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December 27, 2025 9 Comments

 

Charming host in that video. I miss the old intertunnel. If was full of regular people like her. They didn’t pretend to be experts on geopolitical events based solely on the last three things they saw on CNN. They often just pointed their cameras and their attention at the world around them. It’s another world to me, so it’s interesting. The idea that the regular news media would just go to far flung places and strictly report what they discovered died about the same time as Gutenberg, I guess.

I live in Augusta, Maine now. It’s the big city for us. Got almost 20,000 people in it. We formerly lived out in the sticks, up in the mountains of western Maine. There’s a little corner there where Canada, New Hampshire, and Maine butt heads. Not too far north of our old haunts, the maps call the area “uninhabited.” There aren’t many of those left in the US.

It shows when you go abroad. We went to the Yucatan recently, and it was a very rare local down there who could take a stab at where Maine was on a map, or had even heard of it. We gave up and answered Boston to the cab drivers’ queries after a while. I made my only lame attempt at humor during our visit to Mexico when I was asked to describe where I lived in Maine by a Yucatecan.  “Arboles, moscas, y enfermedad,” I said. Got a chuckle, anyway, for my pronunciation, if not the material, even with the the alliteration blown all to hell.

I left out the nieve. My audience in the Yucatan had never seen snow, except on television. My old digs get about 8 feet of snow a year, from October to April. I struggled mightily to describe a moose to my Mayan friends. They never heard of the beast. There’s a stuffed moose in the Portland airport, so I took a picture of it when we came back home, and emailed it to them. I don’t think they were sure of what it was even after seeing one. A horse made by a committee. Swamp donkeys.

It was 6 degrees this morning in Augusta. Nippy. Still, we’re closer to the coast now, and that’s about as cold as it’s going to get around here. But it got me to wondering what it was like where the weather was worse. Besides other parts of Maine, I mean. Maria Solko filled me in. Yakutsk, Russia is colder than a banker’s heart, I tell you what. Winter lasts a long time, too, seven months at least. Maine has five months of winter, and seven months of tough sledding. And July 4th, of course.

They’re not fooling around in Yakutsk, a place I only know about by playing Risk. Wintertime temperatures of -22F to -58F are common. And the sun barely comes up. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t go out to the mailbox in my bathrobe and slippers in January in Yakutsk.

I may have found the place more interesting because I had a frame of reference others might not have. If you live in the banana belt, you know, Massachusetts or some other tropical place, any temps below zero are unheard of. Below the IHOP/Waffle House line, they’re as mysterious as moose in Mexico. If it’s 72 and sunny everyday where you live, numbers like -22F to -60F are an abstraction. It just becomes a statistic that doesn’t register. But it hit -22F at our old house once or twice while we lived there. I know how we handled temps like that. Handled them badly, to be sure, and not very often, but we handled them. I’m scratching my head about how to handle -60F. Well, I would, if I could get at my head under the fur hat with flaps.

It’s funny, but it snows much more in Maine than Yakutsk. It doesn’t snow much when it’s that cold. It hardly snows at all in Antarctica, for instance, according to scientists who live there and might be lying, how would we know? It’s also amusing to me that despite plumbing the angry portions of the thermometer much more thoroughly, Yakutsk and western Maine have almost identical weather in the summer, although their days are longer, I gather. Both report temps from 65F to 86F. Summer in Maine is pleasant, so I assume it would be in Yakutsk.

It’s amazing to me how resilient and inventive human beings are. I couldn’t conjure up a reason why anyone would tough it out in Yakutsk, and take a meteorological beating like that. So I asked Chad, and he laughed at me a little. Dude, Yakutsk has gold like an army of Scrooge McDucks and coal like a million Santas and oil and gas like a legion of Rockefellers and more diamonds than Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Oh yeah? Well western Maine has… has… has… arboles, moscas, and enfermedades. Advantage Yakutsk, I guess.

Still More Intelligent and Less Excitable Than Jim Cantore

January 29, 2015 9 Comments

As my father used to say, “God love ’em.”

