A Leap Second For The New Year.

Hello everyone!

Does this year seem like its taking forever to get over with?  Does it seem like there is some bizarre spacial anomaly that is causing this year to drag on and on?  Does it just seem like the longest year ever?

Well it is.

The fact is that this year will be the longest year since 2005.  At exactly 23:59:60 GMT (0:00:00 UTC, +6 EST) the not-as-sinister-as-it-sounds keepers of the time will stop all of the atomic clocks in the world for one second.  They do this in order to let the earth catch up to our conception of time, as our little rock is slowing down ever so slightly every year.  They have had to do this 24 times since 1973.

Some “people” – and by people I mean scientists who have all the numbers on their side – say that this is because the moon is getting farther away, the core of the planet sloshes around inside of it throwing off its rotational tempo, and the tides of the ocean cause parasitic drag.  They say that these are the reasons that the earth is spinning slower than our atomic clocks are ticking.

I think, however, that the rapid spinning of people like Martin Luther King jr. and John F. Kennedy (and everybody who has ever fought to make the world a better place instead of what it is) in their graves is simply robbing the planet of angular momentum, thus slowing us down and making this year drag on for one second more than it really needs to.

So at 3 PM exactly (if you live on the left coast), stop for a moment and realize that you actually get one second of your life back, making one seconds worth of the insufferable conversations that you have had in bars with total D-bags totally worth it..  If its midnight when this happens, hold that kiss a little longer.  She wont understand, but you will, making it either a supremely uncomfortable kiss or a or win-win situation for the both of you.

Have a happy and fun new year, everybody.  Please be safe out there and DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE FOR F&$K SAKE.

Correlation?

There is this building near my house in Hazel Dell that is in a really crappy location. It seems to flip-flop every six months between being a church of some non-denominational orientation or another and a bar or club.

I can’t help but think that the clientele is the same in each case.

IT’S EVERYWHERE

A dear friend of mine from Seattle made me realize something today.

I was looking at and sharing pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope (http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/), images that don’t even look real and show in full color how diverse and insane our universe is, when I realized something.  Art is often thought of as a man made creation; something splashed on a canvas of assembled out of scrap metal or performed on a stage or screen, and that is all true.  The problem comes when people fail to recognize that so much of that art is inspired by the things around us.

I know what you are thinking.  “Jeremy is on another one of his little diatribes” and you are totally correct.  So here it is.

Something has been happening to me a lot lately.  I have noticed that I notice things.  All the time.  You are all aware that I currently walk almost everywhere, and because of this I am exposed to the many things that surround us that usualy pass by your windows at 45 miles per hour.  I think this has been happening because I don’t have my camera anymore (its battery being in Seattle) and can’t take pictures of these things so I have to remember them the old-fashioned way.  Whatever the reason, I am constantly in awe of the amazing things that I see around me on a daily basis.

It’s often the little things, too.  The way that light bounces off a tree branch.  A random nacreous cloud.  A locomotive muscling its way slowly down some old train tracks.  The stupid, stupid things that some of the girls I see wear.  Lots of stuff.  ALWAYS the sunset/rise.

I dunno…

Next time you are outside, do yourself a favor.   Pick a time and randomly stop and look around you.  Don’t just cast about one of those furitive glances that one gives when walking into a new room, but really look around.  I bet you will be surprised by what you see.  I do – and am – all the time.  I take the time to look at the world around me, be it in the sky, on the ground or really anywhere in between.  And I see incredible things, things that human beings could never hope to match in their endeavors.  I see the science behind it, the art, and often the harmony of these things and the environment around them.

Due to the overwhelmingly huge amounts of snow that have fallen here, the city that I live in looks like something else.  Somewhere else.  It’s amazing, and had I the means, I would be documenting it in fine detail.

I don’t really know where this is going.  Just please take some time next time you are outside or somewhere that you are not used to and try to see the things that you usually miss.

