December dog sense

It's 10 degrees in Omaha right now, the ground is covered with snow, it's rather hazy and the wind chill is 1 below zero.

LONG STORY short, I think Molly the Dog has the right idea here.

Alas, I disturbed Her Royal Hunkered-In Highness, who no doubt wants Pop to go away -- and to take the annoying, clicking Rectangle of Death with him.

Her wish, etc., etc.

As you were, Mollster.

Louisianian for 'looks like rain'

Troffaloff.

If you're at least 50ish, lived in Baton Rouge in the 1960s and early '70s and ever watched Tex Carpenter deliver the weather on Channel 9, you either know what that means or you think ol' Tex had an on-air stroke every so often, and then it rained.

Or as my pediatrician once said to my dad when the subject turned away from my fear of needles and toward the weather (and those who forecast it on TV), "What the hell is a 'troffaloff'?"

The answer, taken from my 1969 edition of the Tex to English/English to Tex dictionary (via the Essa Weather Wire Service), is a "trough aloft," otherwise known as a low-pressure area, which oftentimes means "rain."

And that's your TV Weatherfact of the day, discovered in a box uncovered after years unbothered.

The Weather With Cap'n Sandy

Yo ho! Yo ho!
What's the weather going to be?
Here's the man who knows,
Let's take a look and see.
Here is Cap'n Sandy with the weather he has found
For Savannah and for Chatham and the counties all around!

 
I'm of two minds on this, which means I may have lost mine completely and you might want to pay me no mind at all.

My one mind thinks that "Savannah Sunshine" may not just have been a weather forecast . . . if you get my smoke signals, kemo sabe. Then again, my other mind thinks, "This is freakin' great! What boring people we have become in the last 50 years."

If I were you, I'd listen to my other mind. It's less of an a-hole.

It laments the loss of eccentric hometown treasures like The Weather With Cap'n Sandy, and it mourns the passing of the men and women who became local legends. Theirs may not have been a better culture than the postmodern one we've created, but both of my minds say it certainly was a richer and more humane one.

Und I vood haff veys uff dealink vith ziss Calamity Clam, ya!

The hunter becomes the hunted

The @weatherchannel vehicle just got thrown by tornado. We stopped to help & they are OK. @jimcantore twitter.com/SeanSchoferTVN…
— Sean Schofer (@SeanSchoferTVN) June 1, 2013

DOES THIS mean that God hates cable TV? Or was Mother Nature just saying "TORCON this!"

"Enquiring minds," etc., and so on. . . .

I've seen this movie before

So this is what it looks like inside a tornado.

Yep. This looks right to me.

In 1971, when I was 10½ years old,  Hurricane Edith was headed toward Baton Rouge, so my folks decided to keep me home from school. Now Edith wasn't much of a hurricane, but it seemed as good an excuse as any to not bother schlepping your sorry butt to the bus stop and spending the day at school . . . during a hurricane.

To tell you the truth, what we got out of Edith in Louisiana's capital city was more akin to a tropical storm -- no wild tales to amaze your Yankee friends with. The morning of Sept. 16, 1971 was starting to look like a complete kid hurricane-adventure bust. Hell, my old man was even at work at the Enjay Chemical plant.

For a real storm, they batten down the hatches on those suckers. Now who was going to run the camp stove, huh? In the Gret Stet, a hurricane is no excuse not to cook.

So everything was looking OK, which meant, to a kid, that it wasn't OK at all. Thunderstorms . . . meh. The most exciting thing was the street was flooded, and the water came halfway to the house.

Then something happened.

MY MOM was on the phone with my grandma, I think, when the sky went as black as night. I'd never seen anything like that before.

"Mama! Look at how black the clouds are!" I recall saying, just before all hell broke loose. There was a roar like a crapload of freight trains or jet engines, take your pick. There was a swirling whitish, grayish cloud -- pea soup doing the St. Vitus Dance -- out of which leaves, shingles, pink Fiberglas insulation . . . you name it . . . would emerge, stick to the front jalousie windows for a second or two, then blow away.

I was looking out the windows the whole time, transfixed. My mother was crying hysterically to Jesus. There were no tornado sirens in Baton Rouge, and we had no warning until the tornado announced itself.

Apart from watching the maelstrom, I was trying to calm Mama down. The thought did briefly occur to me that we might die.

Then . . . quiet.

