Saturday, April 17, 2010

Volcano in Iceland

The Fimmvoruhald volcano erupting at Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull glacier, earlier this week. (Don't ask me to pronounce either name - when I listen to Eyjafjallajökull being pronounced via Slate or Wikipedia, it sounds very little like what it looks like).

I was living in Seattle in 1980 when Mount St. Helens blew (see the website for the Mount St. Helens National Volcano Monument for more information).

The winds never blew the ash cloud into Seattle, but Portland was hit several times by the ash when the wind blew in the right direction. It was still very dramatic - you could see the huge column of ash for a long time from Seattle. I never did visit the volcano, but one of the tourist souvenirs one could buy soon afterwards were little glass vials of volcano ash. I bought one but have no idea what happened to it.

1 comment:

  1. Listening to the audio on Language Log, it seems to be:

    eyafyadlj'k'ts

    It's that string of 5 consonants on the end (the last seeming to be a tzadi) that's really weird. And the emphasis goes on the second 'a'.

    ey like "hey you",
    a's like say Ah.,
    adl like waddle only with jktz tacked on the end.

    BTW, how are you doing? Ithaca, eh? My brother has a farm in Dryden, lives there in the summers, just got tenure in biology at Queens.

    Before I read your book, I had never heard of incantation bowls. Then I went to Israel, and saw some at the Shrine of the Book, and had some clue what they were. We met at some of the RASF get-togethers.

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