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January rambling #2: JEOPARDY!, and recess

‘I feel like a dime among nickels.’

I received one of those recorded scam IRS phone calls this month, threatening to put me in jail. Mine came from the Syracuse, NY area from a known scam phone number.

2015 Was Hottest Year in Recorded History.

No boots on the ground… What does it mean?

Abortion Is as Old as Pregnancy: 4,000 Years of Reproductive Rights History.

No relation: The Green brothers explain January 1 and Oregon “militia”, the latter before the recent arrests.

Fiscal Woes Drowning Clearwater: Iconic Festival May be Scrapped.

I saw this moving piece (90 seconds) on CBS Sunday Morning: The Man and the Dog.

The decline of play in preschoolers — and the rise in sensory issues. Conversely, Recess four times a day is good for learning.

Now I Know: Behold the Power of Cheese and One of These Things Just Isn’t the Same (about twins).

WHATEVER happened to the laptop computer? (1985).

Rejection: A Wilderness Guide for Writers (Evanier) and Jaquandor.

Sharp Little Pencil: Bright Brit (For Alan Rickman).

Frank S. Robinson: Joe Krausman, Monkeyshines, and heightism. Joe writes on Facebook: “Carlos Rommulo, once president of the General Assembly of the UN, was very short. He went to Texas, and when asked how do you feel being short among so many tall men, he said, ‘I feel like a dime among nickels.'”

Watch Bill Nye Weigh In on ‘Star Wars’ vs. ‘Star Trek’ Debate.

Yankees without number (1.9999…).

Dustbury’s Six Degrees of Separation.

Tweets from Gettysburg.

The strange life of Q-tips, the most bizarre thing people buy.

Don’t believe that splashy finding that 10 percent of college graduates think Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court.

A Venezuelan beetle named for SUNY chancellor.

Celebrity anagram illustrations from illustrator Steve Rampton and Decluttr.com.

RIP, Abe Vigoda

Mark Evanier, and Abe Vigoda’s Dead (Premortem Mix).

The Godfather – Tessio is taken away to be killed.

The graphic above is from here.

JEOPARDY!

3-day winning streak on ‘Jeopardy’. Not only is Amelia Hershberger from Albany, NY, reason enough to root for her, she attended Greenville Central School (as did my wife), she graduated from SUNY Albany (as did both my wife and I, albeit us in grad school), and she was a political science major (as was I).

Final ‘Jeopardy!’ clue stumps all 3 contestants, who all bet everything. The two people tied for first bet rationally; the woman in a distant 3rd could have bet nothing, or $5,999, or anything in between, and won. (Some really uninformed comments here.) BTW, would you have gotten the Final? I did, but I am of a certain age.

This has passed, but ‘Jeopardy!’ hopefuls can try out online features quotes yours truly.

Loo

I was looking through my draft posts. From 2008, and the original source is lost to me:

And to that end: IllumiBowl is a night light for your toilet.

Music

Coverville 1109: A Tribute to David Bowie. Plus David Bowie on Extras, and SamuraiFrog has some Bowie links; he’s right re: Kayne.

Renaissance Geek: Music for MLK Day.

Chuck Miller: Shane Howard and Lawrence Welk.

Of course, you can do mashups of classical music.

Muppets: She Loves You.

I linked to this before, as part of the Kennedy Center Honors, but it’s Aretha, FCOL.

HuffPo: A Shade of Jade: Interview With Rebecca Jade. That would be niece #1.

In Defense of the Eagles, and Not Being a Jerk About Recently Deceased Musicians.

Old music is outselling new music for the first time in history.

Google alerts (me)

Shooting Parrots: Sunday round-up and The Art of a Scammer.

Chuck Miller: Where rejection is growth.

Google alerts (not me)

Top teams win as Hucknall Wednesday Pool League heads for a tight finish. “Station B’s winners in their 8-0 romp at home to Chequers were George Roy, David Butler, Jason Smith, Danny Butler, Roger Green and PJ Singh on singles and the pairings of Andrea and Roger Green and Danny Butler and Jason Smith.”

Regional journalist turned TV wrestler dies aged 76. “Tributes have been paid to Roger Green…, who started out at the Portsmouth Evening News before working simultaneously Fleet Street and as a grappler in the ring.”

Not a snowball’s chance in hell climate change will be addressed in the USA in a timely fashion

This past winter was the warmest on record

Last month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that it will require states seeking billions of dollars in U.S. preparedness funds to sign off on plans to mitigate the effects of climate change.

“The policy doesn’t affect federal money for relief after a hurricane, flood, or other disaster. Specifically, beginning in March 2016, states seeking preparedness money will have to assess how climate change threatens their communities. Governors will have to sign off on hazard mitigation plans.”

