gwax's rumblings

I guess, in a sense though, this is my momma’s cli­mate but that’s not really the point. Today, October 11^th, marks the first time that we’ve received snow here in Minneapolis. As I sit here wait­ing for the feel­ing to return to my ears, I wanted to let all of you out there in warmer climes know what you’re missing.

Well fancy that, it’s –6°F out this morn­ing; we’ve def­i­nitely got a rather superla­tive win­ter on our hands.

When I left my house today, the tem­per­a­ture was –2°F, which is pretty darned cold, espe­cially for this early in the win­ter. Anyway, I noticed a few inter­est­ing kinetic side-effects of the tem­per­a­ture; aside from nor­mal things like my truck tak­ing an extra sec­ond to get started, my car CD player LCD was doing some funny stuff. In case you don’t know how LCDs work, the dis­play itself is polar­ized and there’s a charged, polar­iz­ing liq­uid crys­tal in the dis­play, when no charge is applied, the polar­iza­tion matches up and it appears clear, but when you apply an elec­tric field the liq­uid crys­tal reori­ents at 90° to the dis­play mak­ing things black. So, like I was say­ing, the low tem­per­a­ture messed with the kinet­ics such that the liq­uid crys­tal became vis­cous and slow-moving, which resulted in a dis­play that mor­phed from one num­ber to the next as my CD pro­gressed sec­ond to sec­ond. The whole effect looked really neat and makes me won­der if there might be a mar­ket for high vis­cos­ity liq­uid crys­tal displays.

I have a num­ber of thoughts about this whole Katrina wreck­ing New Orleans thing:

• I’d like to extend my utmost sym­pa­thy to those directly affected by this disaster.
• theod­icy
  n : the branch of the­ol­ogy that defends God’s good­ness and jus­tice in the face of the exis­tence of evil
• Where the Hell, is the National Guard? Isn’t it their job to help out in sit­u­a­tions like this? Oh, that’s right, they’re in Iraq try­ing to get us cheap oil. Guess what doesn’t mat­ter when our refiner­ies at home get wrecked: cheap crude oil. Or was it try­ing to pro­tect our peo­ple from dan­ger, because Katrina is killing more Americans than the Iraqis are.
• Our President is not tak­ing this seri­ously enough
• I won­der how long it will be until New Orleans exists again.
• Hippo’s blog has an inter­est­ing idea about repair­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion infra­struc­ture quickly in dis­as­ters like this.
• I hope the death toll is lower than expected.

It’s hot; it’s humid; I’m uncom­fort­able; it must be summer.

My pre­vi­ous analy­sis of this bliz­zard was insuf­fi­cient. Having walked back to my appart­ment late last night and now hav­ing been out­side once the bliz­zard has stopped drop­ping snow, I can give a bet­ter expla­na­tion of things. I need only one adjec­tive to describe this blizzard.

This bliz­zard is ludicrous.

Oh holy crap, it’s bliz­zard­ing out­side right now, like a whole bunch. We’ve prob­a­bly got about half a foot of snow and some drifts up to two or more feet; that’s not to men­tion the snow-plow piles that are like 6 feet high. Also, there’s like a whole bunch of wind and it’s mak­ing the snow fly all over the place and into your face and crap. It’s really cold too. Oh and it’s sup­posed to keep snow­ing until tomor­row evening. Also, they declared a state of emer­gency. I love this kind of weather so much. Blizzards are the like the bestest things of all.

Also, my sen­tance con­structs are stu­pid in this post.