THEN THE RADIO, which was tuned to WLCS, erupted with "(Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!) BULLETIN! BULLETIN! BULLETIN! (Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!) BULLETIN! BULLETIN! BULLETIN! (Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!)" It was a "tornado alert."

Thanks for the heads-up, y'all.

Surveying outside the house, the hanging address placard had blown off its chains and was out in the yard. The façade of the house was tar papered with green leaves, and Fiberglas was all over the place.

The street and the front yard were bone dry. Later, we'd hear that some houses the next street over were missing their roofs. And a shopping center and some apartments less than a mile away were all torn up.

The State-Times that afternoon said a "small tornado or tornadoes skipped across the Sherwood Forest area." The official weather records put it down as an F-3 -- not exactly "small."

To me, the Tornado From Edith was a marker -- a dividing line. You had life before the thing, and then life after it.

In life after Edith, hurricanes weren't "fun" adventures. They were damn serious business, and those of us who'd been on the business end of one -- or the twisters they spawn -- stood ready to deck any idiot who thought they weren't.

I've seen things. Look at the video, and you'll see what I saw that day.

Alex Jones explains it all

To the best of the non-whack-job world's knowledge, the United States does not have a "weather weapon" it uses to attack unsuspecting cities with killer tornadoes.

I'm fairly certain, however, that the federal gummint has a "bat-sh*t-crazy weapon" it apparently has been testing on unsuspecting conspiracy theorists. Seems to work well. Still, I wish radio could return to more civilized times, when quack doctors sold audiences more useful fare . . . like goat-gland miracle cures.

Hell, televised

Even hours after the fact and hundreds of miles distant, this footage from KFOR television's live coverage of Monday's tornado catastrophe is likely to induce self-soiling. 

Lord, have mercy. God help Oklahoma.

What hath nature wrought?

Moore, Okla., May 20, 2013

 Hiroshima, Japan, Aug. 6, 1945

What is an EF-4 or EF-5 tornado like? Basically, it's like the blast wave from a Hiroshima bomb, just without the fireball.

Only man would seek to harness -- and now, with the hydrogen bomb, top -- the sheer destructive power of weather at its worst. You would think that dealing with the terrible wrath of nature would be enough of a burden without worrying about the terrible wrath of nuclear physics coupled with itchy trigger fingers.

That, however, is not how fallen humanity rolls. We can always make things worse.

I SUPPOSE this is why I am Catholic. Catholicism understands that the natural state of mankind is tragedy, and that we all inhabit a valley of tears. Thus, this prayer -- the Hail, Holy Queen -- usually recited at the end of the rosary:

Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,
our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve;
to thee do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
Turn then, most gracious advocate,
thine eyes of mercy toward us;
and after this our exile,
show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.
℣ Pray for us O holy Mother of God,
℟ that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

EVE ATE the apple. Adam did, too, and everything went to hell. This is what we'll deal with until kingdom come, and whatever we do to bring light amid the darkness is not only lagniappe, but victory.

Did Johnny Paycheck have a snow song?

It started with the sleet Wednesday.

"It" is what this Omaha World-Herald article refers to in today's editions -- a rare May snowfall:

The 3.1 inches of snow that fell overnight in Omaha set three records for May - but not a fourth.

Omaha now has two new daily records and a monthly record, but not a new calendar day record, according to Barbara Mayes, meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Because the snow straddled midnight, it set two daily records:

• 1.9 inches on May 1 exceeded the previous record of 0.2 inches for that date in 1911;
• 1.2 inches on May 2, the first recorded snowfall on that date.

On the other hand, because the snowfall straddled midnight, neither single day accumulated enough snow to exceed the 2 inches that fell May 9, 1945. That remains the most snow to fall on a single calendar day in May. Until this year, it was also the most snow to fall in the entire month of May in Omaha. This year's 3.1 inches breaks that monthly record.

The 2.7 inches that fell in Lincoln Wednesday and Thursday set two daily records, Mayes said:

• 2.5 inches on May 1, first recorded snow on that date;
• .02 on May 2, first recorded snow on that date.Neither day's total was enough to beat the calendar day set on May 3, 1967, when 3 inches fell. That amount also remains the monthly record for May in Lincoln.

MOLLY THE DOG couldn't believe her eyes. She knew this wasn't supposed to be "cold white stuff time." It's supposed to be "hot tickly stuff under paws time." This confused her greatly.

