Author: Allegra

Born when atmospheric carbon was 316 PPM. Settled on MST country since 1997. Parent, grandparent.

Gas leak

Man, the last 48 hours have been jammed with incident. I was supposed to go pick Kopper up at 6:10 last night but between me getting tied up with something at home and then having to get over to the other Can car and her working late, I was a full half hour late picking her up. Well and good, we’re prepared to get the evil eye from the instructor, and then we run into a roadblock on Lougheed Highway right after Kopper says, “The Skytrain’s not running,” and we’re redirected way the hell off the highway, and we’re contemplating what this might be about including, Gosh wow, an Olympic security exercise (only 750 days to go until we host the world, barfula gagula).

We turn on the radio to News 1130 (the flexible enema nozzle of capitalism in the GVRD) and pretty much simultaneously with the announcer saying something about a broken gas line WE SMELL GAS. We’re not talking about a little whiff. It’s pouring bloody rain and the wind’s blowing and WE CAN SMELL GAS. For, like, six long city blocks. I remember thinking “Well, at least I’m on the explosion side, I should mask Kopper from most of the shrapnel.” Then Kopper says the equivalent of “Sod this for a lark, I’m taking YOU to the Keg.” At that point we’d been stuck in redirect traffic along Broadway for a while and we were going to catch the last 15 minutes of the class.
So we went to the renovated Keg on Willingdon and we ate and my GOD what it’s like to hang around people who don’t require you to censor every single thought. I think Kopper feels much the same – we ate and talked and talked and talked and it was definitely therapeutic.

Good times, ow, solar science

Went dancing last night to the melodious strains of the Blue Meenies, a fabulous cover band of these parts, and they had Winter Ale on tap at the John B! Home by 12:30 thanks to one of my fellow revellers. Daughter Katie jammed, mentioning something about self-care. We had a small and lively crew there and it was lovely to see Mike and Heather.

This morning, of course, the piper has arrived with his hand out; I am interesting varieties of sore. Daughter Katie is showing up this afternoon, possibly maybe, for a meal and a visit, and then I’m off to the Luddite’s for dinner. I really wish I could crosspost his last email to me – it is a masterpiece of British humour. Reference to this video was made. NOTE: it is nothing you won’t see on TV these days, but that doesn’t mean you want your boss walking up behind you while you are thoughtfully educating yourself with its four and a half minutes of hardhitting content.

So after all this gimping about with climate change, and everything supposedly getting warmer, some bunch of solar science geeks are saying we’re heading into solar minimum and it’s going to get ass freezing cold around here. Well, why not!? It’s a planet, it’s a complex system, and I wish I hadn’t given away my ski pants. Here’s the consensus view of the timing of the event.

Here’s the International MSM take on the science.

Not so fast, said RealClimate in 2005.

Please note there’s a big difference between the solar minimum of the 11 year (actually 9 – 14 year) solar sunspot cycle and a Maunder Minimum, when there are virtually no sunspots for many decades. The last Maunder Minimum put Europe in the fridge for about 40 years. Or so some people believe…. the deep freeze can also be attributed to the stalling of the thermohaline current, which might or might not have something to do with the sun.  I am seeing the ‘problem with climate change’ as not being so much a problem with the planet as a problem with interpreting what’s going on around us.
The scientific problem (how do prove that we know what is happening by developing successful predictive models) is  aggravated by bumps in the research road.  Human beings a) live for about 80 years and we’re trying to see patterns that are godlike in duration and grandeur, b) see patterns where none may be, c) fail to see patterns because they’re too close to a problem and d) hold opinions and field arguments for reasons which may line up with their breeding rights and status rather than the facts in the case.

So is the earth getting warmer?  Well, yeah. Ice doesn’t melt without getting warmer, and 2007 was a f*cking catastrophe for glaciers and polar ice.  But in ten years of bad weather we could get every cubic inch of that ice back and then some; this winter was an interesting study for me in how very minor changes in weather patterns and temperatures can make immense differences in snowfall.  East Van got rain!  I got 1 foot of snow – twice!  (And had to clean it off the f*cking CAN car, both times, but I’m from Ontario and I am used to cleaning a foot of wet snow off cars.)

The debate goes on, but I have one plea for the boffins – please continue to work on food crop seeds which can deal with temperature and moisture extremes, because I suspect that will do more good for humanity than arguing about what kinds of spots the sun finds fashionable this year.

I am toasting almonds for biscotti.

The landpeer will be showing the apartment starting Monday, so I gotta tidy up.

Two dreadful nightmares and a commute

I guess I am having fever dreams or I’m working off the last bit of sleep dep. Now, when I say I had two dreadful nightmares, I don’t have nightmares like other people, who wake up filled with existential dread and needing medication to go back to sleep; nope, I just have bad dreams. The first one involved cleaning spots off my parents’ wall. Somehow one wall in their house, which is not the house they currently live in, got COVERED in two inch across wax splatters. Think “meditation circle gone horribly wrong” and that would about cover it. And not nice white paraffin wax splatters, either, multicoloured nasty Chinese candle wax splatters that left stains. Sigh. Continue reading Two dreadful nightmares and a commute

If I were Al Swearengen

I did a video of this song last night. I roll my eyes like a cartoon character when I’m performing! Meep! Now I know the horrible secret, my mother didn’t give birth to a little pink wrinkled thing she GAVE BIRTH TO A CARTOON CHARACTER. No wonder I’m terrified of Dip! Alert the Media. Anyway, I’ve tried and tried and tried to post it to my website, and I can’t. I’m gonna wait until Glenn comes over and walks me through FTP again, because I’m OBVIOUSLY doing something wrong, something simple to do with the naming of it, or I’m putting it in the wrong folder. Then I will post it. It’s not good enough for Youtube (a low standard to be sure as Doc Filk would say) but it’s good enough for a giggle among friends, so ping me if you want to see it; the quicktime video is about 4 megs and it’s 3:35.

There is snow. So much f*cking snow. It’s unbelievagable.

Ack. Fast fo;ward to June 23, and I DID so post it to Youboob. Heavy sigh. But I’m commenting it, and that makes it oddly better.

Map of cut cables

mapofcutcables.JPG

There have now been six undersea internet cables cut since December 2007.  I had been having a hard time visualizing where they were, but ScaryClown, as always comes through.

Anybody who thinks these events aren’t sabotage is probably a professional pundit.  There are apparently 25 ships that cruise the globe fixing cable wear 24/7 and there’s a cable break on average every 3 days.  What triggered the hysteria, including mine, was the size of the original break – it took down about 70 percent of Egypt’s traffic, and Egypt is not a small country. 

So I can go back to worrying about something else, like uploading my videos.