And so it begins

I really need to stop using that tagline, as I think that is the third time I have used it.

But in this case it is, again, true.

Today is a day of firsts.  It is the beginning of the winter here in the northern hemisphere, it is the winter solistace, meaning the beginning of longer days and it is the first time I can remember seeing 15 inches of snow and ice in my backyard in Vancouver.

Solistace:  Aside from the fact that Pontiac named their slick little roadster after it, Solistace is soemthing that many people may not have really heard about.  Those that have heard of it generally seem to think that it involved naked people or people in dark robes standing around ancient stone temples chanting as the sun comes up (which isn’t really that far from the truth in some places..).  In actuality it means that the earth is in the part of it’s orvit where the Northern Hemisphere is pointed away from the sun, but as of now is slowly rotating its hat toward the sun.  So for the next 6 months the days will be getting longer and longer….  4 minutes/day.   This is good, because when the sun goes down at 4:25 PM my brain kinda goes a little wonkey.  Solistace also means that

Winter Begins:  Yep.  Winter.  Started today.  That being said, the fact that there is 15 inches of snow on my back porch, interlaced with alternating layers of solid ice and topped with a nice crust of very fine frozen powder taht has been falling all night making the entire Portland/Vancovuer metro area come to a complete standstill tells me that winter started a little early.  Mother Nature: I hate you.

Snow:  There is more snow than I can remember falling in a storm in this part of the state.  I have lived here on and off for 16 years and I honestly can not ever remember having one storm system drop this much fluffy white pain in the ass on our city.  Over the course of a winter, sure, but not in one sitting.  If this is the way that this city handles itself during a storm, I hope it doesn’t happen again.

Anyway, happy solistace, happy (grumble) winter, and please god someone take care of all this snow.

Dear Mother Nature; a letter.

o whomever it may concern,

For the past week the people of the Pacific Northwest have been having an issue with ice falling out of the sky. For the most part it has been a pretty affair; fun to look at and walk in, if a little cold. We have not had a problem with this aspect of it. The snow that has fallen has been a bit of a nuisance to some places, especially Eastern Washington, but snow we can usually deal with when we have a storm.

That being said, three successive dumpings of inches upon inches of what was once pretty snow over the course of a week has worn our nerves a little ragged. Idiot drivers here have resorted to desperation tactics in order to get to the store to buy essentials like cigarettes and beer, and in their haste have made the problem worse. People are losing money in an already rough holiday season because the authorities are closing roads and people are not able to travel from the outlying areas into the cities. I have fallen on my ass no less than four times today. Admittedly none of this is your fault directly, though one could argue that had it not been for your overly aggressive use of ass-cold weather and frozen water the problem would not have come to a head in the first place.

Add to this the fact that there is now rain falling and freezing instantly to whatever it touches, be it the existing foot of snow on the ground, lamp-posts, roads, cars, and my head while helping my friend change a tire (a tire, I might add, that was damaged due to not being able to see what was on the road because of the total snow-cover) and I think that you can see where we feel justified in being a little tired of this. Granted, Winter started like 3 minutes ago, but we of the NW are not willing to retroactively forgive your actions in light of that fact. The snow outside my window as of now has a crust of about a half-inch of solid ice on top of it, and it is only raining harder.

I believe that I speak for MOST of the people in the area when I ask that you lighten up on us a little bit. We are not asking that you cease winter activities all together, far from it. Winter in the NW is often exciting and many of us look forward to finding out what you can throw at us. We are only asking that you parcel out your vengeful wrath in smaller doses, and possibly that you spread them out a little to more than every other day.

And the freezing rain can go completely.

Thank you for your time and I hope that you take my recommendations under consideration.

Sincerely,

The people of the Pacific Northwest.

A sociolological study of reindeer.

Yeah.  Reindeer.  Stupid, stupid reindeer…  Those reindeer really piss me off.

