The Weather.

Leo

Well-known member
partly cloudy with temps topping out at 81, that constitutes a comfortable day at this point.

btw, is this a dinner-of-the-day offshoot thread?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Have you forgotten 2018 already
That was nice but I don't think it was as good as the spring we've just had.

Or maybe I just enjoyed it more because I was soaking up the sun in the garden at home rather than sat in an office/laboratory.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
May was the driest or sunniest on record.

After 2 of the hottest summers ever, back II back, this summer has been alright, apart from Covid, culture wars and Liverpool fans for relatives.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
i don't think i've really felt so disturbed by wind before. this one feel particualry fractious and gusty and chaotic. impossible to feel settled when the air is unsettled. impossible to feel balanced when the air is unbalanced. it's not even a stable counter-force. a push you can oppose or submit to.
Apparently the fact that it's so windy in San Francisco has been suggested as a reason for the city's abnormally high rates of mental illness. Though I guess you can add that to the obvious fact of it being full of drug casualties.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I love the idea of wind turbines exhausting the wind supply, btw. Sounds like something Trump would come out with to explain why renewables are an evil communist liberal plot and we should just stick to nice harmless coal instead.
 

Leo

Well-known member
california folklore, the santa ana winds (aka, devil winds) cause people to go loopy.
 

version

Well-known member
Weather, communication, code, interpretation, influence: these things have always gone together. For both Seneca and Aristotle, the airy region was a region of conveyance, of transferral and translation, in which "meteors" or atmospheric phenomena... were produced by the influence of the celestial sphere on the sublunary one. For Virgil, too, weather told a coded tale of influence, of cause and effect, and hence was decryptable: his Georgics describes a world of signs in which the movement of ants, swallows, frogs, and ravens can be read and interpreted as can the appearance of the clouds, sun and moon. Seventeenth-century English Puritans treated the sky as a switchboard connecting them to God, divining the portents in its storms and lightshows. The anonymous author of the 1641 text A Strange Wonder, or, The Cities Amazement (subtitled News from Heaven) describes exceptional meteorological events as God's "signes and Tokens," "prodigious ensignes," "ominous harbingers," "Cyphers," "notable Messengers." Londoners were so addicted to such Cyphers that, according to Defoe, during the plague years they scoured the clouds constantly for "shapes and figures, representations and appearances." It's standard to think of the atmosphere as a medium... but we should go further. Weather is and always has been more than just a medium: it is also media.

[...]

When language grapples with the weather there is slippage and there is displacement. Johnson's quip that "when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather" is an easy one to make; Gwendolen's intuition (in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest) that "whenever people talk about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else" is much more astute. For centuries manuals and charts have tried to map meteorological phenomena onto social ones, from The English Chapmans and Travellers Almanack for The Year of Christ 1697 (which aligns the ten-week frost with the gunpowder plot, the time when "the whole heaven seemed to burn with fire" with the invention of the art of printing) to Election Weather Tables compiled by today's Met office (Labour only wins in fair weather, apparently; that fateful day in 1979 was foul) or the Weather-to-Stock Market Correspondence Graphs studied by the more esoteric among our economists. The weather unfolds endlessly across non-meteorological discourses, across Other Stuff. It's an index both of truth and of all that's random, meaningless. Like all media, it bears a plethora of messages - perhaps even the message - while simultaneously supplying no more than conversational, neutral white noise.

-- Tom McCarthy, Meteomedia, or Why London's Weather Is in the Middle of Everything
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yesterday was a bit cooler... low 30s maybe, but so muggy and still and heavy. Felt really close all day and, of course, it culminated in an absolutely spectacular lightning storm. For ages I couldn't work out what was going on, the sky kept lighting up like a strobe but silently and everywhere. After a couple of hours of this - maybe around midnight - the storm moved closer and we kept seeing the sky split by these absolutely amazing megaforks of electrical light.
We decided to walk down to the river and I guess the storm was right overhead... incredible to see and hear, possibly a bit dangerous, I dunno really. Then it broke and there was about ten minutes of hard rain - but not the biblical deluge that the preceding craziness had promised.
A few minutes after it stopped it was already hot again, we were perspiring as we walked up the hill, buffeted by gusts of warm air.
Today we're back on the beach- it's as though it never happened.
 

Leo

Well-known member
hot as hell since Saturday, close to 100 yesterday.

Fahrenheit is so much sexier than centigrade. "96 degrees in the shade", temps breaking 100. you guys have "oh, it's 31 today!". no comparison.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Shit. Sun came out for 20mins, then fucked off. What a cunt. Clouds gathering, just to rub it in.

Rain, however, is character forming.
 

Leo

Well-known member
wicked thunder and lightening storm on Wednesday night, one crack of lightening sounded like it was right above us, knocked our cable TV box and flat screen out, unable to turn them back on. the electrical outlet in the wall where they were plugged in still works, so it appears the lightening somehow came through the cable line and fried the cable box and TV (since it was connected to the cable box). crazy shit, lucky it didn't cause some sort of electrical fire in the wiring, which is really old in our building.

now on hold with the cable company to get a new cable box, not sure if they are sending technicians out to do installations, hopefully they can deliver and it do it myself. life without TV isn't a big deal, glad it didn't knock out our internet connection as well.

does the UK get thunder and lightening often? summers here can be nuts.
 

Leo

Well-known member
we actually have a friend from England who's father died due to being struck by lightening, so I guess it does happen sometimes. what a way to go, geez. what are the chances?
 

craner

Beast of Burden
wicked thunder and lightening storm on Wednesday night, one crack of lightening sounded like it was right above us, knocked our cable TV box and flat screen out, unable to turn them back on. the electrical outlet in the wall where they were plugged in still works, so it appears the lightening somehow came through the cable line and fried the cable box and TV (since it was connected to the cable box). crazy shit, lucky it didn't cause some sort of electrical fire in the wiring, which is really old in our building.

now on hold with the cable company to get a new cable box, not sure if they are sending technicians out to do installations, hopefully they can deliver and it do it myself. life without TV isn't a big deal, glad it didn't knock out our internet connection as well.

does the UK get thunder and lightening often? summers here can be nuts.

Not often. We all saw your storm on Twitter: a video of lightning hitting the Statue of Liberty.
 

Leo

Well-known member
that's actually what I meant by "glad it didn't knock out our internet connection as well". so yes, life is still good despite it all.
 

version

Well-known member
we actually have a friend from England who's father died due to being struck by lightening, so I guess it does happen sometimes. what a way to go, geez. what are the chances?
"Most people’s lives have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They’re the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life — do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that’s what! A-and right across the point, it’s minus infinity! How’s that for sudden change, eh? Infinite miles per hour changing to the same speed in reverse, all the gnat’s-ass or red cunt hair of the delta-t across the point. That’s getting hit by lightning, folks." (Gravity's Rainbow, 664)
 

muser

Well-known member
I just found out today about fulgurite the stuff that forms in sand when lightening strikes, some of it strangely looks like the scars it leaves when you get struck.

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