircraft pilots, and anybody in the vast open spaces featured in them and living under the whims of the winds.

I'd open classes and lectures with these videos; they're that good.

They're better on Vimeo than YouTube, but either way, choose max res, and go fullscreen.
I may contact this guy and throw him a bone by buying some of his work on archival media. If I were a gazillionaire, I'd pay him to do it full-time forever, because he's making true art, and he excels at it. The Weather Channel or NatGeo should have long since put this guy on a long-term contract, if they had a lick of sense. He's also got a lot more than the three I've mentioned, so this is the guy's life for several months every spring, going back years.


And a h/t to the Feral Irishman for leading me to this beautiful internet black hole in the first place.