In fact, her confusion was such that bad consequences began to stem from it.

LIKE THIS. After surveying the shocking scene outside, the poor thing began to lose corporeal integrity. Over the next few minutes, it got worse and worse.

And then. . . .

And then. . . .

And then, Molly the Dog was but a vaporous presence. I'd hear a mournful "WOOOOOOOOOOO!" and see what seemed to be a ghostly apparition shambling around the house.

Soon enough, all that was left was the "WOOOOOOOOOOO!"

It was awful.

It hadn't even begun to properly snow yet.

COME THIS MORNING, this (below) is what we found when we opened the front door. On May freakin' second.

Snow.

Slushy snow covering the front stoop.

Soupy snow covering the driveway and street.

Heavy, wet snow covering the greening lawn.

Shoveling off the stoop and the front walk was like shoveling the last half of a Slurpee. It was like the Jolly Green Giant spilled his snow cone -- hold the syrup.

It sucked. Sucked worse than a snow cone with no syrup, because with that, at least you have shaved ice on a hot summer's day.

MAY 2, Omaha, Neb., was no hot summer's day. Or even a lukewarm one. It was a windy-ass, snowy-ass day. Halfway through spring.

I think Molly the Dog may have had the right idea with that losing-physical-integrity thing, dammit.

WOOOOOOOOOOO!

Oklahoma: It's always somethin'

If you're considering pulling up stakes and pointing your Sooner Schooner toward Tulsa, Okla., you may want to delay your trip until after cold-and-flu season.

Or indefinitely. Whatever.

Hey, I'm just passing along what's out there on Facebook. And if it's on Facebook, it must be so.

A winter wonderland

A funny thing happened Wednesday evening here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska. Winter showed up.

And how.

Above is the long-exposure view of what the blizzard looked like at about 20 of 11 last night.

AND HERE, immediately above, is what it looked like when using a flash.

The following photos represent what it looked like today, after the storm was through and we'd had a chance to dig out from under the 7 or so inches of well-drifted snow. I think they speak for themselves, so I'll just shut up now.

Besides, I got water boiling on the stove, and I need to make me a pot of coffee.

Blizzard warning

4:06 p.m. -- starting to snow hard

The more the forecasters keep forecasting, the higher the snow totals keep going in these parts.

When we started our day today in Omaha, we were expecting a winter storm. Maybe 6 inches of snow.

Sometime along the way, that turned into a blizzard warning, and now we might get up to 10 inches of hard-blowing snow which, come to think of it, sounds a little kinky the way I just put it. A little more than an hour ago, it was just raining.

Now it's not.

Good thing I'm an artiste with a snow shovel, which is a skill not every -- OK, almost no -- Louisiana boy possesses. Perhaps I'm a real Midwesterner now, after 24 years.

By the way, in the Gret Stet, what we know in Nebraska as a "blizzard warning" is commonly referred to as "instant frozen death." Not an understated lot, those Louisiana folk.

Film at 11.

Whew! Frosty was getting a little despondent

Nov. 26, 2012: The first snow of the year.

Well, that took long enough, didn't it?

I don't know about where you are -- and no matter what, family and friends back in Louisiana think Omaha is an Arctic wasteland -- but I was starting to wonder what the heck was going on. So far, it seems like a dry and relatively warm fall on this little corner of the Great Plains.


CERTAINLY, so far it's no winter of 2009-10. (See the above video from the Christmas Eve blizzard of 2009.)

Stay tuned.

Staten Island today

New York is not the kind of place you want to be if you're barely getting by, I think.

And if you get wiped out by Sandy the Superstorm. . . .

This is Katrina writ smaller, and it seems to me the concern of officialdom for working stiffs like this waitress is about the same as that for the poor folks of flooded New Orleans before the media began making a big stink. The trouble in this case is this little election tomorrow that's overshadowing a situation that's almost like the old movie Escape From New York.

Only these folks can't afford to escape from New York. Just as they can't afford to stay.

Did I mention the Northeast is going to be hit by a nor'easter this week? Lord, have mercy.

Why they stay; why we won't go

(New York) Daily News

Some people.
 
Sandy the Superstorm has laid waste to large chunks of the Eastern Seaboard -- most notably, New York City and the Jersey Shore -- and some people's first reaction is to wonder why the suffering souls they see on the TV news didn't get the hell out of Dodge.

