Writer, traveler and international woman of mystery Buffy Holt recently paid a vist back to the West Virginia mountains where she got her start. This trip back she received some more timeless wisdom from her nearly-timeless grandfather, “Pa.” Pa still chops the wood to heat his home and carries jugs of water from the spring into the house. He also fills his coal bins and freezers and works hard to provide for his family’s needs. Hard times? bookmark to:
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Author Archives: The Night Writer
I am thankful for: Health
It’s Thanksgiving week and I’m busy finishing up projects at home and work before jumping in the car with the wife and kids and Ben, heading for the family gathering a good ten hours away.
As I reflect on the things I’m thankful for, I must include those of you who have made it a point to visit here regularly.
Yes, I write this blog to amuse and test myself, but I appreciate your interest and I want to have something (hopefully) interesting here each time you look in. As such, I don’t want to let this blog “go dark” in the coming week while I’m traveling and enjoying my family so I’ve collected a few past posts that you may or may not have seen that illustrate the things I’m thankful for and collecting them here by theme in the coming days for those of you who take the time from your own obligations and celebrations to stop by.
Today’s theme: I am thankful for health.
Night in the Emergency Room
Of Migraines and the Fear of Man
The Difference Between Men and Women: #436
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Things that I am thankful for: Family
It’s Thanksgiving week and I’m busy finishing up projects at home and work before jumping in the car with the wife and kids and Ben, heading for the family gathering a good ten hours away.
As I reflect on the things I’m thankful for, I must include those of you who have made it a point to visit here regularly.
Yes, I write this blog to amuse and test myself, but I appreciate your interest and I want to have something (hopefully) interesting here each time you look in. As such, I don’t want to let this blog “go dark” in the coming week while I’m traveling and enjoying my family so I’ve collected a few past posts that you may or may not have seen that illustrate the things I’m thankful for and collecting them here by theme in the coming days for those of you who take the time from your own obligations and celebrations to stop by.
Today’s theme: I am thankful for family.
Dad to the Bone
My Head in Her Hands, and a Wistful Mr. Henri Looks Back
The Knowing
What a Dad’s to Do
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Someone has a fever
They’re making Dr. James Hansen sweat again. From a Christopher Booker column in the Telegraph, The World Has Never Seen Such Freezing Heat (emphasis mine):
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs – run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph – GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic – in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.
A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.
If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)
Yet last week’s latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen’s methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.
Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising “very much faster” than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.
Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world’s governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.
HT: The Lumberjack
In a related story; EU Facing Revolt Over Climate Change Enforcement:
The European Union is facing a revolt from poorer members over tough climate change targets at a time when the global economy is heading for recession.
Italy has teamed up with seven east and central European countries – Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia – to threaten a veto over Brussels legislation that implements an EU target to cut Europe’s CO2 emissions 20 per cent by 2020.
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Troy eager to drop Childress
Ex-Vikings “receiver” Troy Williamson says he’s still mad at the way Coach Brad Childress treated him and wants to “duke it out” with Childress at this weekend’s Vikings/Jaquars game (Williamson now sits for the Jags).
Williamson, now in Jacksonville, said Wednesday he lost respect for his former coach last year and would like to “duke it out” with him when the Jaguars host the Vikings on Sunday.
“We can meet on the 50-yard line and we can go at it,” Williamson said.
The 6-foot-1, 200-pound receiver said he liked his chances against Childress, too, especially with a few inches and at least 10 pounds on the coach. Williamson even said he would fight with both hands tied behind his back.
I think Williamson has an unfair advantage in that he always played as if both hands were tied behind his back anyway so he’s used to it. If he did connect, however, watch out! Williamson’s “hands of stone” would make Roberto Duran curl up in his corner and cry.
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The long way
the economic freedom that conservatives used to believe in,
and the personal freedom that America used to believe in.”
— Doug Mataconis, Below the Beltway blog
The building where I work was envisioned by its famous architect to have two reflecting pools alongside it. Therefore it features two rectangular cement depressions on its west side. In the nearly 30 years that I’ve been coming to this site, “envisioning” the pools is about all you’ve been able to do because when they are filled with water they leak prodigiously and incorrigibly, despite many efforts over the decades to correct the problem. The property managers ultimately gave it up as a lost cause and left them empty, despite my suggestion that they would make wonderful planters.
