In the northern latitudes there are four months that are dreaded, that can chill a man's soul even as he sits in the warmth of the summer sun, and they are known as November, December, January, February. These four horsemen of the freezocalypse are merciless, grim, dark, bitter months – which is why Northern cultures since prehistory have organized big excessive festivals and holidays in them, because otherwise too many people would hibernate, go insane, and/or commit suicide.
Hence December with its put-on Christmas cheer, its casual holiday alcoholism, and its cozy nights with the family you have avoided most of the year even though you all love each other, supposedly. Hence... uh... Christmas, and the reason it's so big is because the corporate society we belong to has to keep us 'goal oriented' so that we don't drop out of their nonsense and discover actual meanings to life and think critically about the system we were born into and if any of it is actually right. But also, it keeps the shadows away, and turns darkness at 4:30 P.M. into 'coziness' as opposed to 'I viciously hate Daylight Savings Time'. And there's the religious significance, and the butt-hurt War on Christmas style rants from bigoted ignoramuses who think the LIBERAL LIBERATION FORCE are going to force them into sensitivity camps.
In December, the remembrance of the people we have to grudgingly buy gifts for (because they give us gifts and WILL judge us if we don't do the adult thing) will at some point cause us to enter that holy tabernacle of consumerism - the Christmastime store. It doesn't matter if it's a mall, a boutique shop, or even a corner store: get ready to hear some jingly, jangly Christmas cacophony that will probably make you feel worse even if you are mentally damaged enough to find joy in a season peoples from all over the southern world associate solely with the word 'forbearance'.
But that's all beside the point. Today I would like to compare the dreary cousins of December, two months that are important solely because they are months that people have to live through in order to get to classically 'good' months. November is proudly mediocre and even in a good year it's the month where the dying plants have mostly all died, the skies are grey and get a darker a bit more quickly each day, and any good weather is The Last Good Weather of the Year. February is colder, bleaker, and generally worse in every way, but it's also closer to the redemption of Late March, where the weather starts to feel amazingly fresh and the promise of life is in the air.
Showing posts with label winter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label winter. Show all posts
1/10/14
North America's Ice Clusterfuckmas: A Retrospective, A Remembrance, a Reverie; pt. 1
Transformers were blowing up, lighting the dark with that eerie blue glow, as if very slow and quiet lightning was striking. Giant and even perfect storms were inbound. Even staunch winter people were feeling dread in the pits of their stomachs. Ice was everywhere, and Christmas was around the corner.
When all was said and done tens of thousands in Ontario were without power for Christmas and nobody was talking much about Rob Ford, who was insisting it was not a state of emergency kind of thing. Really, on that point, I would agree with him. In Canada snowfall, and even ice leading to power outages, is generally considered as not exactly a cause for paralysis and gnashing of teeth. It's considered a good occasion to grouse good-naturedly and take one's time getting to work or anywhere else, if going is even worth it. When the power goes out it's considered good green-energy policy, or used to, before the country filled up with the kind of people who simply refuse to wear coats to bed. Those kinds of people can move to New York, as the saying goes.
Lots of countries would be strangled with hundreds of deaths and immense chaos, but in Canada – even on Christmas and with ridiculous weather – it is merely good hours for road crews, bad news for travelers, obviously a few deaths and varying degrees of discomfort. For some it is probably even an excuse to politely skip an uncomfortable gathering. Generally it can be agreed upon that a non-electric Christmas is a worst case scenario for the ~70,000 people who had to deal with it. The rest of Southern Ontario got the first 'white Christmas' in years, and the coldest, and the most beautiful.
Some news outlets even reported that some people were enjoying the blackout as a challenge of their ability to rough it. Others asphyxiated trying to heat their homes with charcoal fires, or were overcome by fumes they brought upon themselves by running generators indoors without ventilation. It was quite a thing to hear about and quite sad. The 'bad weather' then continued into January, disrupting entire days worth of flights and disorganizing other travel situations as well. There was all kinds of talk about frustration as people waited days to get into a plane. Others went skiing and gave up on a trip to the Bahamas.
All of which sidesteps the (presumably) immense social media bitchfest, which a dedicated blogger may dig up, but I will summarize it quickly as a bunch of flimsy complaining ninnies. Not worth my time or yours, dear reader. It was the first real winter some people faced, absolutely, but who cares about how you're cold and stop complaining, please. Winter is Canada, and Canada ought to be shaming its federal government to the highest degree allowable by law because a couple of United States legalized marijuana first, after lengthy and fractious efforts to bring Canadian laws into the more logical 21st century. What is a winter storm compared to a government so adamant in its refusal that it threw a 150 year old document (among other things) into the trash just to spite environmentalists?
