“The online environment in 2024 is a mess,” said Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.
In recent years, amateur weather trackers’ posts have quickly spread through social media. Some have responsibly shared the latest information from experts, but others have found that extreme language can result in more shares and likes.
Brian Garcia, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service’s San Francisco Bay Area office, said he and his colleagues had become more aggressive in combating misinformation.
“People want to increase their following on social media, and one of the best ways is to go catastrophic and alarm people,” Mr. Garcia said. “But just because the hype train is leaving the station doesn’t mean we to need to all get on it.”
The weather.
The poor old weather.
Everybody talks about the weather but nobody every does anything about it.
here we are again the days of the long shadows were we ever here?
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
My wife and I try to walk around out in the neighborhood everyday, twice if the weather and my schedule work out.
It is an exercise regime that works with my outlook on physical exercise.
I have noticed that several times a year (it really should be only twice a year but the time change throws a curveball into the mix) the sun lines up low in the sky with a length of sidewalk and produces these long shadows.
From the picture, you can see we are some minutes or maybe a day or two away from the shadow lining up exactly with the sidewalk but you can’t count on sunny days even here in the low country of South Carolina so I thought I better grab the image while the grabbing was good.
I have, by the calendar, seen these shadows stretch out and line up about 16 times since we moved here.
The sidewalk is the same.
The street ahead is the same.
The shadows pretty much look the same thought the bulky of our clothes changes from early spring to late fall.
The sun is the same.
What has changed in the last four years?
Truly the more things change the more they stay the same.
With this in mind though, I agree with Delwin Brown, who in his 1994 book, Boundaries of Our Habitations: Tradition and Theological Construction, (State University of New York Press) wrote, “There must be some continuity with the past, “or else the world is a madhouse.” Hence, the more things change, the more they stay the same; the more things stay the same, the more they change.”
Full disclosure I am not familiar with this book but when I looked up the the saying to get the french spelling of Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, I came across Mr. Brown’s quote in the lazy man’s best friend, Wikipedia.
I am reminded of snow.
If you grew in the western part of the State of Michigan in the back half of the 20th century like I did, you saw a lot of snow.
Early in your life, your learned from your Mom or your brothers or your sisters or your kindergarten teacher that NO TWO SNOWFLAKES are the same.
I put it to you that NO TWO OF ANYTHING are the same.
No two snowflakes.
No two days.
No two nothing.
But besides being different, all snowflakes are snowflakes.
They are all the same.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The more things stay the same, the more they change.
Then again, there is the shadow.
Here and gone.
Dark and bold in its outline in bright sun and a cloud comes along and covers the sun and the shadow is gone.
Was it really there?
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The more things stay the same, the more they change.
fog, little cat feet sits looking over harbor on silent haunches
From Fog in Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg (Henry Holt and Company, 1916).
I will bet you one dollar you knew this poem.
I will double that bet and guess you knew it was Mr. Sandburg.
I will double that bet and guess that its the only poem by Mr. Sandburg you know.
Maybe a safe bet, but if there are two things I hope from all this is that most folks know this poem and that it is by this poet and for today, and you know what, that is enough!
So let us go on out to the kitchen and grab ourselves a beer to celebrate if I won or do the same thing if I lost.
Fog as published in Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg (Henry Holt and Company, 1916).
The fog comes on little cat feet.
It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.
By the way with a 60 degree swing in the temperature since last weekend and with the ocean still at about 55 degrees, we gots ourselves a FOG warning here in the Low Country / Coastal Empire.
these are tawny days bashful mornings hurl gray mist on stripes of sunrise
These are the tawny days your face comes back The grapes take on purple the sunsets redden early on the trellis. The bashful mornings hurl gray mist on the stripes of sunrise. Creep, silver on the field, the frost is welcome Run on, yellow halls on the hills, and you tawny pumpkin flowers, chasing your lines of orange Tawny days and your face again
Tawny by Carl Sandburg in his book, Smoke and Steel, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., (1920).
