We're in the middle of the continent, just about. It's hard for a mass of wet air to get this far in winter. If there's a lot of snow, usually it's west or north or east of here. We're far enough from the oceans that we can only get a lot of snow at any one time under rare circumstances; otherwise it's more typical for us to get a lot of small storms of 2-3-4 inches (as was the case in 2014) rather than one big one of 15-24 inches (like 1967 or 2000).
And thankfully, yesterday, it was too warm to snow. We got a lot of rain, and if that had fallen as snow I don't think I would have been able to dig us out without assistance.
Of course, it does happen; in 1967 a system stalled over the Chicago area and we got pounded. (I was approximately the size of a softball at the time, and somwhere there is film of my mother and I shoveling snow in the blizzard. I am not visible in the picture--see above, "softball"--but I am in it.) We had similar--though less extreme--blizzards in 1979, 2000, 2011, and a year ago. But that kind of snow generally does not happen here, which is yet another reason I would be hesitant to leave the midwest for other climates.
Considering the fact that it just rained and rained yesterday, I'm glad it was unseasonably warm. Otherwise that would have sucked.
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In California here's how you avoid raping your wife:
You: Good evening, honey. May I hug and kiss you hello?Under no circumstances are you to do the following, as that is SEXUAL ASSAULT! and probably R_A_P_E_!_!_!:
Wife: You may.
[hug, kiss]
You: Hey, gorgeous! [swoop, hug, kiss]Even if she gives the appearance of accepting and enjoying your misogynous pawing at her sacred person, she didn't give consent, and you are therefore a RAPIST!
Wife: Tee hee!
This has been a public service bulletin for our friends in California.
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As long as we're sure this isn't an imaging artifact it's pretty cool. The Red Square Nebula (it's more of a rectangle) has an awful large number of straight lines. But if you saw something like the 1987A remnant from the side, that's approximately what it would look like, they think.
Well, whatevs.
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So, I thought The People vs. O.J. Simpson would be a dreadful show, but Mrs. Fungus had the DVR record it (I always want to say "taped" but there is no tape in there) and we watched it last night with the proviso that I would go do something else if I stopped being interested.
I didn't.
I am ashamed to admit that--thanks to the wife's predilection for The Soup, a now-defunct pop culture show--I knew who the Kardashians are, and could point out to my wife that "She's got her own talk show now, and she married Bruce Jenner," and other nonsense. Yeah, the OJ imbroglio in the mid 1990s gave us all that horseshit. Thanks, Juice!
The cops' first encounter with Kato Kaelin, the night of the murders, let me to (mis)quote The Door Into Summer: "He ain't drugged; he's just stupid!"
The story is prefaced with a discussion of the Rodney King fiaso, of course. Need to set the stage! And Johnny Cochran is shown as having a closet with enough suits in it for an army, so many that he needs one of those revolving racks you see in a dry cleaner's, and he complains that he hasn't got anything to wear--when he lives in an extremely rich part of Los Angeles and has about fifty thousand dollars' worth of clothing and accessories.
Anyway, the story looks like it might be more interesting than I thought it would be, but we'll see if I stick with this or if I just give up because of all the horseshit surrounding the whole thing.
* * *
The Expanse finished its first season last night. So far it's been pretty fair dinkum. It's hard SF--about as hard as TV can manage, anyway--and I'm looking forward to seeing more of it.
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Incidentally, yesterday is one of a very few Groundhog Days where it was cloudy the entire time.