Meanwhile 2014 is likely going to be full of extremely big stories. 80's revivalism is going to fail. The Nerd Bubble may pop, leaving millions without a retirement strategy for their collectibles, consumer electronics, and childish knick-knacks. China is going to be a big name again, so get ready for that. That's not all, of course: geopolitical skulduggery is likely to create new extremists in, according to my calculations, a first world country. I always knew the Dutch were just pretending to be tolerant and objective, but I fear nobody else will see this coming and they will do a lot of damage before the truth comes out. That's just the tip of the proverbial 2014 iceberg.
One thing's for sure: the news will continue to make a huge deal out of small potatoes for as long as it's profitable or can cover up their intellectual, journalistic, and conceptual bankruptcy. I am currently debating doing a Predictions 2014 list, but it may have to wait, until I'm done trashing news media. I bet you Gawker, Huffington Post, TMZ, et al will say some shit and probably have employees make regrettable mistakes this year... so will traditional news media, and that's really all they do when they're not taking political money and supporting various agendas, filling the minds of otherwise undamaged people with the unhinged ideation of partisan politics (in which anyone is supposed to have a clue). That is: when it's not, you know, complaining about weather.
When all was said and done tens of thousands in Ontario were without power for Christmas and nobody was talking much about Rob Ford, who was insisting it was not a state of emergency kind of thing. Really, on that point, I would agree with him. In Canada snowfall, and even ice leading to power outages, is generally considered as not exactly a cause for paralysis and gnashing of teeth. It's considered a good occasion to grouse good-naturedly and take one's time getting to work or anywhere else, if going is even worth it. When the power goes out it's considered good green-energy policy, or used to, before the country filled up with the kind of people who simply refuse to wear coats to bed. Those kinds of people can move to New York, as the saying goes.
Lots of countries would be strangled with hundreds of deaths and immense chaos, but in Canada – even on Christmas and with ridiculous weather – it is merely good hours for road crews, bad news for travelers, obviously a few deaths and varying degrees of discomfort. For some it is probably even an excuse to politely skip an uncomfortable gathering. Generally it can be agreed upon that a non-electric Christmas is a worst case scenario for the ~70,000 people who had to deal with it. The rest of Southern Ontario got the first 'white Christmas' in years, and the coldest, and the most beautiful.
Some news outlets even reported that some people were enjoying the blackout as a challenge of their ability to rough it. Others asphyxiated trying to heat their homes with charcoal fires, or were overcome by fumes they brought upon themselves by running generators indoors without ventilation. It was quite a thing to hear about and quite sad. The 'bad weather' then continued into January, disrupting entire days worth of flights and disorganizing other travel situations as well. There was all kinds of talk about frustration as people waited days to get into a plane. Others went skiing and gave up on a trip to the Bahamas.
All of which sidesteps the (presumably) immense social media bitchfest, which a dedicated blogger may dig up, but I will summarize it quickly as a bunch of flimsy complaining ninnies. Not worth my time or yours, dear reader. It was the first real winter some people faced, absolutely, but who cares about how you're cold and stop complaining, please. Winter is Canada, and Canada ought to be shaming its federal government to the highest degree allowable by law because a couple of United States legalized marijuana first, after lengthy and fractious efforts to bring Canadian laws into the more logical 21st century. What is a winter storm compared to a government so adamant in its refusal that it threw a 150 year old document (among other things) into the trash just to spite environmentalists?
Meanwhile 2014 is likely going to be full of extremely big stories. 80's revivalism is going to fail. The Nerd Bubble may pop, leaving millions without a retirement strategy for their collectibles, consumer electronics, and childish knick-knacks. China is going to be a big name again, so get ready for that. That's not all, of course: geopolitical skulduggery is likely to create new extremists in, according to my calculations, a first world country. I always knew the Dutch were just pretending to be tolerant and objective, but I fear nobody else will see this coming and they will do a lot of damage before the truth comes out. That's just the tip of the proverbial 2014 iceberg.
One thing's for sure: the news will continue to make a huge deal out of small potatoes for as long as it's profitable or can cover up their intellectual, journalistic, and conceptual bankruptcy. I am currently debating doing a Predictions 2014 list, but it may have to wait, until I'm done trashing news media. I bet you Gawker, Huffington Post, TMZ, et al will say some shit and probably have employees make regrettable mistakes this year... so will traditional news media, and that's really all they do when they're not taking political money and supporting various agendas, filling the minds of otherwise undamaged people with the unhinged ideation of partisan politics (in which anyone is supposed to have a clue). That is: when it's not, you know, complaining about weather.
