A Couple Things On My Mind
I’m taking a brief break from my job of keeping the world safe for large multi-national corporations to share a couple things on my mind. You know, since you asked...
1. Top level scientists all over the globe are predicting that temperatures in the Portland (Oregon) metropolitan area could reach as high as 104 degrees today and these skin searing temperatures could last as long as one additional day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In response, the city is taking the only reasonable measures that a city can take when faced with the kind of weather that makes people in Phoenix throw on a light jacket. Speaking from a well air-conditioned NORAD facility deep below the scorched surface, City representatives have announced the following steps to be implemented immediately. Let’s just hope it’s enough
a. Miniature individual sized fire extinguishers are being passed out to citizens to keep their families safe from spontaneous human combustion.
b. Al Gore is being flown in to blame everyone for making it “hotter than the summer that killed the dinosaurs.”
c. The Freemont Bridge is being converted into a giant slip and slide where you will get a running start, slide across, slide down the off ramp, break your back in 5 places, slide past the group of plaintiff’s personal injury attorneys and right into the Willamette River at a place which may or many not be downstream from a superfund site.
d. For one day and one day only, citizens of all weights, shapes and body styles will be allowed to walk around wearing less clothing than a c-list actress at an MTV award show. Oh wait, this already happens all the time and yet no one will step up and add “fashion czar” to the growing list of “czars” in this country so we can put a stop to this form of visual polution. It’s for the good of everyone. Really.
This city kills me when it comes to weather. We are supposed to have a couple days over 100 degrees and you would think we’re bracing for a tsunami. Adding to the already long list of reasons to never watch local news is the coverage that opens with the words “DEADLY HEAT WAVE STRIKES PORTLAND” in all red, flaming letters with some variation of Beethoven’s “bom bom bom bom” music from his 4th symphony playing in the background. Give me a break. It’s going to be hot and sunny for a couple days. You know, like every day in the summer in Sacramento or Palm Springs, or Miami, or Phoenix and on and on. We should be celebrating the absence of rain.
The reality is that Portlanders can not handle weather. This is likely because we are not called on to deal with weather very often. Sure it rains here, but even the rain is weak. There are few storms or hard rains but instead rain is an innocuous daily event for 10 months of the year with a few days of sun sprinkled in to remind you how depressed the rain is making you. We don’t do tsunamis or deadly earthquakes or blizzards or hurricanes or tornadoes or any of the weather that attacks just about everyplace else. Here, we do rain and sun and mild temperatures.
So, when something really extreme happens like someone relying on the arthritis acting up in their trick knee predicts a 22% chance of light snow mixed with rain, the entire city shuts down and marshal law is declared to keep people off the streets where they might (gasp) make use of the 4-wheel drive function of their SUVs. I remember after moving from B.C. (where we routinely had 2-3 feet of snow on the ground every winter) where I don’t recall ever missing a day of school because of snow, we had school canceled in Portland because they thought it was going to snow the next day. Not snow a lot. Not have a blizzard, but maybe, just maybe, a light dusting.
People even overreact to the rain, which we have plenty of. After the summer, or as it’s known in Oregon “July,” when we have the first day of rain after a stretch of dry days everyone freaks out and refuses to drive over 15 mph even on the freeway.
If Portland ever does experience some serious weather, forget about it. Just write the whole city off. Mass hysteria won’t begin to describe it.
As for me, I’m going to douse myself with ice-water and sprint to my air-conditioned car where I will probably just sit in the protection of my AC until I run out of gas and die from the heat, or atleast get really really sweaty.
Just everyone calm down.
2. An acronym is defined as “a word formed from the initial letters of a multi-word name”. The key there is the word “word.” Any string of initials does not an acronym make. It must be a “word” that you can pronounce as such, like RADAR or NASA or SCUBA. I recently suggested this to two of my friends who are both roughly 10 times smarter than me and they dismissed this as a CSN (Completely Silly Notion) and a RTS (Ridiculous Thing to Say). Never one to let the superior intellect of others dampen my own self-righteousness, I rechecked the definition to discover that, of course, I was right all along (and by "right" I mean, there was enough ambiguity in the definition that I could spin it to support my theory)
Something like ATM is not an acronym unless you happen to pronounce it as its own word like “atom” which you should not do because it would be so dorky. Of course, if this definition of the word acronym were accepted by anyone other than me and people who speak English, it would bring the entire high-tech industry to a halt as they have abbreviated so many terms to their initials, they even refer to “TLAs” (Three Letter Acronyms). Well I’m sorry, but neither TLA, nor many of the initial strings it refers to are acronyms. To call these series of letters acronyms is at best slang or jargon and really the misuse of a perfectly good word.
Why is all of this important? Well, if you can’t see why all of this is of the utmost importance to our survival as a species, then I can’t explain it to you. Suffice it to say, I will not rest until I convince everyone to try to pronounce as words any string of initials they want to call an acronym. I understand this will likely subject me to scorn and ridicule, especially among my many friends in the high-tech fields, but I have found that once you are generally scorned and ridiculed for many things, adding another one really doesn’t matter that much.
Have a good weekend and for the love of humanity, please don't be a hero and take on this merciless heat.