Earlier this year, however, the building was sold to new owners who have taken up this grail. As a result workmen have been milling around for the last several weeks, measuring and marking and ultimately tearing up sections of the bottom of the pools; the short, repeated bursts of jackhammers on cement sounding just like the staccato ripping of a German MG42 in the WWII Brothers in Arms xBox game I like to play in my spare time. In the game when you hear that sound you get down or you die and I involuntarily ducked my head a couple of inches the first time I heard that rat-a-tat as I approached my office a couple of weeks ago.
The larger pool runs the length of the building, while the smaller is to the north, separated by a 30 foot wide plaza that leads to the portico at the front of the building. The plaza provides the path for me to get into the building as I walk from the light rail stop. A couple of weeks ago a tall, chain-link construction fence formed a parenthetical bracket along the north end of the large pool to keep gawking civilians out of the work area; for our safety, of course. Personally, I would be able to control myself and my curiosity enough to stay clear, but you know you can’t trust the masses.
A day or two later a similar construction framed the south end of the smaller pool, creating a fenced path across the plaza, still about 30 feet wide. As construction has proceeded, however, the fences have been moved closer to each other as the plaza itself is bisected to lay a drain pipe. Last week we were down to an 8-foot-wide access across the plaza. Ugly, and a little inconvenient, but at least we could get through.
Today when I walked up the 8-foot access was gone and solid fencing extended all the way across the plaza. To get in I had to walk a quarter of a block around to the north and come up on the building from the other side while the chill November wind continued to abuse my ears. Tomorrow I’ll come via the Skyway route from the train, which means, ironically, I’ll actually take an underground tunnel for the last block to reach my objective.
It’s been getting colder for some time now; it could be a long winter.
my grandfather enjoyed.”
–Rev. Dr. Tom Jestus
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Take a moment, Tiger Lilly, then back to the keyboard!
From today’s Writer’s Almanac:
It’s the birthday of a young man who became a best-selling author as a teenager, Christopher Paolini, born in California (1983) and raised near Paradise Valley, Montana. He was homeschooled, and when he finished high school at age 15, he had a lot of time on his hands, so he decided to write a fantasy novel. He began Eragon, finished it a year later, at age 16. He spent a second year revising that draft, and then gave it to his parents. They loved it, and in 2002 Eragon was self-published through the family company. The Paolini family embarked on an exhausting tour to promote Christopher’s book. They went to 135 promotional events that first year, dressed in red and black medieval costumes. Paolini got offers from both Random House and Scholastic, and in August of 2003 — when Paolini was still 19 — the book was published by a division of Random House/Knopf.
The book went straight to the number three spot of the New York Times Bestseller List. Paolini has written two best-selling sequels to Eragon, and he is at work on a fourth book.
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Only 40 shopping days left
Peter at Half a World Away discovered an amazing product in an airline shopping magazine during one of his recent trips from half of the world to the other: the Potty Putter. And if the name isn’t enough to pique your interest or close the sale, here’s the text from the ad:
You know those days when you’ve eaten something that hasn’t agreed with you and you can’t be too far away from the bathroom? Well, this is the perfect companion for such occasions: The Toilet Golf. The package includes: a putter with articifial turf, a miniature club, golf balls and flag. It also comes with a very useful sign to hang on the bathroom door “Do Not Disturb: Golf Game in Progress”.
…
The Potty Putter is a true innovation in toilet entertainment and the perfect gift for the golf (or toilet) enthusiast in your life!
No, I don’t want one (though I could use a new bug bat since the last one died). Peter thinks it is obviously the gift for the person who has everything.
I think it’s the perfect gift for those idiots at professional golf tournaments who love to shout “IT’S IN THE HOLE!”
(Yes, that was potty-humor from me. At least I won’t show a picture of the product. You have to go here for that).
