It’s -25°C and snowing, but no worries, it’s going to stop snowing. Of course, once it stops, it’s going to get cold…-30°C by Tuesday. This cartoon is kind of wrong, though.
Silly Lio. You won’t be so thoroughly skeletonized until you thaw out in the spring, although your corpse can get severely dessicated.
Fairly frigid here and we’re far warmer here. Hell, I’ve never owned clothing appropriate for that kind of environment and was miserable when issued such clothing and was assigned to such Dante’s infernal delights!
We’ll hit -7C later this week, I’ll be hibernating by then. I think I’ll hibernate until Sol goes red giant…
I’ve moved to sunnier climes. This week’s forecast:
Sun
Partly cloudy
28° 18°
Mon
Partly cloudy
30° 19°
Tue
Scattered showers
29° 21°
Wed
Showers
28° 21°
Thu
Partly cloudy
28° 19°
Fri
Scattered showers
29° 20°
Sat
Mostly sunny
29° 21°
Sun
Scattered showers
29° 21°
Maybe the unfortunate skeletal shoveller is still there from last year?
I think I prefer -30°C to +30°C. Anything about 25 is getting too warm. Although…those are really good spider temperatures.
I got a good laugh! That’s exactly what I was doing when I saw the cartoon . Wrapped in a blanket and reading
A deer was hit at a corner and then the corpse covered up in ice and snow from the ploughs here in a Virginia town outside DC. Usually corpses of deer are fodder for the turkey vultures, but not this time.
Instead, the badgers and foxes dug through the snow to get to it and picked it clean. By the time the snow pile on top of it finally melted, it was nothing but the skeleton. I’d never seen that before.
What leadership looks like:
New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern postpones wedding after announcing new COVID-19 restrictions
Change.org petition:
Stop plate tectonics
2 tripple vaxxed colleagues down with Covid, bladder infection, and a rat in the cellar.
Could be worse.
@6 — I also live in Virginia and saw a road kill that stuck with me. I was riding my bike on the Virginia Capital Trail and passed by the corpse of a beagle lying on the shoulder. I was certain that within days it would be nothing but bones and some hanks of fur. Between the buzzards, crows, raccoons and nocturnal scavengers I was certain it would be picked clean in short order. But, no. The days passed and the corpse simply decayed in place. After two weeks it was nothing but a bag of bones. I know from experience that buzzards have a very keen sense of smell and can zero in on anything edible within minutes. This made me think that this domestic dog smelled unpalatable to the otherwise ravenous scavengers. Was it something about the dog’s diet? Makes me wonder if they would also be picky about a dead human. I know this has nothing to do with bodies in the snow, but the subject of death outside triggered this memory.
But you can’t go wrong with Zombie gophers on the moon.
Sask. RCMP obtain Canada-wide warrant for anti-vaccine dad charged with abducting daughter, 7
Sunny and boring here in the SF Bay Area. Instead of enjoying it, I wonder about the onset of permanent drought conditions, though we did get a little rain this season.
Portland has a temperature inversion but thanks to the Clean Air Act no smog. I remember back in the 80s when the sky was brown all the time. Things are getting better here.
In Gainesville, FL, the Nat’l Weather Service predicts the first real freeze of the ’21-’22 winter tonight.
When I moved here in ’86, we typically had our first freeze in late November.
Foreigners in Taiwan are complaining about the constant rain we’ve had for the last two weeks. They’re blithely ignoring the drought from last spring, with reservoirs as low as 3% full, all but two under 40% at one point, and a lake turned into a mudflat. Some people. 9_9
It has been an unusually cold December and January by Taiwan standards (low teens almost nightly, many days of single digits) but there have been no news reports of death from the cold.
That’s just silly,who going snow clearing in the teeth of a blizzard?
@9 What type of medical condition is rat in the cellar,what is he going to do?
OT
A bad week?
“A bad day to be a tripod”
https://youtu.be/pQBund8uLmo
Davidc1 @ 17
In the spoof documentary “The Ruthles” their first gig was in the German place “Der Ratkeller”, translated as “The Rat Cellar”.
So ‘rat in the cellar’ might be an expression meaning “there is a British band playing on stage”.
.
Over here, the temperature is just above 0°C, so the zombies are thawing out. Annoying but a welcome distraction from the omricon spreading.
Intransitive @ 16
Yes, I have read about the drought.
Did it extend to the eastern half of the Island as well? I assumed the part west of the mountains might be in “rain shadow”. I am not familiar with the predominant direction of wind in your region.
Old dog being old dog, which means occasional accidents indoors. Last night he did it as I was about to go up to bed. But the reason he did it this time was because he dug up and ate some cat shit along with the surrounding earth earlier in the day. Why he woud develop a shit eating habit in old age when he’s never done so before I don’t know.
Weather wise it’s varied from hard frost to heavy rain to cold and dry – well it is the UK so the weather is usually variable.
