Song Lyric of the Day (Classics IV, With an Appropriate Tune for Recent Turbulent Weather)

“You were the sunshine, baby, whenever you smiled
But I call you 'Stormy' today.”—James Cobb and Buddy Buie, “Stormy,” performed by Classics IV on their Mamas and Papas/Soul Train LP (1968)
 
The image accompanying this post, The Storm (1881), was created by American painter Edward Mitchell Bannister and hangs in the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum.

Quote of the Day (Alice Hoffman, on ‘The Weather and Love’)

"When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure."—American novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth (1997)

These matters are, if possible, even more unpredictable this wild winter.

(The image accompanying this post, showing Alice Hoffman at BookExpo in New York City, was taken May 30, 2019 by Rhododendrites.)

Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on the Lack of Weather in One of His Books)

“No weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather. It being the first attempt of the kind in fictitious literature, it may prove a failure, but it seemed worth the while of some dare-devil person to try it, and the author was in just the mood. Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it because of delays on account of the weather. Nothing breaks up an author's progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather. Thus it is plain that persistent intrusions of weather are bad for both reader and author.”—American novelist and humorist Mark Twain (1835-1910), The American Claimant (1892)

This weekend, my area of northern New Jersey is slated to have a spell of nasty weather. For all of Twain’s commendable attempt to avoid literary cliches by not writing about weather in his books, I suspect he would have been almost totally unable to maintain that resolution during these days of climate change!

Song Lyric of the Day (George Strait, Anticipating the Current Texas State of Mind)

“Amarillo by morning
Up from San Antone
Everything that I've got
Is just what I've got on.” —Country music singer George Strait, “Amarillo By Morning,” written by Terry Stafford and Paul Fraser, covered by Strait and released on his LP Strait from the Heart (1982)

Just before I wrote this, I googled current weather conditions in Texas and found it was 32 degrees in San Antonio and 10 degrees in San Antonio. And that’s Fahrenheit, not Celsius.

Over the last few weeks, my neck of the woods, in northern New Jersey, has been pelted with one snowstorm after another. (Come to think of it, that’s exactly what’s happening right now.) But Texas is another matter. Nobody expected what they’re getting now, so nobody prepared for it.

So yesterday, we had front-page headlines from both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about the deep freeze that has massively disrupted the state’s electricity grid, forcing many out of their homes in search of a warm place to stay. The mayor of Colorado City in the Lone Star State has even felt the need to resign, after constituents took serious offense to his Facebook post disclaiming the local government’s responsibility to help in the emergency, climaxing with the Darwinian suggestion that “Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish (sic)."

In the 1970s, many state drivers, disdaining speed limits as a means of energy conservation, sported the bumper sticker, “Drive 80 and freeze a Yankee.” How many ever dreamed that they themselves might freeze?

So, I guess Strait, singing the above lyric by Terry Stafford and Paul Fraser, anticipated the privation and even desperation produced by the current crisis. There’s one thing he didn’t expect, however: in this auto-centric state, the man in his song might not even be able to get on the road with all the traffic accidents. Who would ever expect the Texas Department of Transportation to issue a winter storm advisory to stay off the roads?

It is hard not to read all the news articles and social media chatter without seriously worrying about what is going on down there. So pray for Texans—very much including those on the road from “San Antone” to Amarillo.

Quote of the Day (Poet Derek Mahon, on ‘Weird Weather’ for July)

“The nuclear subs are keeping sinister watch

while sun heat focuses on the cabbage-patch.

What weird weather can we expect this July?

Tornado, hail, some sort of freak tempest?

The bonfire month, and another storm brewing:

I hear it sing i’th’wind, and among the leaves.