First, they make fun of another of their kind, simply because he has a birth defect.  Not just any defect, but one that is pretty tame in the grand scheme of things.  Was he born with a fetus sticking out of his forehead?  3 eyes?  Stunted antlers the grew in the form of a swastika?

No.

He was born with a red nose.

For this slight change from the Caribou-esque aesthetic norm he was laughed at, called names, and shunned from partaking in ANY reindeer athletic activities.  These I would imagine include butting heads until minor concussion declares a winner, running through the snow, racing through the air to see who is the fastest, and beer-pong.

I have to give it to the guy, though.  He didn’t let it get to him, and when it came time he was ready.  A brief bout of incliment weather over the North Pole, something that is not unusual due to the comon mixing of several different kinds of atmospheric phenomena far from the jet stream of the northern hemisphere, made it necessary for his luminescent olfactory end-piece to light the way for a flying vehicle towed by those very same reindeer that had hated on him only days earlier.

And he did it with style.

This led the other reindeer to start to enjoy his presence.  They laughed, they shouted with glee, they got hammered at the local pub (where one of them, Dancer, hooked up with a total skank and now has a young caribou/antelope hybrid that is being shunned and picked on by its own generation of angsty four-legged forrest mammals).

The point here is that in order for this social outcast, one who was ostracized by his own kind from  a very young age, to be accepted into the social system of his peers he had to redeem himself in their eyes.  He had to partake in a dangerous and highly risky act of altruism in order for them to enjoy having him around as anything more than a whipping boy, much less see him as an equal.

I wouldn’t hang out with reindeer like that.

Random thoughts on a cold night.

I’m sitting here, unable to sleep because the cold is slowly eating away at my window and I am afraid that it is going to come into my room and drag me out in the street specifically to make me hate mother nature more than I already do.  When things like this happen to me I often start to think about the strange things that I notice on a day.

Congratulations, dear reader, you are going to get a small glimpse into the kind of things that keep me up at night.

Toothbrushes – They are sooooooo hard to open.  they come in this clear packaging so that you can see it, but it take an act of engineering not seen since the US Apollo program to get them open.  I just want to brush my teeth, man, come on.  Know whats worse? Razors. Usually I need some kind of cutting torch just to get some headway in the strangely pliable yet utterly impervious plastic sheeting that they wrap these damn things in.  Why I need something sharp to get into the package that is full of sharp things will always vex me.

Partially Hydrogenated Anything – How, exactly, do you partially hydrogenate something?  I like to think that there is a guy with a clip-board and hard hat sitting in the factory watching ever so dilligently and occasionally slapping a red button that sounds a klaxon and stops the entire line.  After he does this he yells out “Watch it there frank!  Don’t want to over hydrogenate that soybean oil!” prompting Frank to roll his eyes and continue to hydrogenate that soybean oil; all while hardhat begins to scribble furiously on his clipboard to remind himself to sign Frank up for another training session on the ACME Industries Soybean Oil Hydrogenator 5000.

Space Shuttles – We have one.  It is a bulky, outdated and frankly dangerous piece of technology, but we have one.  In 2 years, they are cancelling it, prompting a five year gap in America’s ability to go into space.  This is happening because the Space Shuttle is a bulky, outdated and frankly fdangerous piece of technology.  Dangerous.  Strapping yourself to 5 million pounds of liquid explosives and forcing yourself into a realm where there is no air, no gravity, 400 degree shifts in temperature and possibly aliens with *ahem* probes is dangerous no matter what vehicle you are doing it with.  I say keep the suttle around for 5 more years so the we can keep going to space.  If you don’t have any volenteers, I am more than happy to crew it for you.

Laptops are weird – Today I was walking around my house cleaning it as I went, listening to music, reading about the Burj Dubai and talking to two different people, each hundreds of miles away… all at the same time.  Laptops are weird.

