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How’s the Weather?

01-Jul-09

Picture a giant quadrilateral (or lopsided rectangle, if you’re not geometrically inclined) covering the United States. The upper left corner is Seattle; the lower left corner is San Diego. The lower right corner is somewhere in Florida, let’s say Sarasota. And the upper right corner is in New England, in my favorite place: New Fairfield, Connecticut.

Having spent at least a few days in each of these places, I can tell you conclusively that I would rather be here.

There are many reasons I feel this way. One reason is weather.

Some people have described San Diego weather as “perfect.”

I don’t know these people personally, but they appear to be typical southern Californians: shallow, boring, and a little weird. These are the type of people who imagine that different rocks have healing powers when you wear them.

The truth is, San Diego has no weather. The average temperature ranges from 58f to 72f. There is almost no rain.

“How’s the weather?” is supposed to be a conversation-starter, but when it is the same day after day that leaves people with nothing to talk about. So when people talk about San Diego’s perfect weather, they are being… inventive. They are making stuff up, like rocks with magical powers.

This lack of weather is ominously reminiscent of descriptions of the Garden of Eden. And we all know how that ended.

The unchanging climate of Southern California makes it possible to live in a nudist colony. On the downside there are droughts, uncontrollable forest fires, mudslides, and earthquakes.

Sarasota actually does have seasons. That makes it a bit more interesting than San Diego.

There are two seasons in Florida. Some people talk about “wintering” in Florida, but they are really referring to weather in other parts of the country. Of the two seasons, only one has a name: hurricane season. In both seasons, the weather is “perfect” in the San Diego sense, for outdoor activity, except that it can get hotter (average temperatures range from 62f to 82f) and there is at least some chance of rain every day.

That is why the Tampa Bay Rays play baseball, an outdoor sport, indoors.

Florida is a peninsula (surrounded by water on three sides), half of it is swampland, and while it seems to rain enough, the state is in the middle of a severe drought.

Hurricane season goes from June 1 to November 30. Most days during hurricane season are just like days the rest of the year, except that hotel rooms are less expensive. Sometimes there’s a hurricane. Then it is more rainy and windy.

The roof of Tropicana Field is rated to withstand winds up to 115 miles per hour. You could watch a baseball game during a hurricane, but you might have some trouble finding your car after the game.

The National Hurricane Center recently announced the prediction for the 2009 hurricane season. They are calling for a “near-normal Atlantic hurricane season… have your disaster plan ready.”

If your job involves predicting the weather, here is a safe way to keep it:

“In its initial outlook for the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June through November, NOAA’s National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center calls for a 50 percent probability of a near-normal season, a 25 percent probability of an above-normal season and a 25 percent probability of a below-normal season.”

What kind of prediction is that?

The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) requested budget for 2009 was $4.1 billion. That included an extra $5.3 million to “improve hurricane forecasts.”

I could be just as accurate, and you would only have to pay me half of that.

Several years ago I spent a week in Seattle as a guest of Microsoft.

The entire week, the only clouds in the sky were the ones skimming off the peak of Mount Rainier, 54 miles away.

The weather was otherwise very nice.

Seattle has a reputation for rain. For example: How do you predict the weather in Seattle? If you can see Mount Rainier, it’s going to rain. If you can’t, it already is.

Not when I was there.

Maybe the people of Seattle invented the rain story to keep everyone else away.

Seattle coffee snobbery is part of the lie. They need coffee because it’s always so rainy. So of course they’re experts.

They’re so desperate to keep newcomers out that they even named the nearby volcano Mount Rainier.

They must think we’re a bunch of fools.

That volcano is active and will erupt some day, dooming a whole bunch of selfish, coffee-drinking liars to a fiery end.

Seattle weather doesn’t scare me. But the nearby suburb of Redmond, WA is Microsoft headquarters. So returning to Seattle is, for me, a little like Frodo from “Lord of the Rings” wanting to make a return trip to Mordor.

New Fairfield’s got New England weather, which is to say, real weather. Calendars mean something here. There is always something to talk about. Our winters are cold and our summers are hot: lowest recorded temperature was -18f in 1994, and the highest was 106f in 1995.

Seasons? We’ve got ‘em all.

This year we even had monsoon season. The past weekend turned out nice, but the rest of June was full of thunderstorms.

With so many days of rain in June, local gardeners have watched their vegetable patches wash away or turn into muddy ponds. They’re looking for advice.

All I can suggest is this:

It is too late in the year to sow cuttings for a new cranberry bog. For those of you with a bog already in place, weeding is your most important summertime activity.