The website, https://www.vocabulary.com/, defines tawny as an adjective meaning of a light brown to brownish orange color; the color of tanned leather.
The online Merriam-Webster says that tawny is from the Middle English, from Anglo-French tané, tauné, literally, tanned, from past participle of tanner to tan and that the first recorded use of the word is from the 14th century.
The book of Genesis, Chapter 1, verses 2-5 state:
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
For myself, when the Bible reports he separated the light from the darkness, I think that God set up what we know as the planet earth and when he separated the light from the darkness, God gave the planet a push that started it in motion so that on the planet, day was separated from night by the rotation of the planet.
From that moment all laws of what we now know as physics came into play.
Neither here nor there, that means, for me anyway, that God had a timer running as the earth revolved on its axis and when the Bible reports “… the first day”, God knew just what he meant, but I digress.
Anyway, at the end of that first day, the light sank below the horizon and on the morning of the 2nd day the light came up.
I am betting that when that light came, it was a tawny day and anyone who might be there to see it would see thatthe bashful mornings hurl gray mist on the stripes of sunrise.
My wife is not fond of these sunrise pictures I take with my iPhone because she knows that to take them, I am driving one handed, with my other hand holding my iPhone as I cross the Cross Island Bridge on Hilton Head Island.
I know it’s goofy but what can one do?
We live in the low country and it is flat.
There are few views to be had anywhere.
The Cross Island Bridge is one of few places you can see anything of the area.
And, as Augustus McCrae said the book Lonesome Dove, “, and “…if he missed sunrise, he would have to wait out a long stretch of heat and dust before he got to see anything so pretty.”
snow drifted, the wind crying because it could not get in by the fire
From the book Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder and the line, “But Laura and Mary listened to that lonely sound in the dark and the cold of the Big Woods, and they were not afraid.
They were cosy and comfortable in their little house made of logs, with the snow drifted around it and the wind crying because it could not get in by the fire.
It was 32 degrees Fahrenheit this morning in the low country.
I didn’t come here for the cool weather let me tell you.
Much is made of, in the News, when the snow storms in the South because the South doesn’t think about snow.
There are no snow shovels.
There is no road salt.
There are no snow plows.
There are no shoulders along the roads to put the snow or to direct your car when you lose control.
It is a big deal.
More so it seems to the people up north that the people in the south don’t prepare for snow.
Do you know why the people in the south don’t prepare for snow?
They DON’T HAVE TO!
If it snows down here, it IS a surprise … not something you have to prepare for like you do up north.
Today there is no snow, no ice.
Just cold.
And the south doesn’t think about cold.
I am sitting in my office and my fingers are numb.
My feet are blocks of ice.
I have on 4 shirts and a fleece vest.
BTW, the vest is something I picked up on sale one summer in an outfitters store in Mackinac, Michigan.
It would be just the thing, I said, to wear at work IN MICHIGAN … IN THE SUMMER TIME, when the air conditioning was set to 65.
When I started work here, the building I work in had central air and central heating, South Carolina style, which means these huge on-the-wall units in each area of the building.
We had a remote control for the unit and we could turn up the heat or turn down the AC as we wanted.
Over the summer the building went through a multi-million dollar renovation and standard central HVAC was installed.
The thermostat is NOT in my office.
I am not sure where that thermostat is located.
What I do know is that whatever room it is in, it must be about 85 degrees because in my office, on a morning where it is 32 degree’s outside, the air conditioning is running.
The sunny south.
It IS sunny outside but you cannot see the cold.
I can feel it, but I can’t see it.
What do I miss from living in the north.
The change in seasons?
Somehow that seems to be on most folks lists.
The food?
The beauty of the Great Lake State?
Nope.
I think back to warm heat.
The heat from a fire place.
The warmth of being inside where the wind is crying … because it can’t get in by the fire.
View from my office on Nov 29 – Can’t see the cold can you??
No Haiku For You 