weather

Florida Game Rescheduled

The University of Florida’s season-opening football game with Middle Tennessee State University has been moved to October 16th due to the potential impact of Hurricane Frances.

The game is now scheduled to be played October 16th in Gainesville at Noon. Television plans for the game will be announced at a later date.

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The threat of an earthquake hitting southern California is not really something that can keep you worrying all night. For all intents and purposes an earthquake is unpredictable. There is little to no humidity, and I haven’t seen a cockroach in four years now. I honestly must admit, though, that I miss this sort of thing. My uncle, aunt, and their kids took a forced vacation to Mississippi. I’m keeping my fingers crossed hoping that my mom and grandmother are going to be okay. Could Frances make it all the way to Gainesville? That’s what they’re predicting, but I doubt it. Kickoff is Saturday, for Zook’s sake.

File this under “Things I Can’t Remember How I Learned but Have Often Been Handy to Know”:

Bananas like the weather
At the tropical equator
So never ever put one
In the refrigerator.

I just about never watch television in the morning. I catch about five minutes worth of the Today Show each month. Katie is just as cute as a button, and Matt is the least-threatening male in all of media. This I know not from watching the show, but because these two happy-morning-people are pop culture icons. (They were also the first two people I saw on tv on September 11.) I know there’s a show called Good Morning, America on CBS or ABC, but I wouldn’t know its anchors if you wrapped them in a fish and slapped me in the face with them. That’s not the point.

There’s also a weatherman. For some reason all television news programs must have a ridiculously annoying self-possessed hyperactive ham reporting the weather. I don’t know why this is, but I do know it is a universal truth. The local guys are even more full of nincompoopery than the national ones. (It should be noted that The Weather Channel is the sole, curious exemption from this truth.) Are Americans too scared of weather predictions to take them without a shot of comedy that only a septuagenarian could enjoy?

For as long as I could remember, there was a chubby guy named Willard Scott who told us the weather. When I was a kid my mom always watched the Today Show while we got ready for school. Willard was balding, but he sometimes wore a toupee. Willard looked to be incredibly unhealthy, ready to keel over at any second. He always told us about people who were 100 years old (or more!) who wanted us to know that they got that way by smoking a cigar a day or drinking whiskey every night or having bacon every morning or something else that was completely contradictory to what medical science seemed to think was good for you. Willard frightened me. I didn’t think he was funny; I thought he was scary.

The new Today Show weatherman is Al Roker. Al doesn’t frighten me. I like Al. Al is hip. Al is so hip that he has Al’s Journal, a blog! What could be hipper?

I’ve been to N’Awlins several times in the last decade or so. It’s one of my favorite cities. Part of its charm, I think, is that you can feel the Mississippi River’s omnipotence no matter where you are. Even as you walk along the streets, with the water far from view, you know it’s there. I just read a fascinating - and scary - article in the NYTimes about the problems the city is having trying to prepare for a possible storm surge. Good reading if you’re interested.

Nothing’s Easy for New Orleans Flood Control
A flood wall built by the Army Corps of Engineers to hold back a cresting river - which on normal days moves more than 300,000 cubic feet of water a second past the city at an average depth of 90 feet - raised the levee to a uniform height of 25 feet above sea level, or 10 feet above the average annual high water surface level of the river, when water can rush by at the rate of one million cubic feet of water, or more, a second.
…
The city would be trapped inside the levees, steeped in a worsening “witches’ brew” of pollutants like sewage, landfill waste, chemicals and the bodies of drowned humans and animals.
Bourbon Street could remain under 10 feet of water, with water swirling above two-story houses in neighborhoods closer to the lake.
…
The American Red Cross … has declared it no longer will provide hurricane shelters … saying that placing staff there in a killer storm will represent too much risk for its employees …

nf0 has written an article that describes How to Add the current Temperature to a Movable Type Blog Entry. (I cannot imagine why you would want to post the temperature which corresponds to a blog entry. But I’ve worked with databases and users long enough to know that no niche should ever go unfilled. Someone, somewhere is just dying to have this feature. I think that it is really much more interesting as a tutorial on how to add your own custom tags to MT.)

It is so windy today that it’s blogworthy. It’s crazy windy. Sixty and seventy mile per hour gusts windy. Shaking the windows windy.
It’s very odd.

Trees are actually being felled. One right here in Studio City.

It rained in Los Angeles today.
Rain? <Princess Bride>Inconceivable!</Princess Bride>

I grew up in Daytona Beach and spent the 90s in Gainesville, Fl. Rain was not unusual. In Daytona it rained like clockwork from 3 to 4 pm pretty much every day for eight or nine months each year. In Gainesville you could wear shorts and a t-shirt to a 9 am class in the blistering sunshine without a cloud in the sky and walk out of that class into a hurricane-force downpour. Rain was … well … if not your “best friend” … it was at least like some guy you see every day and get to know pretty well. Rain was somebody who worked in the same building as you and you saw him every morning in the elevator. Rain was “not unusual”.

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The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 through November 30. The East Pacific hurricane season runs from May 15 through November 30. But why wait? Get a jump on Nature’s Greatest Storms by visiting the Tropical Prediction Center now!
Or just take a blink over to the Weather Underground for your not-yet-quite hurricane season satellite imagery fix.

“I brought a fleece,”

University of Tennessee student Lance Pasco said mockingly as the temperature rose to 85 degrees in Gainesville, Fl.

“For God’s sake, why did I bring a fleece?”

It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.

I just spent a week telling all my New England relatives how wonderful the weather is in Los Angeles and what a great place this city is to live and work. And then I returned. Dumb move on my part I guess. For at least the tenth time this year the air conditioning is malfunctioning in my office building. My cubicle is only slightly less comfortable than I imagine the burning flames and constant anguish of hell to be. Consider this: I wore a long-sleeve, warm shirt to work today because last week we couldn’t get the thermostat above sixty degrees F.

Or maybe it’s just that everything sucks after a vacation.

A company in the United States claims it has invented a powder that can be used to remove clouds from the sky and even stop the development of hurricanes.

I was never really nervous about hurricanes when I lived in Florida.

Director Ridley Scott took issues already noticeable in the 1980s, such as urban development, genetic engineering, and, of course, climate change, and took them to what he thought was their next logical stage.

So what else did Blade Runner get right?