(Warning post-coffee Internet mania)
Ray Ceeya @ 14
Portland? The Swedish edidion of MAD Magazine in 1968 had a parody of Mission Impossible, mentioning the place. The kid version of me was annoyed there were two Portlands – so which place was Martin Landau going to?
The Maine version of Portland features in John Connolly’s slightly Lovecraftian thrillers. Portland, Oregon might at most get the odd Wendigo. ‘Salem, Oregon’ sounds more promising.
In winter, a dead animal can be dried out as the frozen water molecules are taken up by the dry air as vapor.
In Antarctica you can find seal bodies left from when the sea shore went further inland long ago.
OT birgerjohansson@18 I associate “Tripods” with John Christopher’s young adult novels so closely that I completely forget Wells’s Martians were on tripods. I don’t think I read War of the Worlds since I was 13 years old. I read the Tripods books more recently when one of my kids was reading them.
@19 Yeah,I remember Eric Idle with a rat on his shoulder,I think.
Another bit he is interviewing a black guy in the deep south,he says the Rutles stole his music.
Then his wife pipes up and says he tells every interviewer that some famous band stole his music.
I live in Louisville, KY (a transplant for my work) and it’s upper 30’s. Thankfully no snow but a bit windy. I can’t stand snow and this is the farthest north that I will be living. When I served in the USAF I was first stationed at Minot AFB, ND and went through two nasty winters which were six months long! I hated it so much that I put in for the Philippines and got my wish. I joke to my wife that my two best winters were in the Philippines. :)
As long as the gulfstream isn’t shutting down — which could happen in my lifetime — I’m happy at 52 degrees North in Amsterdam. That’s quite a bit North of Morris, MN, at 45+ degrees N. (Currently single-figure centigrades above zero, here. Very livable if it doesn’t rain.)
The pandemic has actually helped some people:
Tiddlywink Stuck up Woman’s Nose for 37 Years Found After COVID Test
Reginald Selkirk@28 Life imitates The Simpsons. (Eh, probably the Simpson’s idea came from a real event.)
Chris L. @ 26
Air force base in North Dakota – presumably a leftover from the time the Soviet Tu-95 was a threat. Dubya had a much more pleasant posting, the bastard.
Also, some “flyover” states had USAF missile bases here and there, not a fun part of human history but Reagan et al saw no problem with it. We were ultimately saved by Gorbachev and perestroika. I believe a small relic of ICBM sites remain active out there.
The temperature today dropped to a bone-chilling 60 F. People were even wearing jacketsn
I hope the weather in Middle River is better. That looks like a deal too good to pass up.
33c down here, and the local spiders are loving the weather. the endotherms not so much, but it seems good for the rest
Davidc1
The medical condition is “driving me nuts”. We used to have mice. Because of that, everything edible is in boxes. Now we have a rat (the kids named it “Fred”). The rat simply eats through the storage boxes. We’re currently trying to block all entrances.
Birger Johansson
I’m pretty sure it was the “Ratskeller”, which means council cellar and is a common name for old pubs which were often located in a half below the surface floor. If it were the “rat(‘)s(‘) cellar” it would be the Rattenkeller as we use the plural of animals for compounds.
Gilliell @ 33 Yes, but for English-language viewers the distinction would not be obvious. So they illustrated the place where The Ruthles had been playing with a cellar with rats running to and fro. “Some of these very rats were present when The Ruthles started their career”.
You should get a Humane trap for rats.
My bastard cats keep bringing in live critters,they catch and release.
And if i can’t catch them in time they disappear under the heaters or the bookcases.
I have a photo of when I had 4 cats,three of them and staking out a heater because they can smell
a rodent under it.
I have humane traps because they could get their paws caught in a spring trap,the cays I mean.
Where I am (S.France Mediterranean coast) its been a decent c.15℃, no wind, but is fecking cold (down to 0℃) when the sun isn’t visible (in the shade or at night). I realise “just above freezing” isn’t “cold” by the standards of others, but it does mean I have to wear socks-and-shoes (rather than bare feet in sandals) — and more seriously, means most of the outdoor terraces are largely enclosed (read: not as well ventilated), which makes me unhappy in the current pandemic situation.
birgerjohansson (#20) –
The drought was a non-issue on the east side of Taiwan, with or without rain. The four largest counties by area (Nantou, Yilan, Hualien, and Taitung) are over a third of the island’s area yet have barely 1.5 million people (out of 23). There wasn’t enough consumption to be a problem. Industrial use sucks up a lot, and that’s all on the west side.
I just hope they get the desalination plants up and running soon. Penghu county (an archipeligo in the west) has them because there’s almost no fresh groundwater, but the main island should have had them years ago.
birgerjohansson
They are called the Ruttles, not the Ruthles.
Jazzlet@38, No, not Ruttles, but (The) Rutles (one t).
The kind of week where my hands aren’t working.
As the weekend ended I got a laugh by viewing Harris Sultan at Youtube:
“Kenyan officials claim western tourists have made their lions gay”.
(imagines a lion sitting with binoculars taking notes of human behavior)