Sunday, December 12, 2010

That could have gone better

1. There are days when I'm poking around at the stories of the day that I come across something and I wince. And I wince at things that most other people are probably not thinking about. So when I read this story, about how the RCMP throughly blew the ending of the stand-off in Bay Bulls after managing it so well up to that point, my first thought after going "oh for Christ's sake", was to wonder about the poor comms person caught in this situation - who I'm betting either:

A. Didn't know all the details when putting together the release announcing the guy's capture.
B. Did know, objected stenuously that being vague on the details wasn't going to work and just fess up, but was overruled.
C. Or was told "How can we not look awful in this situation?" and this was the best that could be dreamed up on short notice.

Just brutal. I actually feel kind of bad for that person, whoever it is. It's a "there but for the grace of God..." type of thing.

2. As God as my witness, I thought Columbia House would have died the horrible death that nearly everybody who ever dealt with it at least once has wished on it at least 10 years ago. But no, apparently it only keeled over and died this past week. How it survived this past decade, what with iTunes and torrent sites destroying regular music retailers, I have no idea.

Like many teens of the 80s, who lusted after cheap music and were pretty stupid, I joined Columbia House. And promptly got burned several times. When I could finally escape from them I did so with the solemn vow I would never deal with them again. Yet, I had friends in university who signed up with them and repeatedly got burned.

3. I read story earlier the week explaining why Iqaluit was getting such unusually mild weather the past few months. Naturally, I can't find it now. However, I did find this link which explains what it was. It has the marvelous name of The Omega Block, which sounds like it ought to be a climate change disaster movie staring Charlton Heston. Basically, a big old high pressure system sat over Greenland for weeks on end, which is not unusual with this type of system.

Because of that, we got higher than normal temperatures and Europe got the other end of the stick, which was much colder than normal temperatures. Judging by the weather the past few days in Iqaluit I'm guess it's finally broken up. The temps have been back in the -20C range, which is normal for this time of the year. And a thin film of ice is beginning to show up on the bay. So we're back to normal. I've ever broken out the BFC (Big Fucking Coat). I normally break it out sometime in October. I made it to mid-December. That's something I never thought I'd see.

Last Five
1. Smoke baby - Hawksley Workman
2. Baby Fratelli - The Fratellis
3. 100 oceans - Tori Amos*
4. Our retired explorer (live) - The Weakerthans
5. Supernova - Liz Phair

3 comments:

Sara Dorman said...

"Europe got the other end of the stick, which was much colder than normal temperatures."

Fascinating. We definitely were told it was a high pressure system in Scandinavia, but not about the knock-on effect on you guys. But, have definitely noticed (and commented) that whenever you blog about unseasonably warm weather in iqaluit, we are having your 'normal' weather!

towniebastard said...

Yeah, I was thinking about you complaining about the weather awhile ago and here it is all related.

But what it boils down to is we can both blame Greenland.

Anonymous said...

about the weather temperatures of late: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2010&month_last=11&sat=4&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=11&year1=2010&year2=2010&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg gives a more global view of it. I did like the link you gave and have bookmarked it.

From the 'South land' (today's high 67 degF)

dg