Observe the current Atlantic Wide satellite image from the National Weather Service:*
Look in the lower third, left side of this image, north of the South American continent, south of Haiti. You can see a blob of clouds that, especially when you look at this animation, is building in strength and organizing, and has a reasonable chance of some day becoming a tropical cyclone (this is discussed briefly here) .
But while everybody is looking at that, what about this? Specifically, that giant rotating low pressure system off the Carolinas. Isn’t that impressive? It is, of course, acting like a large extra-tropical low, and is doing nothing like one expects in the formation of a tropical cyclone. But sometimes … things happen.
I’m reminded of the old Three Stooges routine. One stooge holds up his hand and says “See this?” The other stooge looks at it and says “Yeah, so what?” And the first stooge whacks the second stooge on the side of the head with his other hand, saying “Look out for THIS!”
Over eleven thousand Haitians have been infected with cholera, and over 700 have died. The epidemic is worsening very quickly. Over 80 of the dead have died within the last 24 hours as of this writing. The resources needed to deal with this are not available, apparently because cholera in Haiti is not as interesting or sympathy garnering as an earthquake in Haiti.
As I watched this, I decided to post it on my blog, and then my mind went through a series of possible titles for the post, but there were so many yet so few that would be appropriate.
This lady is obviously crazy. Frankly, perhaps the mail carrier is crazy for not driving off with her arm in the door, but I wasn’t there so it’s hard to say.
I should say, for context, that Hingham Massachusetts is a relatively affluent but typically fairly mighty white somewhat liberal region along the “South Shore” of Massachusetts, south of Boston and adjoining Boston Harbor. It dates back to 1635, and sports one of the more interesting really old New England restaurants renamed a couple of hundred years ago to “Ye Olde Mille Grille” (pronounce, presumably, Yee Oldy Milly Grilly).
You can see this woman’s training (Brandeis? no, her accent suggests a Western Mass education, maybe one of the Amherst area sister colleges? Anyway, she wasn’t born in Hingham, but elsewhere in the northeast) rubbing up against her hard-earned opinion of reality, buttressed by the concept that since Martin Luther King was active several decades ago, and black people (i.e., “nigger thieves” in her words) are still, you know, all niggery and stuff, that it must be due to internal strife and back biting amongst them.
And she’s saying and thinking all this talking to a man from some other country, which does make us chuckle a little just because her understanding of context is so provincial.
But is she racist? Not as racist as the system that allowed this event to happen without consequence, in a world in which a black man striking a white mail carrier would probably spend days, possibly years, in prison for violating the Patriot Act.
The mail carrier was, of course, fired. Uppity nigger mail carrier.
The mail carrier may or may not have been fired, and if he was, he may or may not have been fired for reasons that may or may not have been related to this incident, and it is possible that he was a temp. See the link kindly supplied by JustMe in the comments section below for a LOT more information on crazy lady.
Probably. Or, to be more exact, the seasons seem to end later these days than they did in those days, if “those days” is defined as the first decade or so during which reasonably good (though not perfect) data were collected compared to now. A more immediate question may be: When will this year’s hurricane season end? Continue reading Have Atlantic Hurricane Seasons Gotten Longer?→
“I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out under another, then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.” (The swine-flu outbreak of 1976 occured when Gerald Ford — a Republican — was president.)
