wow

[gwyn]

The house shook, and there were two sets of double booms so strong that car alarms went off and the blinds moved. (I wonder if it's our proximity to Boeing Field?) All the neighbors running out of the house, dogs yapping everywhere.

It has been decades since I heard a sonic boom -- they don't usually let the military planes do them over land even at air shows, and Boeing killed the SST program when I was a kid, when we heard them more than a few times. The Concord and BA SSTs never flew here. The news source says someone breached presidential air space (Obama's in town), or something, and they scrambled some F-15s. Whatever the hell it was, it was intense, and the poor cats are total wrecks. Maybe this will convince them that someone knocking on the door isn't so bad.

Or maybe next we'll have another earthquake. That would be a wing-ding!

Comments

[gwyn]

What surprised me was how scared I was! I was sitting here working, and suddenly something exploded on the house, and car alarms went off and dogs started barking maniacally. Blues freaked and ran into the kitchen. Then they came again. My first reaction was that something had exploded, or a tree had fallen somewhere around the house, but I could hear all my neighbors running around asking what the hell had happened. Of course everyone's windows are open because of the heat.

When you're not expecting it, when it's not something you ever hear at any time, it's amazingly scary, like the first few seconds of an earthquake -- that WTF is happening?! kind of thing. It's funny now, because it's a pretty cool phenomenon, but wow that was weird.

It kind of makes me think about movies and TV that are based on some kind of brief but horrific event, like Fast Forward. How they don't do enough with that sense of "what the hell happened?" and how you want to talk about it for hours. If we feel that way over something small and relatively controlled like sonic booms, the lingering effects of something severe would be... incredible. Hm. I feel a story coming on.

[klia]

Those fighter jets had to have been pretty low for their sonic booms to shake stuff on the ground and set off car alarms -- very different from the way loud, but still far-off-sounding booms of my childhood -- so I can understand why you would've been scared!

You're right about movies and TV failing to show anything resembling real reactions, but it seems to me the events are usually just the set-ups for their stupid, contrived, soap opera style dramas, anyway.