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Proud Poppi
Sometimes the girls call me “Poppi”. I think it started when we were in Italy a couple of years ago and the phrase, “Gelato, Poppi!” was so cosmopolitan — and effective. As they have gotten older, calling me Poppi is an affectionate endearment in so many ways that “Great Hairy Thunderer” isn’t. And today Poppi is just about popping his buttons.
I wrote last week about the Mall Diva’s debut with her friend Casii at The Black Sheep’s Open Mic Night. Last night they hit another open stage, this time at the Dunn Brothers coffee shop over on Grand in St. Paul. Whereas the first outing was for teens, the Dunn Bros. stage is a long-standing, bi-weekly event for a pretty much adult audience. There are a lot of Old Folkie types there, including one guy who looked like the ghost of Tom Joad but with even less meat on his bones, and another guy who relished the opportunity to stand on a stage with a guitar and a microphone and drop high-decibel f-bombs — not because he was outraged, but simply because he enjoyed it, I think. The girls more than held their own, singing the same three songs they sang previously, and engaging the audience which featured a lot of bright, smiling faces and bobbing heads. One guy was even moved to sing along with them as they sang, “It is well, it is well, with my soul.”
I remember the first time my wife and I heard the young Diva sing in public. It was for a Christmas program when she was in second grade. Neither her mother or I have a lick of singing ability and we weren’t expecting any in our progeny so when Faith told us she had a “solo” we figured she meant a speaking part. Lo and behold — or should I say, “Hark!” — she sang! My wife and I were flabbergasted. Never had we dared expect such a blessing! She later showed herself to be a quick study musically as well, once picking out a tune by ear on the piano even before she had had lessons. Later, when she had been taking lessons for a year, she played a recital with such skill and élan that others thought she’d been studying for year. To see her and Casii taking such confident and polished steps on a public stage is nearly enough to make me burst.
But that’s not all. As Tiger Lilly posted on Saturday, she just won a short-story writing contest sponsored by the Dakota County libraries. The contest was to write a ghost-story or thriller (the deadline was Halloween) and she took time off from the novel (or novels) she’s already writing to knock out something that came to mind. As with her sister, I was stunned with the result.
Stunned, but not surprised, if that’s possible. I’ve given her writing assignments in the past, and we’ve seen her skills posting here on this blog but those were all things I asked her to write or some inspired silliness for public consumption. True, there were the series of “Larry the Guinea Pig” books she wrote when she was little, and she’s let me peak before at some of her work in progress that was pretty impressive, but she didn’t let her mother or I see this short story before she turned it in. Naturally, I expected her to win a prize because I figured she could out-write people her age, but when I read her entry after she posted it here I was awed at how skilled and mature her writing was.
If you haven’t followed the link from her Saturday post you really need to do so. This is not a cute story that a teen-ager would write with the literary equivalent of “like” and “you know” phrasing or heavy-handed prose and awkward symbolism. The story grabs you from the first, one-sentence paragraph and she shows a lot of writerly techniques in phrasing and repetition that you would expect to see — if at all — in an older, more experienced writer. It is also, definitely, a “chiller” which I wouldn’t expect from my sweet little angel, but I can definitely pick up on some of the bent from the “Dead Like Me” TV series we’ve been laughing at lately.
Seeing such a polished, fully-formed story was amazing even with my high expectations for her. It’s both exciting and motivating to see this from her. I know she’s been pounding away, doing at least 1700 words a day, as part of the National Novel Writing Month event and I figure if she’s going to be doing this level of work I’m going to have to raise my own game or cede the writing title in the family to her. Either that or perhaps change the name of this blog to “The Night and Day Writers”!
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What he said
Stop for just a moment, or 3 …
3
by John BerrymanSole watchman of the flying stars, guard me
against my flicker of impulse lust: teach me
to see them as sisters & daughters. Sustain
my grand endeavours: husbandship & crafting.Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams;
achieve in me patience till the thing be done,
a careful view of my achievement come.Make me from time to time the gift of the shoulder.
When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey.
Empty my heart toward Thee.
Let me pace without fear the common path of death.Cross am I sometimes with my little daughter:
fill her eyes with tears. Forgive me, Lord.
Unite my various soul,
sole watchman of the wide & single stars.
From “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”, “3” by John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937-1971. © The Noonday Press, 1989.
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