11/6/11
Daylight Savings Time
Probably the worst invention ever, Daylight Savings time robs hard-sleeping, late-rocking people of one full hour of darkness and also ensures an early nightfall for the rest of everyone who goes to bed on time. There's no deal like less daylight. I once researched DST and saw that it was done mostly to screw with farmers and boost consumerism. Seeing as where screwing farmers and chasing consumerism has gotten us, perhaps it's a good idea to drop DST like the filthy bastard it is. We don't need our only link to natural time (moving sunlight) altered on an arbitrary day.
We could also experiment with waking up later, not having an ironclad, unrealistic time-table for small business and retail, or just being happy with the usual dawn and usual dusk. These things do not have to be altered, and the hour everyone gains is actually a lost cause, more or less. DST is one of those small things that's actually a gigantic sign of human arrogance and the arbitrary nature of 'time' as mechanistically conceived nonsense.
We are, apparently, an intellectually gifted species, so why do we balk at the idea of darkness? Why do we ignore the fact that there is simply less sunlight at certain latitudes? Why do we delude ourselves with arbitrary judgements? Why can we not live in harmony with nature's cool tricks? Turn your lights off and keep sleeping. Buy blankets for your bed and keep your furnace off and grow a thicker skin, humanity. In 50 years our starving ancestors will hate us for hoarding comfort in our time, and if they find our elder selves they will skin us for our treasured soft-skin, even though it is fragile and lets cold air through.
Maybe I say this because I like darkness at 6:30 in the morning, and I wouldn't mind an 8:00 AM sunrise in mid-December. I think if you live in the northern or southern hemispheres of this planet you should goddamn well deal with the colder temperatures and the fleeting sun. Make the most of your day, don't change it by an hour so you can feel like you're doing something.
P.S. It occurs to me that I may not know anything about DST, in which case my objections stand. If DST was never brought around these frustrations would never have existed. I don't know whether DST actually steals or gives hours (which is unlikely, as matter and energy yadda yadda) but when it changes anything, it does so in a troublesome way. If DST is responsible for darker mornings and longer evenings, then I suppose I am against my own self-interests, which is fine, just look at America. Yadda yadda yadda.
We could also experiment with waking up later, not having an ironclad, unrealistic time-table for small business and retail, or just being happy with the usual dawn and usual dusk. These things do not have to be altered, and the hour everyone gains is actually a lost cause, more or less. DST is one of those small things that's actually a gigantic sign of human arrogance and the arbitrary nature of 'time' as mechanistically conceived nonsense.
We are, apparently, an intellectually gifted species, so why do we balk at the idea of darkness? Why do we ignore the fact that there is simply less sunlight at certain latitudes? Why do we delude ourselves with arbitrary judgements? Why can we not live in harmony with nature's cool tricks? Turn your lights off and keep sleeping. Buy blankets for your bed and keep your furnace off and grow a thicker skin, humanity. In 50 years our starving ancestors will hate us for hoarding comfort in our time, and if they find our elder selves they will skin us for our treasured soft-skin, even though it is fragile and lets cold air through.
Maybe I say this because I like darkness at 6:30 in the morning, and I wouldn't mind an 8:00 AM sunrise in mid-December. I think if you live in the northern or southern hemispheres of this planet you should goddamn well deal with the colder temperatures and the fleeting sun. Make the most of your day, don't change it by an hour so you can feel like you're doing something.
P.S. It occurs to me that I may not know anything about DST, in which case my objections stand. If DST was never brought around these frustrations would never have existed. I don't know whether DST actually steals or gives hours (which is unlikely, as matter and energy yadda yadda) but when it changes anything, it does so in a troublesome way. If DST is responsible for darker mornings and longer evenings, then I suppose I am against my own self-interests, which is fine, just look at America. Yadda yadda yadda.
3/14/11
What time is it?
Daylight savings time, snow melts that lead to ankle-deep slush/water hybrid puddles, birds returning to chirp and swoop and shit on everything. That's springtime, but thanks to all of these impediments and blessings, I don't actually know what time it is. Winter dies with a vengeance – real winter, I mean. Some of you out there might think that a dusting of snow and -10 Celsius weather is a serious ordeal, but you're weak and have nothing noteworthy to brag about or discuss.
Anyways, my computer and my alarm clock are at odds about what time it is. My cellphone agrees with my computer, and most 'stupid' electronics in my place agree with my alarm clock, so I expect it really is 7:19 right now, and everyone could attest to that. I have somewhere to be at... 7 PM.
Anyways, my computer and my alarm clock are at odds about what time it is. My cellphone agrees with my computer, and most 'stupid' electronics in my place agree with my alarm clock, so I expect it really is 7:19 right now, and everyone could attest to that. I have somewhere to be at... 7 PM.
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