So, I was taking some pictures this evening of USC national championship paraphernalia around the house, preparing for a future blog post in the unhappy eventuality that, sometime soon, some of said paraphernalia may refer to events that, according to the NCAA, never happened. In the course of this, I took the following picture of an item that refers to… Read more »
As noted earlier, today is Atlantic hurricane season’s opening day. But the Pacific hurricane season starts a half-month earlier, on May 15, and it has already produced a landfalling system — Tropical Storm Agatha — which has killed more than 150 people in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and produced this enormous, building-swallowing sinkhole in Guatemala City: Photo courtesy of… Read more »
Happy Monday Tuesday! In need of something new to worry about? Start off the new week, and month, right — with a new source of PANIC!!!!!!!!!: [A new plant-blighting virus, called] brown streak, is now ravaging cassava crops in a great swath around Lake Victoria, threatening millions of East Africans who grow the tuber as their staple food. Although it… Read more »
Today is the “official” start date, climatologically speaking, of the Atlantic hurricane season. As I’ve pointed out before, it’s really an arbitrary date, with no special significance except that the National Hurricane Center begins publishing its Tropical Weather Outlook four times a day. Speaking of which: TROPICAL WEATHER OUTLOOK NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL 800 AM EDT TUE JUN… Read more »
Me: “I’m going to put up our American flag, because it’s Memorial Day weekend, and Memorial Day is a very patriotic holiday.” Loyette: “Are we going to the holiday?” Me: “It’s not a holiday you go to, sweetie, it’s a holiday you celebrate with your family and friends and your community, to honor the brave soldiers who fought for our… Read more »
I’ve written extensively in the past on why I think preseason tropical activity forecasts are generally fairly useless. And indeed, trying to specifically predict a particular number of storms is pretty silly. Although hurricane seasons are medium-period events, occupying the gray area between long-term weather and short-term climate, individual hurricanes are short-period events, influenced heavily by other short-period events, which… Read more »
[Kudos to Terry Corcoran for coming up with an alternative title for this blog post: Brendan’s Grand Unified Theory of PANIC!!!!!! Hahaha. Brilliant. -ed.] I had an interesting conversation with Melissa Clouthier (and, chiming in at one point, Doug Mataconis) on Twitter today. It started with me criticizing Melissa for, in my view, propagating patently unfair criticisms about President Obama,… Read more »
Over 72% of the people who voted in a Fox News online poll think private businesses should be allowed to discriminate however they wish. To say this is appalling is an understatement.
From the “I don’t know what I’m talking about, but look at this pretty chart” files… Those are stock prices — specifically, the Dow and the S&P 500 — over the last 20 years. Visually, it starts to look a bit like we had 7 or 8 years of genuine growth, followed by Bubble #1 (the tech bubble), then Bubble… Read more »
Law & Order, arguably the Val Kilmer of procedural TV shows, is apparently ending this year after, I don’t know, let’s say 349 seasons. And while that’s a shame for the middle aged and shut-ins who cannot tolerate watching anything but the same show over and over again, it got me to thinking about what else has had a good… Read more »