DIARY
– YESTERDAY – Worked all day. Got a little emotional in the end as I was reading the news from back home, listening to Pat S.’s industrial compilations (There is No Time; I was looking for a track listing, but I couldn’t find the thing anywhere on Amazon), and wading through a stack of surprisingly tangled Montana tax forms. If filing taxes was like that for me, I’d probably hate them too. The colloquium and class went well yesterday, but I was very tired when I finally got home.
– WEATHER – AccuWeather summarizes the weather in January:
People are starting to ask what happened to winter. Well, it is not officially over, but many locations across the country are going to report all-time record warm Januarys Wednesday. The reason for this is that the jet stream has remained well to the north over the past five weeks. This pattern has locked up arctic air over northern Canada. At the same time, a mild flow of air been flowing from the Pacific Ocean westward across the country. The result has been an unusually wet weather over the Northwest, while the Southwest is locked in a drought pattern. With the jet well to the north, the snow track has been mainly confined along the Canadian boarder. As the storms track east, a few have managed to tap into Gulf moisture, bringing rain, instead of snow to the eastern half of the United States.
– ASTRONOMY – Cosmo Dogood says:
Over the next week use binoculars to watch Saturn slip past the Beehive star cluster in Cancer.
I might take a stab at it.
– TODAY – Is Hegira, the Islamic New Year.
LAST WORDS OF THE WEEK
from Last Words.
– “Only from the cold, my friend.”
– Bailly, Jean Sylvain (1736-1793)
Jean Bailly, a member of the French Academy of Sciences, became the first revolutionary mayor of Paris in 1789. Eventually, however, the reign of terror ensnared him and he was sentenced to death. On the scaffold, awaiting the guillotine, he was heckled by a spectator who noticed that he was trembling.
QUESTION OF THE DAY
Which Disney character would you be?
END OF POST.