A perfect storm of treacherous atmospheric effluviulescence

     

❄...Special festive holiday post...❄

    ONE OF THE MORE controversial buildings at Irvine Valley College is "BSTIC," the "Business Sciences Technology and Innovation Center," which was completed about two years ago. Think of "business," and then think of a tick. That's BSTIC.

Mr. tick

     Curiously, some of the programs BSTIC was built for went into serious decline just before or during BSTIC's opening. (I won't even get into the lab tracking issue and its impact!) Consequently, BSTIC is a bit like the "DoDo Bird Center." Meanwhile, Schools that are larger and more productive than the DoDo Schools remain housed in shitty digs—or nowhere in particular, scattered among the various buildings and centers and grassy knolls at IVC. 

    BSTIC is a weird looking or attractive building, depending on where you're standing. It's got a pointy "bow" end (see above). It's got lots of fake brick on another end (it seems to have several ends). Don't know what it looks like on top. Flat, probably.

    Some of the interior spaces are pretty cool, I guess. Fancy schmancy, high tech, whizz-bangery. People have mostly grown accustomed to the endless echoes in those vast, empty rooms and halls. (See above.)

     OK, we'll get back to that. Now, some physics:

     You wouldn't believe the physical processes that can mess up or enhance a building: you've got convection effects and moisture effects and wind effects, etc.

    Illustrated above is the "Venturi effect," which involves wind (or just air) suddenly being funneled through a narrow space, causing the air to speed up and the pressure to go down. When that happens on a side of a building, it can cause unwanted wind or suction, etc. 

     It's a big issue for tall apartment buildings that are close together by the beach. Sometimes, a guy will poke his head out of his window and the wind can be so fierce that the guy's head gets torn off his body and sent bouncing down the goddam street!

     The Venturi effect can be nasty.

     Ain't physics wonderful? You can get severe blowage and you can get severe suckage. You gotta know about these phenomena before you spend millions of dollars on a building to house your dying programs.

     Let's take suckage. If you get too much suckage, you'll find things stuck to the wall that aren't supposed to be there.

     OK, LET'S GET SEMI-SERIOUS. Now, suppose you've got a nice, big building—like BSTIC—with some kind of heating unit up in the attic or on the roof. The unit burns natural gas, but it also gives off substantial afterfume spewage (that's the technical term, in my mind), which normally escapes to the outside through roof vents and such. 

     That's OK, cuz almost never do students hang out on the roof sucking on these vents. They do other things up there.

     Now, what if you build your fancy new building (like BSTIC) and then something unexpected happens? For instance, on the top floor of BSTIC, you've got lots of Fine Arts types, plus a special room for forensic speechifiers. That, or maybe something else, can create extraordinary volumes of vituperative hot gas that naturally floats up through the vents into the HVAC. Now, that's not good. The system wasn't designed for massive volumes of gratuitous hot air, no sir.

     And suppose that, somehow, there arises some kind of vent restriction up where all that afterfume spewage is supposed to belch forth, harmlessly. Could happen. Or maybe it's something else, dunno. [OK, I'm speculating.] Well, now, you've got a perfect storm of treacherous atmospheric effluviulescence! That hot air, mixed with afterfume spewage, has gotta go somewhere! 

     And so it does.

     Could be you'll get all that miasmic funk going straight back into the building, causing unpleasant stinkage and worse. (See above.)

     It can get so dicey in the building that you've got to shut off the HVAC! If it's summer, that means it gets hot and stinky and toxic inside. If it's winter, it gets dank and frigid and noxious, like the southern realms of an Eskimo's shithouse.

     Well, it's winter. In fact, it's the "holiday season." And shit happens.

     What to do?

     Since it's IVC, there's only one thing to do: move the boiler, and when that doesn't fix the problem, simply advise all building denizens to bring sweaters.

     Perfect!  
     But that's when things get really ugly:

Forgive them for they know not what they do.

Yikes! Es past nit!

Santa at the veritable wooly Hellmouth

Crickey, threads from a marmite motorway!

OK, this is kinda pleasant. Hey Antler Girl!

Renaming Saddleback College's "Butt" Library

     I noticed that, on Monday, the Lariat posted an editorial: What should the new Library be named?
     Gosh, I’m surprised that college officials are even contemplating changing the library’s name, what with Tom Fuentes still among the living! (Fuentes knew and loved cold war right-winger James B. Utt, after whom the library was originally named.)
     The Lariat clearly seems to think that a name-change opportunity exists.
     It notes a serious problem with the existing name: “Currently the name is the James B. Utt library which has been given the nickname the ‘Butt Library.’”
     Ouch.
     The Lariat seems to embrace criteria for naming the library after a person: “A person should be memorialized with his or her name on a building only if they have contributed a lot to the campus, both in his or her terms of time and monetary patronage.”
     Both? Whatever.
     The Lariat has a sense of humor:

     One of the more popular ideas is to give the name a sense of learning and dedication.
     The Saddleback College Library of the Pursuit of Higher Dedication to the Continual Journey of Knowledge [SCLPHDCJK for short], is certainly not a practical name but the essence is to give it a cerebral quality that should be found at a college.

     Yes, a cerebral quality should indeed be found at a college.
     That’s funny, especially at Saddleback.
     Naturally, I wrote them my suggestions:

     …How about the “Bedtime for Bonzo” Library—in honor of Saint Ronald, who was on hand for the campus’s opening?
     “Bonzo” Library is more pithy. Also “Bedtime” Library (which gets a plus for fidelity to fact).
     Or just “Library.” That would be cool, pithy-wise.
     You can’t call it the “Gaucho” Library because, as you should know, the “Gaucho” moniker/mascot is controversial and, indeed, there’s some sort of committee working on its replacement.
     How about “Gabacho” Library? From “Gaucho” to “Gebacho” is cool, I think, in a meta kind of way.
     The original library’s design was changed when right-wing trustees got weirded out by the student anti-war protests occurring in Santa Barbara at the time. That’s why it had no windows: they wanted it to be a fortress against students!
     So how about “Bastion” Library? Or “Paranoid” Library? Or maybe the “Fear of Students” Library?
     For the sake of timeliness, I’d go with the “Soon-to-be-phased-out” Library or the “Increasingly Anachronistic” Library.
     Or you could go in the other direction. Call it “Books” Library. That would be fun, I think. There’s a nice right to that.
     One more: the “Non-ALA affiliated” Library. Or just the “Benighted” Library.

     Be sure to send the Lariat—and college decision-makers—your own thoughtful suggestions. It couldn’t possibly hurt.

Missing again?

     As DtB readers know, Saddleback College instructor Amy Ahearn was recently found after having "disappeared" for many weeks. (She likely has Huntington's.) One of her sisters created a Facebook page to help communicate with those helping in the search: here.
     I visited that page this morning and found the following (from Dec. 1):