Average. . .

. . . Schmaverage . . .


(from http://science.time.com/2014/01/22/average-temperatures-in-january-warm-despite-cold/)
"January 2014 will go down as the month we all learned about the polar vortex (even if meteorologists have known about it for decades). It’s the month when it got so cold that Minnesota closed all schools for the first time since 1997, when much of the Midwest was more frigid than the North Pole, when even Tampa experienced temperatures below freezing. (As of this writing) much of the eastern half of the country is suffering through another bitter cold snap—not caused by the vortex, FYI—one that has blanked the East Coast in heavy snow. Winter, in short, has felt miserable.

But here’s the surprise: on a historical and national level, it hasn’t actually been all that cold. With data from Weather Underground, I calculated the average high daily temperature from Jan. 1 through Jan. 22 for the 10 largest cities in the U.S. The results make this winter look surprisingly average:

    Jan. 2014 Average High                Historical Average High
    New York:         38 F (3.3 C)          36 F (2.2 C)
    Los Angeles:     76 F (24.4 C)        68 F (20 C)
    Chicago:            27 F (-2.7 C)          32 F (0 C)
    Houston:          64 F (17.8 C)          63 F (17.2 C)
    Philadelphia:   40 F (4.4 C)           41 F (5 C)
    Phoenix:           73 F (22. 8 C)         67 F (19.4 C)
    San Antonio:   66 F (18.9 C)           63 F (17.2 C)
    San Diego:        72 F (22.2 C)          65 F (18.3 C)
    Dallas:               58 F (14.4 C)           57 F (13.9 C)
    San Jose:          66 F (18.9 C)           58 F (14.4 C)

What do we learn from this? Well for one thing, there’s an East Coast bias in news coverage, at least of the weather. But while it truly has been historically cold on average for much of the Midwest, for most of the rest of the country the average temperatures have been around normal, or even a little above. And the West Coast is experiencing an unusually hot winter (one that has compounded the record drought in California). Average high temperatures have been further above normal in Los Angeles and San Jose than they’ve been below average in Chicago. Anchorage has been positively balmy—by Alaskan standards—with average daily highs that are 11 F (6.1 C) greater than the historical average for January. . ."

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Slough, Dough, Cough. . .

(from The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs The Dough by Dr. Seuss)
". . . Dearest creature in creation, study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy, make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word, sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you with such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery, daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar, solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral, kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind, scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet, bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food, nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad, toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK when you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, friend and fiend, alive and live. . ."


. . . and oh yeah. . . another take on Mr. Graboski's
Slough of Despond
written by John P. Graboski
(OHO rehearsal recording-
Jay Graboski, David Reeve and Ray Jozwiak are OHO)





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Fat-ig-yew. . .

,\

. . . hey man!! . . . it happens!!!


It's not that I feel inadequate or sub-par for getting tired.  There are only twenty-four hours in a day you know.  So you sleep for five or six hours, you get up good and early for the upcoming adventure of a day, you put in a solid  seven-to-eight hours at the office, you commute, you prepare (or assist in preparing) a reasonably exciting and delectable evening meal with a little family time, you consume the aforesaid exciting and delectable (blah, blah, blah) thing in a relatively relaxed manner because, as you may well know, the speedy consumption of your food does not aid digestion, weight management or your general health, then you may have thirty to ninety (depending upon the complexity of the preparation of the exciting and [blah, blah, blah, blah- YOU KNOW!] ) for a favorite hobby, pass-time, television show - OR YOUR PASSION!!!,  and then it's time for the sleep-time ablutions and ceremony before you can finally jump into bed for another restful five to six . . . and then . . .

DO IT AGAIN!!!

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Did You See . . .

. . . how your reps voted on cutting military pensions in Congress? . . .

. . . then you probably saw this . . .


(http://reason.com/24-7/2014/01/21/senate-could-vote-to-restore-military-pe)
The Senate may consider a proposal to restore cuts to the pensions of working-age military retirees as early as Monday, according to a Senate aide.

The measure was inserted in an omnibus veterans bill sponsored Thursday by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and would repeal the $6 billion in cuts made to veterans’ pensions included in the 2013 Bipartisan Budget Act.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) invoked “Rule 14” last Thursday, which will allow the bill to bypass committee votes and go straight to the Senate floor, an aide for Sanders said

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Ain't No Drag . . .

