Tag: Weather, Holidays and Seasons

Friday Bullets For The Last Of Spring

So how did spring 2009 turn out? We hardly judge them, springs. They are a gift after the bleak second half of winter. They convey none of the foreboding that can even creep in around mid-July. It’s all give, give, give. Except it was cold. We had the air conditioning on for one day the whole time. I fully expect to be obviously sweating in public by the end of May. Not pretty but it’s what I’ve come to expect. Nature can be so disappointing.

  • Married Priest Update: but this time it’s OK.
  • I do hope they ban Cheddar soon in Quebec, too, as the particular tang of English cheese might also lend some support to the destruction of culture as we know it.
  • Zombie croquet
  • The level of dumbness that arises of not having a two-party state in the culture can be quite startling.
  • I don’t particularly have a hackle raised by the theocrats of Iran (subject to bombing any nuke-ish facility without notice) but the clerics do look a bit silly when they try to explain themselves. But I like this slogan: “Every single Iranian is valuable. Government is a service to all.” Nothing like a chill down the spine to clarify the mind.
  • I wouldn’t aim a missile at Hawaii. Not me. No good comes of that.
  • Heard on NPR this morning: the trillion dollar health bill adds up to three boxes of girl guide cookies per person per day. Plus it is an extra trillion over ten years representing a 100 billion annual increase on 2.2 trillion annual health spending. thought it was a trillion over one year. I am still not sure if it is net or gross costs. No skin off my nose but that waitress in Maine who said she was spending $650 per month on health insurance back around 1994? It’ll matter to her.

Must run. Learning day. Fridays are so much nicer when there is less learning.

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The Problem With Averaging

This is the problem with averaging: June’s more than half done which means it’s almost over which means it’s almost July which means the year’s half done which means which means it’s almost over which means it’s almost 2010 which means the decade without a name is almost over. By this logic I am already dead but as the pace of the years picks up as – in where the hell did 2000-2009 as a ten year span go – that is exactly what seems to be happening. So In need a counter-pressure. I need to imagine the process in reverse where nothing quite achieves itself. Then I’ll slow time. It might be easier in the southern hemisphere. Simple.

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Friday For The First Stinking Hot Weekend

It’s the meteorological chitchat that keeps you coming back. I know it. We spend so much time looking forward to a bright hot day that you would think we would record them in binders like family albums, categorized by how nice the breezes were or how long the evening seemed to last. Tomorrow bodes very well. Perhaps 80F in April on a sunny Saturday. 70F this Friday evening. This very day. It’s the anti-blizzard weekend. The one you wanted on a Tuesday in late January.

  • I sure love it when people who accuse others of having no moral compass then have to admit that the guy was pretty much right. Oh, what a giggle we will have in the next era when we look back on these times.
  • I would have thought the whole “eating a replica of our bodies” might have been a bigger issue than the name.
  • SPACE BLOB!!!
  • I thought this was pretty funny. When to worry about the IT geeks planning to control your lives? When they say “…people are passionate about your product…” or “IZ: You mean enhance civilization, make it even better?” you know someone is quite enraptured by an impending cash-in.
  • In the same vein, when someone says “Can we just retire this stupid line of questioning once and for all?” after referring to “the straw man” you may need to realize they are facing an argument they don’t want to admit is lost due to the weight it places on the possibility of being enraptured by an impending cash-in.
  • Sometimes the things that got cashed-in die and, quite surprisingly, take 675 employees. Can you believe GeoCIties was bought for 2.9 billion ten years ago?
  • Not necessarily my deepest love with a french fry van – I reserve that for Colburne’s of Pembroke, Ontario – but certainly my first. Sitting on the wall at the Halifax central library having a Bud the Spud was a big part of my youth.
  • Why are we not hearing news item after news item about how Ford saw this coming, may well never ask for a penny of public money, is about to crush its competition through sheer prudence and actually makes cars people buy?

And you may ask yourself how do I work this BBQ? You may ask yourself where is my suntan lotion? And you may ask yourself where does that garden path go? Is this my beautiful yard?

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Praise Be To The Circling Of The Sun


Previous celebrations: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. Spring happens this month. Baseball happens this month. Plants will poke their heads out of the ground. I might even BBQ. March good. The bad months are past. Woot.

These Too Be Sun Worshipers Update: While one may quibble as to the point, UMPI plays ball:

Because winter can last until May in northern Maine, Presque Isle routinely plays its entire season on the road. With their campus 400 miles north of Boston, the Owls have not played a home baseball game since 2005, when there were two. “You can either complain that the baseball field is buried under six feet of snow, or you drive to where you can play baseball,” said Tyler Delaney, a junior infielder. “We don’t complain.

Here is their schedule in case you want to catch a game.

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Dislocated Thoughts That Arose On Family Day

Thank God for Family Day. It was great. As we sat around in our pajamas, dilly dallying with unconsciousness, trying to kill of the last of our colds until mid-afternoon when we got to watch the mailman deliver the mail. How delicious to have a holiday that is not applicable to the Federal civil service. I do hope they have their own that provides them the analogous experience. Later, we walked out on the river as the sun set and listened to the grinding sound of ice boats way out on the St. Lawrence. They seem to be associated with the Kingston Yacht Club. Reason enough to try the family membership for a year. I did loads of laundry. We also watched more Doctor Who, reads some Doctor Who literature, checked out some Doctor Who web information and the cast from the Hill from Hell got a Dalek drawn upon it. I made veggie Parmesan with the stuff acquired after Saturday saw a trip to the town’s Italian grocery. It was all disorganized, lazy and relatively unproductive.

Is that what “family” means? Sure thing. I still have my copy of “In Praise of Idleness” by Bertrand Russell from 1932:

I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth.