One of the governors who this will affect is Rick Scott of Florida, who not only denies there is man-made climate change but has barred officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection from using the phrases “climate change” and “global warming” “in any official communications, emails, or reports since shortly after he came into office in 2011.” At least one employee was ordered to get a medical evaluation for considering “climate change.”

Even though President Obama noted this month that climate change is hurting our health, I don’t see that anything substantial will happen on this front in the United States any time soon. The moment which crystallized that belief for me happened in February 2015, when Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, used a snowball as a prop on the Senate floor… “to show the recent spate of cold weather in the Northeast is a sign that human activity isn’t causing climate change.”

Yes, it snowed in Washington, DC, in February, and it was cold, too. However, the fact, is that this past winter was the warmest on record, and 2015 had the second warmest February on record, despite what happened in the eastern US.

Moreover, a majority of Americans don’t think climate change will affect them personally, even though it already is.

It may already be too late for Vanuatu, the Pacific island nation, which was devastated by the deadly typhoon Pam last month. Moreover, big shelves of Antarctic ice are melting faster than scientists thought.

Happy Earth Day.

Z is for Zone

Those of us in the northeast US felt pretty secure about avoiding the remnants of hurricanes until Irene and Lee in 2011 and Sandy in 2012 roared through.

I came across this article: Alaskan villages try “climigration” in the face of climate change. The subhead is “When a town turns to a perpetual disaster area, it might be time to move it.”

I was thinking about this in following the Oklahoma tornadoes in May; the picture is from the aftermath. How DOES one live in a tornado alley? There was an intense storm in Moore, Oklahoma in 1999, after all. There have been a few articles about why there are few underground shelters in the area; Dustbury linked to one.

This led me to muse on other disasters; repeated flooding on parts of the Mississippi River, e.g. A couple of towns, I’ve read, moved to a safety zone several miles away from the river, but others get sandbags together for a near-annual threat of the town being swallowed up.

I recall after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there was lots of chatter about someone who could be so crazy to build a city, New Orleans, that actually below sea level. It’s a major port, that’s why, and the government is building walls that – likely – will protect it from another storm.

Wildfires and earthquakes and the occasional avalanche in the western US, hurricanes in the southeast. What is the zone one can go to that is immune to the ravages of Mother Nature? Those of us in the northeast US felt pretty secure about avoiding the remnants of hurricanes until Irene and Lee in 2011 and Sandy in 2012 roared through. Sandy made a left turn; it’s not supposed to do that! The American meteorological models didn’t even predict that path, though the European models did.

So where in your country, or part of the country, are the danger zones, the safety zones? Of course, one cannot be 100% safe anywhere, but there are greater and lesser risks.

I’m still convinced that my locale in upstate New York is still a relatively safe zone to live in. That IS subject to change…

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

W is for Weird Weather

There are simpler things to do, though, such as planting a tree and taking less energy dependent transportation.

People in the US state of Oklahoma have had a tough year. The state’s “July average temperature was a scorching 88.9 degrees, the warmest to occur in any state during any month on record. State record hailstone measuring nearly 6” from Gotebo on May 23… At the other extreme, Oklahoma recorded its coldest temperature on record on February 10 when Nowata dipped to a frigid -31 degrees. On that same the day, the state’s heaviest 24-hour snowfall on record piled up, with 27 inches measured in Spavinaw. Not to mention non-weather related events, such as the 5.6 magnitude earthquake, the strongest on record.

The Sooner State is hardly the only one. Back in the spring, there were already more weather-related fatalities in the US than in all of 2010. By the halfway point, NOAA had made it official: 2011 Among Most Extreme Weather Years in History. “Near the halfway point, 2011 has already seen eight weather-related disasters in the U.S. that caused more than $1 billion in damages.”

Then August 2011 set records in several locations for “torrid heat, torrential rain, and river flooding. You can thank, in part, an exceptional Plains drought and Hurricane Irene,” another billion-dollar event.

Of course, the question is why. A recent study linked air pollution to extreme weather. California is a leader in places where sometimes the air isn’t fit to breathe.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has urged countries to come up with disaster management plans to “adapt to the growing risk of extreme weather events linked to human-induced climate change.” See the report here. And the deniers are in full force.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. We CAN minimize the damage by making changes. Valmeyer, Illinois “was once a community of about 900 on the banks of the Mississippi River, 25 miles south of St. Louis. The Great Flood of 1993 left 90 percent of Valmeyer’s buildings damaged beyond repair…Valmeyer would be rebuilt on a 500-acre parcel on a nearby bluff overlooking the river…with energy-efficient home construction…resource-efficient institutions and…future renewable energy development. When the Mississippi flooded again, the town was safe, though it would not have been had they rebuilt in the same location.

There are simpler things to do, though, such as planting a tree and taking less energy-dependent transportation. Meanwhile, check out NOAA’s State of the Climate, a Global Analysis. Interesting stuff.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9