Fatty – STOP BUYING YOUR KIDS VENTI CARMEL FRAPPICHINOS. YOU ARE KILLING YOUR CHILDREN AND I WON’T BE AN ACCOMPLIS.

Anyway, these are the kind of things that go through my head ALL OF THE TIME, so for all of you who think I am kind of a weird guy, no shit: I don’t get much sleep.

Have a happy snow day tomorrow everyone!

Totally called it.

It snowed today.

An inch.

Portland has, in response to this fluffy deluge, now enacted several pieces of a sad little “severe weather action plan.”  They are as follows:

-ALL SCHOOLS ARE CLOSED.  I remember walking to school in two feet of snow when it was so cold that the moisture in the air actually condensed and froze on anything made of metal.  Bundled up in my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ski coat and huge red moon-boots, I would walk the three blocks cursing the very existence of nature.  School children in Portland are not  deemed sturdy enough to go to school when it is kind of cold outside and there is even the slightest of hints of ice ANYWHERE in the metro area.

-CHAINS ARE REQUIRED ON ALL METRO HIGHWAYS.  This includes I-5 (the main west coast arterial interstate), 205, 405, 84, and highways 26, 99(e and w) and 30.  There is a quarter inch of snow frozen to the highways…  Between the lanes…  Where the cars don’t drive.  This is scary enough for people to be asked to stay at home unless they absolutely have to drive.  People in, well, pretty much any state that isn’t the northwest drive on a foot of snow and ice in blizzard conditions to go pick up beer.  In Portland every car, truck and bus will now churn up the asphalt and concrete of our already beaten-to-hell roadways with their chains and snow tires because the prospect of driving on anything that isn’t rain scares the bejeezus out of everyone who lives here.

Hell, they don’t even know how to drive on rain.

-SAND TRUCKS.  EVERYWHERE.  When I lived in Pullman these trucks laid down enough gravel to make it so that you could drift a car on dry asphault road on a sunny day in may.  In Portland these trucks spray a slurry of liquid chemical de-icer (which does wonders for your paint job) and sand (which, also, does wonders for your paint job).  Ass tonns of the stuff.  The difference is that in pullman there is often a foot of snow topped by 6 inches of solid ice on the roads.  In portland these trucks spray their vile excrement all over any horizontal surface they can find.  Perfectly flat and dry intersections, parking lot entrances for places that arent even open, and any place that happens to be directly in front of whatever vehicle I am currently occupying.

Jesus you’d think that we were in Green Bay, only everyone driving there was from Miami and thought snow was something flown in from Columbia on unregistered planes.

Get it?  Anyway….

One of the most annoying things that happens here when it is this cold and they think that there may be any type of inclement weather – be it rain, wind, snow/ice, locusts, anything – is that the news stations spread out their “first-alert super-duper weather-radar team 5000 network dot com people team” weather spotters to every hill, valley and river in the place (and there are boatloads of each of those here in the NW).  They do this to report that it is, in fact, cold outside and that it did, in fact, snow today and that it may, in fact, stay cold.  I don’t mind this.  In fact, as a weather nerd it’s kind of nice to be able to trak these storms through the area.  What I do mind is the fact that they deem it necessary to do this every fifteen minutes, right in the middle of any television show, sport-cast, newscast, game-show or particularly witty commercial that I happen to be watching (and it’s usually right at the peak of the show too, or right before a touchdown).

Since there is undoubtedly a large room there at the television station that they run that has one of those big walls full of TV’s that shows what is on, I have an idea.  Since you have that big room and you actually get to choose when things happen on your station, how about when team “first-alert super-duper weather-radar team 5000 network dot com people team” decides that the snowflake they saw 14 minutes ago in Beaverton HAS to be shown to people in La Center you put those newscasts at a IN to your video stream instead of pre-empting what I am watching.

Thanks.

More dispatches from the “kind of cold, maybe a little snow and a few gusts of wind storm of the century” later.