This is what all TV weather reports look like to me, only with much less charm. This guy has it goin’ on. He really knows how you’re supposed to prepare for a wikid stahm comin. Let’s go to the transcript he’s so solicitously supplied with his video:

Order your Pizzas and Chinese Food and Buy Cases of Pspsi and Coke and
Do your Grocery Shopping Don’t Wait until the Last Minute Do it Right
Now

I must admit that I don’t keep up with nutritional advice from the government these days. Is that the new Food Pyramid? Well, as long as it’s gluten-free pizza and the chopsticks are harvested in an ecologically sound manner from happy trees, I guess it will do.

Yeah. He’s more tuned in to popular culture than the runt of a Kardashian litter could aspire to:

…have your iPads, iPods, Cell Phones, Laptops and Tablets Charged and
have your 3G and 4G Internet Ready and when you are driving your Car
Take your Time driving your car and Slow Down so you Don’t Get in the
Car Accident and when you are going outside Don’t Walk too Far and have
your Shovels, Snow Scoops, Snow Blowers, Snow Plows and Salt Trucks
Ready and Drink Lots of Green Tea, White Tea and Red Tea and Drink Lots
of Green Tea to keep you warm and have your Furnaces Ready and Turn on
the Furnaces to keep the House Warm during the Blizzard

Funny thing was, while the weatherman was apologizing to New York for no blizzard, the snow was going by my house at 50mph or so. It started snowing inside my house, literally. Snow started to geyser straight up from the crack between the windowsill and the sash, and settled in a little drift on the sill. That was on a window that’s been painted shut for fifty years, easy.

It snows here, so we don’t worry overmuch, but the temperature routinely goes below zero at night, and the loss of power in a blizzard would be a big deal. No heat. We can power a wood furnace in the basement using an inverter hooked up to a car battery, but the car has to be running, and you can’t manage that during a blizzard. The power stayed on, and the house didn’t fall over, so it was just another snowstorm.

We went out yesterday and started shoveling the asbestos snow, with no way to know how much there was. The wind had moved it around so much that it could have been anything from a foot to thirty inches. The end of the driveway defended itself ably against our assaults, but the two exchange students from across the street wandered over and outflanked the last of it. 

We’re going to get another foot of snow tomorrow, and I have no idea where we’ll put it. The banks are six feet high already. We’ll figure out something. We always do. We just can’t figure out where to get Pspsi.

BEST. NEIGHBOR. EVAR.

January 27, 2015 6 Comments

There’s always a lot of competition for BEST. NEIGHBOR. EVAR, of course.  When you were ten, there was that guy that used to whistle while jingling change, and he eventually wore a hole in all his pockets. Boom! Ice-cream-man money up and down his driveway, all the time. That guy was pretty sweet. Then there was that dude that had a stack of Playboys in his bathroom next to the crapper. That was pretty good. There was that guy that put down a plastic liner and flooded the back yard so we could all play hockey. He even put up lights. That guy was like a god. Not the God, but a god, surely. 

Then there was that guy with the hot wife who was always vacuuming in the nude and didn’t have any drapes. Wait, that came out wrong. Pronoun trouble. The guy didn’t vacuum naked, his wife did. And I meant to say that the house didn’t have drapes. The wife had drapes. I guess. I’m not sure she had a head or a face or anything. Anyway, that was a pretty good neighbor. But this guy is the BEST. NEIGHBOR. EVAR.

[Thanks to faithful reader and friend Sam for sending that one along. He’s the BEST. READER. EVAR. At least for today]

The Blizzard of 1899 in New York

January 26, 2015 4 Comments

The Great Blizzard of 1899 in New York. It’s amazing that we’re looking at a film of it. The oldest film I’ve ever found in the Library of Congress was 1898, so this must be among the first things ever filmed in New York. The Blizzard of 1899 was a big deal. Back before weather forecasts, people got caught unawares fairly often by cataclysmic weather events. The Hurricane of ’38 killed a lot of people, and I have personally been in a house in Rhode Island that was blown across a salt water pond to the opposite shore. The owners just decided to leave it there, and built a foundation under it where it landed. Tornadoes killed people in the mid sixties, I think it was, in western Massachusetts. [Update: I looked it up. It was 1953. The toll was 94 dead, 1200+ injured in Worcester] The Blizzard of 1899 went into folklore because it killed a bunch of people, and it destroyed a lot of things. It was 39 below zero Fahrenheit in Ohio, still the record low. They had a snowball fight on the steps of the Florida State Capitol Building. Cape May, New Jersey, got 34 inches of snow, back when Sesame Street Scientists™ weren’t abroad in the land, exaggerating for grant money, and they used an honest ruler. It was reported that there was a hard frost in Cuba, of all places. It was reported by the US Weather Service, because we owned Cuba then.