If you are lucky enough to have two inches of water in your garden, you might try growing rice. Just toss it in and wait. Rice takes about four months to grow, unless you planted white rice.

Or, you can give up gardening and start building an ark.

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Anniversaries

09-Jun-09

“Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.”

– Oscar Wilde

Six years ago a snapping turtle walked across my lawn and inspired the inaugural edition of this column.

I don’t expect anyone to care because six is not a big anniversary number.

Numbers count when we talk about anniversaries. They sound more important when they’re divisible by five or by ten.

I think it’s because most of us count with our fingers.

On June 12, 1994 (fifteen years ago) Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered.

At the time and for months afterward it was all most people could talk about. In hindsight, we had better things to do.

Instead, our insatiable hunger for every last sordid detail of this story led to the creation of the modern news industry, dominated by endless hours of talking heads shouting opinions but very few facts, and driving cultural wedges deep into the heart of this country.

On June 4, 1989 (twenty years ago), while anti-communist revolutions were springing up in Eastern Europe, the People’s Liberation Army crushed a student revolt in Tiananmen Square.

The crackdown included suppression of news about this event that continues to this day, especially within Mainland China.

On June 6, 1984 (twenty-five years ago) the USSR almost crushed Western civilization by releasing a secret weapon called Tetris. This attempt at fatal distraction failed because many people did not yet have personal computers. Some years later Microsoft retaliated by bundling Solitaire with Windows.

On June 8, 1949 (sixty years ago) George Orwell’s 1984 was published.

In it, Orwell described a dystopia where people were kept under control through the news they were fed by the state-run media. Looking back at the Chinese response to the student democracy movement in 1989 and looking at our own “news” media since the O.J. sensation, I can’t tell for sure which one more closely matches Orwell’s nightmare Ministry of Truth.

On June 6, 1944 (sixty-five years ago) Allied soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy. D-Day marks the crucial moment in the struggle to liberate Europe.

Sixty-five years after this battle, the youngest remaining veterans are in their eighties. As they pass on, we are slowly losing touch with this historic event. Let’s not forget them or the many who fell in that struggle.

On June 9, 1934 (seventy-five years ago), the people of New Fairfield gathered in front of Town Hall to celebrate the opening of a new addition.

New Fairfield Town Hall, 1934 (courtesy J. Zackeo)

New Fairfield celebrates Town Hall addition, June 9, 1934
(photo courtesy Janice Zackeo / Preserve New Fairfield)

This space was used for square dances, wedding receptions, parties, and town meetings. Most of those things are not associated with government.

When I look at the photo of everyone standing in front of the new Town Hall, I can’t help but wonder if there was anyone in town (population less than 500) who was against the project.

This was in the depths of the Great Depression, after all.

There had to be someone who wrote letters to the local paper. Who did everything they could to stop the project from going forward. Who said that the town’s declining population didn’t need more space. Someone who filed FOI requests and complained about the First Selectman. Someone who drove past the new Town Hall for many years, muttering bitterly. Someone not in that picture.

This year is significant for Town Hall in a bigger way: it was first built in 1759. That’s two hundred and fifty years ago.

We’ll be opening the new Senior Center in a few weeks. Let’s take a picture.

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Sunday Night Movie

07-Jun-09

Here’s how Microsoft would package the iPod.

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Obama v The Religious Right

04-Jun-09

President Obama made a speech in Cairo today that was mostly directed at Muslims. At one point he quoted from an early American treaty with Morocco:

In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote, “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.”

As with most treaties, this one was eventually broken (within three years, resulting in the First Barbary War — proving you can’t negotiate with pirates). What Obama left out, and what I am sure would have made some heads explode back in Kansas, was the phrase that immediately preceded the one he quoted:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen (Muslims); and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The treaty was read aloud and ratified by the Senate in a unanimous vote 212 years ago this coming Sunday (June 7, 1797).

Next time someone tells you our Founding Fathers intended America to be a Christian nation, you could remind them of this.

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Sotomayor v Gingrich

03-Jun-09

For those of you wondering whether Gingrich had taken Sotomayor out of context, you were right. And the media has done nothing to clear it up, even though the media is not under the 140-character limitation that Twitter imposed on Gingrich.

One hundred forty characters is just an excuse, of course. Gingrich deliberately took Sotomayor out of context.

From Obsidian Wings:

In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women. I recall that Justice Thurgood Marshall, Judge Connie Baker Motley, the first black woman appointed to the federal bench, and others of the NAACP argued Brown v. Board of Education. Similarly, Justice Ginsburg, with other women attorneys, was instrumental in advocating and convincing the Court that equality of work required equality in terms and conditions of employment.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

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