First Looks category archive

When: Tonight, January 3, 7:00 p. m.

Where:

Meyera E. Oberndorf Central Library (Libris Room)
4100 Virginia Beach Blvd.
Virginia Beach, VA 23452

Afterthought:

There will probably be lots of seating, since Virginia Tech is playing in the Orange Bowl tonight.

More Lucovich.

A week later, most of the snow is gone and what is left is only a couple inches thick, down from a foot.

64 Fahrenheits on New Year’s Day. That is how you say “unseasonable.”

Some pics:

In the middle distance are some crows, but they skedaddled before I could get a good picture. Crows post a watcher at the highest point around; the watcher sounds the alarm if a threat appears. I know from experience that they can tell the difference between me with a rifle and me with a broomstick.

Geese on a pond very pretty walking round (apologies to String Band).

The one on the left was doing somersaults in the water.

More Auth.

The local rag considers why local forecasters blew it on the snow storm. (Weather dot com was much closer, revising its forecast upwards from 1-2 inches to 5-8 inches shortly before the snow started, but it’s not local; it’s cyber.)

I recall reading somewhere that weather forecasting is the only physical science in which success is judged on predicting the future, as opposed to explaining the past.

Afterthought:

Once, there was a grizzled old man who had a reputation for being able to predict the weather with unerring accuracy. Farmers and ranchers from miles around would journey to his cabin for his help in planning when to plant and when to harvest.

One day, after a dry spell, a delegation of farmers from the next county arrived to ask him whether it was going to rain.

“Sorry,” he said. “Can’t tell you.

Read more »

Over at the local rag.

Beware of those who claim God is on their side.

Too often, they make their own god, as James Carroll points out in the Boston Globe. A nugget:

The other side of this story is the way in which, again from the very start, we humans have used Jesus as a lens through which to project our prejudices and needs onto the screen of history. So when 1st Century Roman military occupation led to civil war among the colonized Jews, Jesus people purged him of Jewishness to imagine a Gentile Jesus (“His own knew him not’’), in radical contradiction to the first fact of his history — that he was a Jew through and through. When Christians found themselves aligned with the Roman empire, Jesus emerged as the embodiment of political power (King of Kings). When, in times of plague, the challenge was to make sense of inescapable misery, an agonized Jesus came to the fore (the bloody crucifix), as if God could will suffering as a mode of redemption. When Christianity remade itself as Christendom, a necessary reaction to material excess elevated a puritan Jesus (the cross without a corpus). Against cold rationalism, there came a warmly pious Jesus (the Sacred Heart). In line with racist eugenics, an Aryan Jesus emerged (blue eyed, light brown flowing hair). When the time came for the overthrow of the corruptions of the old order, why not a revolutionary Jesus (liberation theology)?

Must go play in the snow.

Afterthought:

The region is shut down. A foot of snow all at once would shut down any place for a day of digging out, even places that are used to it.

One thing I’ve noticed here is that the television news coverage of the weather is nowhere near as panicky as it was in the Greater Philadelphia-Wilmington Co-Prosperity Sphere. I’ll put it this way:

Here, TV News was saying,

A lot of snow. Stay inside. Stay off the roads. And now some pretty pictures of the snow and some weather maps.

And this is a place where four inches is a Big Deal.

In Philly, it would have been and no doubt is

OMG! OMG! OMG! The End of the World as We Know It, the White Horseman of the Apocalypse, We’re All Going To Drown, Look at the Weather Map of Horrors! Look! A Car in a Ditch! A Tree Fell Down! OMG! OMG! OMG!

Worst damned television news on the East Coast.

It looks like the snow is pretty much over, though the forecast calls for the possibility of another inch or two overnight.

The AP reports a foot for Norfolk (for those of you not familiar with the area, Norfolk is about a mile that way); it looks like a foot on the railing of the deck, but I haven’t gotten outside to measure it (walking in the snow scheduled for tomorrow). That would make it half again as much as the maximum predicted and the heaviest snowfall in these parts since 1989.

Snow started last night in the Bayside area of Virginia Beach at about 8:13 p. m. We were driving home from dinner touring the neighborhood looking at lights when we saw the first flakes.

The prediction of one inch had already morphed into a one of 5-8 inches, (It was resoundingly derided by one of our fellow guests at dinner. Now he has a shovel-ready project.)

It looks as if there’s already five inches on the railing and it’s still snowing heavily.

Same view, five hours later:

Read more »

Science 2.0 has some suggestions from the world of science. My favorite:

Christmas is about a birth but there’s a star that lets everyone know where it happens. So first go take a look at this astronomer’s explanation for the Star Of Bethlehem – planetary conjunction or Christmas miracle? Yes. Bonus: it’s sure to enrage all the left wing atheists you know.

Check out the links in the Old Time Radio section just added to the sidebar below the news feeds, over there.

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Andy Borowitz on Goldman’s sacks.
Follow the link for the full report.

In a rare press conference, the usually reclusive Prince of Darkness defended Goldman’s bonuses today, welcoming reporters at his apartment in New York’s Trump Tower.

“I don’t doubt for a minute that my friends at Goldman deserved those bonuses,” Satan said, adding that “buying their souls was the best investment I ever made.”

When I was a young ‘un, boys learned about cars. Now the only cars they learn about are in GTA. Cars are also much more complicated now; the era of the shade-tree mechanic has ended.

Jennifer Waters has column full of good car maintenance tips at MarketWatch. A nugget:

“Probably the most common cause of the check-engine light is that the gas cap is not on tight enough,” Reed said. The sensor has responded to the extra oxygen going through the gas line and it will go off once the cap has been tightened or the entire tank has been used.

Aside: When my check engine light came on, Donny replaced the gas cap. Problem solved.