But out here in the hot pastures of the west,

no Google goggling at our marginal lives,

there still are corners where a lark can sing.”—Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon, “The Seasons,” in An Autumn Wind (2011)

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on Thunderstorms)

“Just where any of us in the human race get off to adopt the Big Man attitude of ‘What is there to be afraid of?’ toward lightning is more than I can figure out. You would think that we knew how to stop it. You would think that no one but women and yellow dogs were ever hit by it and that no man in a turtle-neck sweater and three days’ beard on his chin would give it a second thought. I am sick of all this bravado about lightning and am definitely abandoning it herewith.”—American humorist Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “The Truth about Thunderstorms,” in The Best of Robert Benchley: 72 Timeless Stories of Wit, Wisdom and Whimsy (1983)

Joke of the Day (Lewis Black, on Why the 21st Century is ‘Not What It Was Cracked Up To Be’)

 “[The 21^st century is] just not what it was cracked up to be. I would have liked to see us control the weather as opposed to being able to make a phone call without having a cord.” —Comedian Lewis Black quoted in Alex V. Cipolle, “Behold Old Yeller,” Eugene (Ore.) Weekly, October 23, 2014

Photo of the Day: Breezy

Before I took this photo yesterday in Overpeck County Park in Leonia, N.J., I thought of calling it “The Breeze Before the Big Wind.” Like many in the New York area, I had been expecting—and dreading—gale-force winds that were supposed to arrive with Tropical Storm Hermine.

So much for that scenario. I don’t mind the meteorologists on the news being careful, even hedging their bets. But by the time Sunday morning rolled around, I was getting tired of the NCEP models, the Canadian models, and the European models. In fact, the only models I didn’t hear anything about were the wanna-be’s on “America’s Next Top Model.”

(Oh, yeah, another thing. Why was this storm known as “Hermine”? Why not “Hermione”? Was the National Weather Service worried about being picketed—and maybe even worse—by fans of the Harry Potter books and movies?)

Quote of the Day (Robert Inman, on Raleigh’s Favorite Weatherman)

“When you got down to it, the details of the weather were pretty routine stuff—pressure gradients on a map, temperatures and precipitation and computer models. What you had to do was personalize the weather: relate it to how people lived, whether they needed an umbrella or sunscreen; and make an unbreakable connection in their minds between the weather and the weatherman. Will Baggett was the weather in Raleigh. He told people, only half-jokingly, that he worked for God. If you didn't believe it, ask the minister who phoned and asked him to be sure they had good weather for the Vacation Bible School picnic.”— Robert Inman, Captain Saturday: A Novel (2002)

I was going to post today about the blizzard of 1888, but I thought better of it when the Blizzard of 2015 turned out, at least in my area (Northern New Jersey), to be rather less severe than predicted. (Or, as my longtime friend Norine posted on Facebook this morning: “Yet another male exaggerating the inches.”)

But it did get me to thinking about the place of the weather forecaster in our lives. Remarkably, while all sorts of events have radically changed the news business over the past several decades, that position has, if anything, became even more important (even though, as in the case today, meteorology remains more of an art than a science.)

Robert Inman captured perfectly the way members of this profession can become exalted local celebrities (in Will Baggett’s case, “arguably the most recognizable man in Raleigh”) in his novel Captain Saturday. Like much of his other fiction (Home Fires Burning was adapted for a 1989 Hallmark Hall of Fame special in 1989, starring Barnard Hughes, Bill Pullman, and a very young Neil Patrick Harris), it’s a finely observed, seriocomic account of how people react to reverses over the course of a lifetime. At the same time, it’s filled with rich dialogue and local color. (North Raleigh was “a creeping sprawl of subdivisions, apartment complexes, shopping centers, parking lots, and four-lane roads where there had been, not too many years ago, pine and hardwood forest.”) I highly recommend it.

In addition to having written novels, plays, musicals, and movies, Mr. Inman maintains a very fine, insightful blog. Having written one myself, I can tell you that writing this looks far easier than it is. How he manages to keep it fresh and interesting, all the while he is maintaining his other writing pursuits, is beyond me. But more power to him!