Doomsayers

As I sit here on my couch watching brad pitt pretend to be a spy, I ponder my situation…

I am sitting on my chair because my tookus is frozen solid after having spent a mere 10 minutes outside and any incidental contact that it has with other objects causes an instantaneous melding of the two into one quite chilly form.  I am staring out the window at a GIGANTIC moon framed nicely by the beginnings of the cold front that is supposed to bring snow to this area very so….

SNOW!?!??!  HERE?!?!?!?

Great.

For those of you who have not been around long enough to hear me rant about the drivers here, go read this, then come back to us.  I wont be talking about drivers here, only the people who think that the fact that it gets around freezing in the middle of December is a harbinger of the end of the world.

These are the people who can think of nothing more to say during polite conversation than “hear it’s going to freeze solid tonight?” or “better wrap your pipes, they’ll freeze tonight” or even ‘Hear the end of the world is coming?”.  These people have been living in the northwest long enough to remember years when it froze for half the freaking winter but for some reason refuse to do so, believing that this year…  THIS is the year that the end of days rides into town on a frozen horse.

I blame the news for this phenomenon largely on the news.  From KOIN to KGW these people tout a late december low pressure cold front as a port hole to hell itself.  They paint a picture, in their ever-present search for rankings, of a chilly doom-incarnate.  To listen to one of their newscasts one sees an image of rogue pipes exploding under houses and loosening their foundations, of entire crops withering on the vine and of streets slick with ice making travel nigh-on impossible while the wind blows the very soil off the bedrock that anchors down our entire civilization.  They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to spread out their people to the random hills that pepper the Willamette Valley so that they can check in every 15 minutes and say “yep.  cold… a little rainy.  Here’s tom with sports” at which time they switch to Tom who tells us that the Blazers lost and every other team in the NW sucks… But thats a blog for another time…

gawd.

The reality of this is that things are going to be the same way they always are when things happens.  People wait in line for hours getting snow-tires that crunch up the pavement and make horrible noises outside my window when I’m trying to sleep (already happened).  People are going to stock up on food like mormons before Y2K (judging by the lines at WinCo today, already happened).  People will cut off their plans and stay at home, huddling under blankets lest they die from hypothermia (judging by the banter at my work, happening as we speak).

THEN

Nothing is going to happen.  It’ll be cold, maybe a little icey.  There will be an inch of snow or two – at which point they will close all of the highways and interstates and enforce martial law – which will freeze overnight and then melt away.  Then it will go back to being 45 and cloudy for the next four months until spring.

Mark my words, the doomsayers of the television news will get theirs when this WINTER STORM OF DEATH AND DOOM 2K8 turns into IT GOT KIND OF COLD 2008.

Perigee

That’s right, people, the rumors are true: today the moon is closer to the earth than it is going to be all year.  Due to it’s eliptical orbit, that smiling cheese-based face in the sky is alternately closer and farther away to your cheese based face, averaging a distance change of 17,000 miles.

Just for those of you who are running around in your living room trying to figure out how to survive when the planet that orbits ours runs into your grandmothers basement, stop;  The earth is still 221,560 miles away.  That does not, however, mean that there wont be effects.

When the moon gets close, things get wierd.  For one, the oceans tides will be way more severe than normal, owing to the increased gravitational pull of a closer moon.  This means that the beaches will be more suseptible to ca-razy tides and currents.  This chage has the unfortunate side-effect of increasing pollution, changing (slightly) the erosion patterns, and (hopefully) helping out the turtles.

That’s right, turtles.

Another effect of this seems to be an increase in the pedantic rambling of those who see it fit to argue on the internet.  While the effects of the moons yearly oscillations about our little globe are extremely well documented (seeing as how it happens every single year…forever) there seems to be an upswing in the idiocy of the general community who see it fit to argue everything from the fact that the oceans will swamp the continents and cause earthquakes to freaking werewolves.

That’s right, werewolves.

So maybe there is some proof after all that a full moon makes people crazy…