Bassist Larry Ridley recalls . . .


(from Straight No Chaser; The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk by Leslie Gourse)
". . . He was cool with me.  We'd talk about a lot of things. He would always have interesting kinds of ways of being very succinct and candid about his insights. One time someone made a comment to us-during the civil rights days, and things were pretty touchy, black power and all.  I had a big Afro and dashikis. We were very conscious of this whole movement. This white guy said something about "you boys" this and "you boys" that to me. I turned to Thelonious and said, "I'm tired of these motherfuckers calling us boys. They don't have to go through all that. We're men." Thelonious said to me, "Ain't no drag, Larry, because everybody wants to be young." I said, "Okay, I'll think on that one." So he could really turn things into nothing with a few words. And there I was, upset, with my fist up in the air about respect. It was interesting. . . "

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Glaciers and Music . . .

(from http://www.priweb.org/ed/finger_lakes/nystate_geo3.html)
". . . The Finger Lakes consist of 11 long, narrow, roughly parallel lakes, oriented north-south as fingers of a pair of outstretched hands. The southern ends have high walls, cut by steep gorges. Two of the lakes (Seneca and Cayuga) are among the deepest in North America and have bottoms below sea level. These lakes all formed over the last two million years by glacial carving of old stream valleys. Ithaca is located at the south end of Cayuga Lake, the longest and the second deepest of the Finger Lakes. Cayuga is 38.1 miles long and 435 feet deep (53 feet below sea level) at its deepest spot. The actual depth of carved rock is well over twice as deep, but it has been filled with sediments; there may be as much as 1000 feet of glacial sediment in the deep rock trough below the lakebed.

The Finger Lakes originated as a series of northward-flowing rivers that existed in what is now central New York State. Around two million years ago the first of numerous continental glaciers moved southward from the Hudson Bay area, initiating the Pleistocene glaciation, commonly known as the "Ice age."

The "Ice age" was really a series of many advances and retreats of glaciers. The Finger Lakes were probably carved by several of these episodes. Ice sheets more than two miles thick flowed southward, parallel but opposite to the flow of the rivers, gouging deep trenches into these river valleys. Traces of most of the earlier glacial events have vanished, but much evidence remains of the last one or two glaciers that covered New York.

The latest glacial episode was most extensive around 21,000 years ago, when glaciers covered almost the entire state. Around 19,000 years ago, the climate warmed, and the glacier began to retreat, disappearing entirely from New York for the last time around 11,000 years ago. . ."

There MUST be music involved here somewhere. Yes, Keuka Lake is one of the finger lakes. . . and yet another iteration of my composition 'Keuka' demanded my attention this weekend. . .


Keuka
©2013 Raymond M. Jozwiak 





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Tull or Till? . . .

(from https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=9036126688324230916#editor/target=post;postID=5685428847922011660;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=1;src=link)
Jethro Tull,  (born 1674, Basildon, Berkshire, Eng.—died Feb. 21, 1741, Prosperous Farm, near Hungerford, Berkshire), English agronomist, agriculturist, writer, and inventor whose ideas helped form the basis of modern British agriculture. Tull trained for the bar, to which he was called in 1699. But for the next 10 years he chose to operate his father’s farm in Oxfordshire, on which about 1701 he perfected a horse-drawn seed drill that economically sowed the seeds in neat rows. This was a notable advance over the usual practice of scattering the seeds by hand. In 1709 Tull bought a farm of his own in Berkshire. While later traveling in France and Italy, he was impressed by the cultivation methods in use in the vineyards, wherein the rows of earth between the vines had been pulverized. This reduced the need for manure and increased aeration and the access of water to and from plant roots, though Tull mistakenly believed that earth was the food of plants and that pulverization made it easier for plants to absorb it. He developed a horse-drawn hoe and successfully adopted the vineyard method to his farm. His success led to the publication of his The New Horse Houghing Husbandry: Or an Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation (1731). Tull’s methods were initially subjected to violent attack, but they were eventually adopted by the large landowners and laid the basis for more modern and efficient British farming.

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