Magic. This could be an epistle to my generation, we louts raised on video arcades and nuclear fear – the two great pillars of relative valuation. How much plainer could a clever person be about being idle: “work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.” Wednesday morning at 10:37 am when a report is screaming to be done and the email is stacked high, you don’t think of such things. Family Day gets you to the point that you can remember such things. I wonder what postmen got paid in 1932.

February day-off reports past: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. That makes this the sixth. I could be fluent in Finnish and Urdu by now had I not decided to blog.

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The Very First Friday Bullets For The New Year

This surely is the unnamed holiday. The shadow twin of Boxing Day, the orphaned Friday stuck between that holiday with a hangover and a weekend. I will suit up and make my way to work but will there be work to meet me there? There likely will be an emptiness, desks without jockeys, voice mail alerts flashing at no one until Monday’s return to the new term, the start of the second season.

  • Actual Doctor Who News Update: the next Doctor will be announced tomorrow. Will he be a she?
  • Update: Skull Splitter saved. More here.
  • New Year’s Day was as idle as idle could be. Ever notice how idle and ideal are so closely related? Hmm? Have you? I didn’t even watch a bowl game, which surprises me a bit. But I did roast a prime rib roast better than I have ever roasted one before. Thanks heavens for the pre-Christmas beef price collapse at the A+P.
  • Congratulations to the twins.
  • The New Years blizzard in PEI received the attention of bloggers with video cams.
  • Ben is quite content with both 2008 and the prospects for 2009. I suppose I have to agree: the family expands, kids are arguably above average, the holiday tours indicated a fairly contented clan. Some will complain but they, we must recall, were asked not to stay on.
  • What is to come? I expect again I will not be wise with my taxes even if I will spend hours getting better at Wii. I expect Iggy to coat tail what is happening to the south and benefit from the increase in confidence that will exist at the end of the year with or without yet another Federal election. I grew out my beard. Will it last? Such suspense.
  • The corner has been turned in the baseball year with the season to come now the topic rather than the one that has just passed. I like the idea of Derek Lowe playing for the Mets but I have no idea where Manny is going to land.
  • Predictions? Resolutions? What could they be? Pledging to be smarter and healthier? Promising to myself that I will eat wild game and buy cut flowers once a week? Ensuring I have an ear to the new bands despite all of new music being chronologically dislocated for me for almost a decade? Play more penny whistle. That’s it!

It is quiet in the house as it should be. The road outside is silent as I trust I will find the office. The day without a name.

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A Very Special Friday Bullets For Christmas

Why so special? Because I took the day off, of course. We have stuff to get in, stuff to put up and stuff to eat. We have a snow storm coming a guests tonight. Ball cap wearing guests, fortunately. But there is that eternal question – how much booze to buy in anticipation of a party that may be one-third of the expected if the snow storm hits hard? Last weekend I kad the kids note down all the species we may consume in one form or another as part of Yule and it was quite impressive: scallops, lobster, crab, oysters, haddock, cod, salmon, chicken, duck, turkey, beef, lamb, pork, buffalo. Surely there are more. T’is the season to eat nature.

  • Mr Orange Togue heads to Afghanistan. I showed Darcey’s pal MOT a good time around Ottawa a year and a half ago. Our thoughts are with MOT and his companions. Christmassy. Definitely Christmassy.
  • Evil web hacker jerks help destroy nature. Not Christmassy at all.
  • The New York Times has vital cookie batter information for you just when you need it. Massively Christmassy.
  • Can the definition of individual liberty posed here actually stand? Seems like wishery to me. Christmassiness neutral.
  • Please tell him to be quiet. Interesting to see how many of the At Issue panel considered Stephen Harper overrated. Very Christmassy or not at all depending on your position. I saw Iggy on The Hour last night. He can actually string two sentences together, something foreign to Canadian politics. Harper is toast. But thanks for the extra seats at this special time of year.
  • Ben pointed out the 1793 legislation (within maybe a year of Ontario’s creation) barring slavery’s expansion. Anti-slavery is very Christmas.

There you go. Off to buy cleaning products and liquor. Happy happy everyone and if your happy is a holiday, whoops up and woots a plenty for that, too.

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How Does Gustav Affect The Race?

I know this is grim especially if this is Katrina II, but is it possible that the response to Gustav that may hit New Orleans this week could be a defining moment in the Presidential election? Apparently George Bush has canceled his trip to the Republican convention. At what point does the convention get canceled? Here are a few scenarios:

  • Gustav misses a major center or fails to, say, cause major damage even with a direct NOLA strike: no issue and everyone sighs in relief.
  • Gustav causes levee breach, flooding but no huge losses and convention continues: response has to be perfect but that may only mean reduction in presence of convention which, given the Palin announcement, may be fine with McCain – the opportunity to avoid association with the party may help.
  • Gustav causes levee breach, flooding but no huge losses and convention canceled mid-week: this is a tricky one as there could be over reaction. Tension over the idea that there was nothing the convention attendees could do anyway.
  • Gustav causes levee breach, flooding and things get really serious: Can the convention continue? And any peep by anyone including the Democrats becomes a huge negative. The balance of the election campaign is entirely taken up with the response. Confusion as the three leader situation – Bush, McCain, Obama – leads to an expectation that each of the three lead…somehow.

Any other possibilities? It is easy to imagine how to botch things but what is the response that a candidate can make to a crisis that honestly elevates their esteem in the public mind? Ever since Hurricane Juan hit Halifax I have been conscious of that late summer warm shore water pop a storm can get. Usually, the worst of consequences means that nothing else really matters – except maybe a Presidential election.

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