I have some thoughts on that. 

They were there because it was home. Was.

 Is?

They also were there because, generally unused to hurricanes, they couldn't believe how bad the wind and surge could be. And who thought an inferno would start amid the flood? Memories of what happened in New Orleans with Katrina are short . . . except for those of the looting, and of families there who may have escaped the federal flood but were cleaned out by the feral among them whose daily existence is preying upon their neighbors.

That's why they stayed.

Was it a particularly bright idea to stay? Hell, no. But the human instinct is to try to protect what one has worked a lifetime for, and the fear of abandoning one's home oftentimes is greater than the fear of nature's fury.

I'm waiting for someone to wonder why in the world anyone would live in New York, which sits so perilously astride the ocean fierce, which awaits the first opportunity to reclaim it, if but for a short while.You know, just like some people did about New Orleans in Katrina's murderous wake.

It happens every time.

THE ANSWER is the same as that of the citizens of New Orleans, and of the smaller communities of Plaquemines Parish, La., whose homes were sent under the waves by Category 1 Isaac this August. They live there because it's home, the place they know and love . . . and the people they know and love. It is who they are. In large part, it made them who they are.

No matter where you live, you very well could be done in by something -- hurricane, flood, tornado, earthquake, wildfire, drought, tsunami or blizzard. Such is life in this fallen world and on this wild and perilous planet.

I was born and raised in south Louisiana and have lived almost half my life in Nebraska. I know hurricanes, I know tornadoes, too, and I have come to know drought, catastrophic thunderstorms and blizzards. Folks down South wonder why I'd willingly live in a place where summer can bring 110-degree days and winter can hit you with 25-below-zero cold and snow drifts up to your neck.

It's the same reason they refuse to pack up and move because of air you nearly can drink and catastrophes you know by name that blow in off the Gulf of Mexico to try and kill you. It's because Nebraska is home now. I love it, and it's where the people I know and love stand beside me to brave whatever curveball nature chooses to throw at us. Because between the bad times and the peril lies the beauty and the wonder of the Great Plains.
 

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

HERE, JUST beyond Omaha's suburban sprawl, lies a horizon that stretches beyond all telling, rolling hills that give this wild land its texture and an endless expanse of sky brilliant with untold billions of stars. The threat of an F5 tornado once in a blue moon is nothing in the face of a landscape "charged with the grandeur of God."

I imagine the good people of New York and New Jersey feel the same way about endless beaches, the Manhattan skyline, boardwalks and an ocean that stretches beyond the blue horizon. I grew up feeling that way about the Mississippi River, upon which my hometown of Baton Rouge was built 313 years ago.

And the Mississippi can kill you in a New York second in more ways than you can list.

I know why people live on peril's edge in New York and on the Jersey Shore, and I can understand why -- foolish as it ultimately was -- they balked at surrendering their homes and home places to nature's fury without a fight, futile as that usually is.

I suggest that instead of second-guessing people who probably already are second-guessing themselves, we instead hold out a hand -- preferably one filled with cash -- to our brother and sister Americans during their darkest hour.

No man is an island, even though he might live on one, and we never know when we will be next in fate's crosshairs.

Fire and rain

Won't you look down on me, Jesus
You've got to help me make a stand
You've just got to see me through another day
My body's aching and my time is at hand
And I won't make it any other way

Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you again

I’ve been walking my mind to an easy time
My back turned towards the sun
Lord knows the cold wind blows,
it’ll turn your head around
Well, there’s hours of time on the telephone line
To talk about things to come
Sweet dreams and flying machines
in pieces on the ground.

-- Fire and Rain (1970)
James Taylor

That dead Russian egomaniac in the attic

Every man is an island . . . until it hits the fan.

Add this to the list of memos the fruitcake-dominated Republican Party never got. And not getting your memos has consequences.

Thus we had the spectacle today of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie -- a nationally prominent Republican once high on the party's presidential wish list -- singing the praises of the Antichrist, otherwise known as President Obama. The reason? Christie thinks the prez is doing a bang-up job coordinating the federal response to Hurricane Sandy, which has devastated the governor's state and inflicted great suffering on his waterlogged people and many others.

Things like massive hurricanes almost always aim right for the underbelly of the good-time Ayn Rand disciples who stole the brain -- not to mention the heart -- of a once-great political party as they lurch about like Stepford pols droning on about self-reliance, the evils of government, blah, blah, blah, blecch.