Some people in New York City won’t have cable TV for twelve straight hours tomorrow, and they’ll start eating each other soon after if history is any example. The feds will ladle money over corrupt city administrations to fund snowplow contracts that are paid to cronies while the snow waits for the spring to do the work. In short, if we weren’t an incompetent society in all things practical, today’s storm would be handled easily. But it won’t, and Cuba won’t freeze, I imagine. For years we’ll have to listen to the same people claim today’s storm was an arctic cataclysm while simultaneously saying it never happened because the computer model they cooked up ran out of ones and zeroes or something.

Back to the video. When moving pictures first became popular, it was common to simply take pictures of mundane life in and around a city or town, and then display it for the locals while charging a little money for admission. People liked seeing themselves on film, and liked seeing familiar things in a new way.

Movies like this one are more valuable to us because they show mundane life as it was. Entertainment on film from early in the 20th century isn’t nearly as much fun to look at. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon in newspapers. A brand new newspaper is useless twaddle. An old newspaper is full of all sorts of interesting things, most of them not the news stories. When I had to fix a dormer atop the back of my house, I stripped off the shingles and found the whole thing was sheathed in newspaper. It served as a sort of primitive house wrap to keep out drafts. It was all from 1910, so I figure the dormer was an addition; the house was supposedly built in 1901. It’s technically a Victorian, because the old girl was still alive, if only for a few more months. The newspaper was perfectly readable. The advertisements were the best part, and the paper on the whole served as a mute tombstone to the bustling city where it was published a century ago, which is now a disreputable place with a ghostly population that favors plywood curtains for their windows.

All in all, I prefer the real ghosts.

I’m the Burning Bush, I’m the Burning Fire, I’m the Bleeding Volcano

January 22, 2015 8 Comments

That animated gif isn’t from this year. This year there’s been snow on the ground continuously since, since, well, let’s call it forever, because I can’t remember. But there’s not as much as last year. It’s too cold to snow. There’s no ground showing or anything, but the snow is  glacial, not slide-y.

I have to pay close attention to the weather because it’s hard to heat the house. I don’t watch television, and wouldn’t watch a TV weather report if I did. I do look at a webpage that has high and low temps projected on a calendar. Well, I did. I got to be a fairly good hand at triangulating what the actual temperature might be by using the hinky numbers they offered. I used to use one webpage, but it went full retard, hid all the temperature numbers, and covered the entire surface of the website with video thumbnails that tout YouTube videos with titles like: You won’t believe what happened to this one couple while they were shoe shopping and eating artisanal cupcakes on their honeymoon! The entire page turned into linkbait crapola too stupid for Buzzfeed. The weather was around back, I guess, like it would be if you bought an elephant and fed it refried beans.

I turned it off and tried what my wife calls the Happy Funtime Weather! webpage. She calls it that because they always say it will be five to ten degrees warmer than it is. It cheers her up to see it. It’s like people telling you that you look mahvelous when you’re caught taking the trash out to the curb in your sweat clothes and slippers, with your hair making architectural poses and sleep seeds in your eyes. Besides, who are you going to believe, the weather channel or your lying eyes and the thermometer?

Anyway, I turned it on a few days ago, and Happy Funtime Weather! decided they’d change the site to default to Centrigade temperatures, because they’re hopeless weenies, and it said it was going to be 22 below zero that day, which looked a bit off to me. It took me a few moments to figure out what had happened.

It had been 17 below zero a week ago, but that was good old Fahrenheit numbers. On the same day I got up and saw it was 17 below zero at daybreak, the Happy Funtime Weather! channel was trumpeting a story I wasn’t interested in from a Maine newspaper. It said that some commissar had announced that ALL WAS WELL, and because it was so hot all the time, people in Maine shouldn’t worry about their heating bills, because it was so hot. Those bills were going to be so low, because it was so hot.

I’ve run out of shipping pallets to burn, so I’m slowly taking apart the barbarous shelving someone built out of rough lumber all around  the basement of my house 75 years ago, and I’m burning it in the furnace.  Luckily, none of that will show up on by heating bill, which will be so low, because it’s so hot.

Tag: winter

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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