In other words, every man is an island. I got mine. Eff you.

Then the day comes when the island gets swamped by a massive storm surge amid a nasty hurricane. And your Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, once argued that the federal government ought to get out of the catastrophe-fixing business because catastrophes are expensive and we're broke.



IN OTHER WORDS, Romney was against FEMA until he was for it. Which was . . . right about now.

The Christian Science Monitor recalls one of the approximately 468 GOP presidential debates last year:

The topic under discussion was the role of the federal government, and which functions Washington keeps. Moderator John King turned to Mr. Romney and asked him about disaster relief, following the tornado that struck Joplin, Mo., the month before.

“FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we're learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role,” Mr. King said. “How do you deal with something like that?”

Romney’s response: “Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that's even better.

“Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut – we should ask ourselves the opposite question,” Romney continued. “What should we keep? We should take all of what we're doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we're doing that we don't have to do? And those things we've got to stop doing, because we're borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we're taking in. We cannot ...”

King interjected: “Including disaster relief, though?”

Romney replied: “We cannot – we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we'll all be dead and gone before it's paid off. It makes no sense at all.”

Fast-forward to now. Contacted by the media, the Romney campaign asserts that Romney would not abolish FEMA, but still prefers that states take the lead in disaster response.

“Governor Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions,” Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said in a statement to Politico. “As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities, and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA.”

THE BOTTOM LINE of this amorphous public-policy Randianism so in fashion among conservatives is that if it's all about me, it's not all about you. Or about us.

That's a problem when the default for humanity is to live in community. Together. Not on our own private islands protected by the wide expanse of the Eff You Sea.

Protected, that is, until the Eff You Sea rises up to engulf you, and there's no one with the reach or strength to pluck your rational self-interest out of the storm-tossed waters.

* * *

SOMETHING just occurred to me: At what point does this present Republican nutjobbery actually become nothing more than an ongoing argument against the Constitution and in favor of the Articles of Confederation?

Which we recall worked out so well at the time. 

Sandy has a vowel movement

Now, does the extratropical weather system formerly known as Sandy -- or, perhaps, Sndy -- hate vowels, or just hate Gannett?

If it's the latter, she'll have to get in line with lots of employees . . . and former ones.

To every thing there is a season

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There is a time and a place for everything. Even being an a-hole.
 
The press refer to Chris Christie as being "tough-talking," "straight-talking" or simply "blunt." Now you've seen the guy on TV, and you no doubt have read about some of his encounters with ordinary citizens of the Garden State who might be less than enthusiastic about his tenure as governor.

You know what the guy is, is what I'm trying to say here.

But, as the Good Book says, there is a time and place for all things, and if it's in the Good Book, it must be so:

1  To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven;
2  a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3  a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4  a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5  a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6  a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7  a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8  a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

HURRICANE SANDY, my friend, is Chris Christie's time in Noo Joisey:

Governor Christie said during a 12 p.m. briefing Monday that conditions will worsen as Sandy makes landfall and anyone who stayed along the coast to ride out the storm is “now in harm’s way.”

“I read some joker in the newspaper…saying he’s never run away from one of these [storms]. Well, you might end up under it…this is not a time to be stupid,” said Christie.

The governor urged residents to stay off the roads, use caution and heed warnings.

He also had a warning regarding power outages.

“If you do not have power, please do not choose today to tap into your creative juices and jerry-rig a [power source],” said Christie. “If it looks stupid, it is stupid.”

LISTEN to the a-hole. If it looks stupid, it is stupid.

Stay safe out there on the Joisey shore. Hurricanes ain't nothing to mess with.

Jim Cantore: Sign of the Apocalypse

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Don't look at me, it's in the Bible.

Somewhere in the back, as that great theologian Homer Simpson has duly noted in the past.

And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.

And I saw, and behold a white satellite truck: and he that stood at its side had a microphone; and a Weather Channel rain slicker was given unto him: and he went forth into the gale from lower Manhattan, and into the Great Flood.

BASICALLY, I think what the Lord is trying to tell us here is that if there is a great wind and a mighty tide over the horizon, and Jim Cantore appears on your shoreline, perhaps you need to make your peace with Him -- God, not Jim -- before putting your head between your legs and kissing your ass goodbye.

And when that shoreline is lower Manhattan, well. . . .