1. Top level scientists all over the globe are predicting that temperatures in the Portland (Oregon) metropolitan area could reach as high as 104 degrees today and these skin searing temperatures could last as long as one additional day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In response, the city is taking the only reasonable measures that a city can take when faced with the kind of weather that makes people in Phoenix throw on a light jacket. Speaking from a well air-conditioned NORAD facility deep below the scorched surface, City representatives have announced the following steps to be implemented immediately. Let’s just hope it’s enough
a. Miniature individual sized fire extinguishers are being passed out to citizens to keep their families safe from spontaneous human combustion.
b. Al Gore is being flown in to blame everyone for making it “hotter than the summer that killed the dinosaurs.”
c. The Freemont Bridge is being converted into a giant slip and slide where you will get a running start, slide across, slide down the off ramp, break your back in 5 places, slide past the group of plaintiff’s personal injury attorneys and right into the Willamette River at a place which may or many not be downstream from a superfund site.
d. For one day and one day only, citizens of all weights, shapes and body styles will be allowed to walk around wearing less clothing than a c-list actress at an MTV award show. Oh wait, this already happens all the time and yet no one will step up and add “fashion czar” to the growing list of “czars” in this country so we can put a stop to this form of visual polution. It’s for the good of everyone. Really.
This city kills me when it comes to weather. We are supposed to have a couple days over 100 degrees and you would think we’re bracing for a tsunami. Adding to the already long list of reasons to never watch local news is the coverage that opens with the words “DEADLY HEAT WAVE STRIKES PORTLAND” in all red, flaming letters with some variation of Beethoven’s “bom bom bom bom” music from his 4th symphony playing in the background. Give me a break. It’s going to be hot and sunny for a couple days. You know, like every day in the summer in Sacramento or Palm Springs, or Miami, or Phoenix and on and on. We should be celebrating the absence of rain.
The reality is that Portlanders can not handle weather. This is likely because we are not called on to deal with weather very often. Sure it rains here, but even the rain is weak. There are few storms or hard rains but instead rain is an innocuous daily event for 10 months of the year with a few days of sun sprinkled in to remind you how depressed the rain is making you. We don’t do tsunamis or deadly earthquakes or blizzards or hurricanes or tornadoes or any of the weather that attacks just about everyplace else. Here, we do rain and sun and mild temperatures.
So, when something really extreme happens like someone relying on the arthritis acting up in their trick knee predicts a 22% chance of light snow mixed with rain, the entire city shuts down and marshal law is declared to keep people off the streets where they might (gasp) make use of the 4-wheel drive function of their SUVs. I remember after moving from B.C. (where we routinely had 2-3 feet of snow on the ground every winter) where I don’t recall ever missing a day of school because of snow, we had school canceled in Portland because they thought it was going to snow the next day. Not snow a lot. Not have a blizzard, but maybe, just maybe, a light dusting.
People even overreact to the rain, which we have plenty of. After the summer, or as it’s known in Oregon “July,” when we have the first day of rain after a stretch of dry days everyone freaks out and refuses to drive over 15 mph even on the freeway.
If Portland ever does experience some serious weather, forget about it. Just write the whole city off. Mass hysteria won’t begin to describe it.
As for me, I’m going to douse myself with ice-water and sprint to my air-conditioned car where I will probably just sit in the protection of my AC until I run out of gas and die from the heat, or atleast get really really sweaty.
Just everyone calm down.
2. An acronym is defined as “a word formed from the initial letters of a multi-word name”. The key there is the word “word.” Any string of initials does not an acronym make. It must be a “word” that you can pronounce as such, like RADAR or NASA or SCUBA. I recently suggested this to two of my friends who are both roughly 10 times smarter than me and they dismissed this as a CSN (Completely Silly Notion) and a RTS (Ridiculous Thing to Say). Never one to let the superior intellect of others dampen my own self-righteousness, I rechecked the definition to discover that, of course, I was right all along (and by "right" I mean, there was enough ambiguity in the definition that I could spin it to support my theory)
Something like ATM is not an acronym unless you happen to pronounce it as its own word like “atom” which you should not do because it would be so dorky. Of course, if this definition of the word acronym were accepted by anyone other than me and people who speak English, it would bring the entire high-tech industry to a halt as they have abbreviated so many terms to their initials, they even refer to “TLAs” (Three Letter Acronyms). Well I’m sorry, but neither TLA, nor many of the initial strings it refers to are acronyms. To call these series of letters acronyms is at best slang or jargon and really the misuse of a perfectly good word.
Why is all of this important? Well, if you can’t see why all of this is of the utmost importance to our survival as a species, then I can’t explain it to you. Suffice it to say, I will not rest until I convince everyone to try to pronounce as words any string of initials they want to call an acronym. I understand this will likely subject me to scorn and ridicule, especially among my many friends in the high-tech fields, but I have found that once you are generally scorned and ridiculed for many things, adding another one really doesn’t matter that much.
Have a good weekend and for the love of humanity, please don't be a hero and take on this merciless heat.
Comments
....in Safeco field.
Oh, the suffering.
As for Mactastic, since she is the one who called me on the carpet, I'll try to make it up to her by taking her to dinner somewhere cool. The rest of you stay away from Portland, it's like breathing lava up here.
]
Since I do not have AC either at home or office I would be on fire for sure. It is News here if it his 90. It it hits 90 for more than one day it is literally a dangerous situation for some.
I rather enjoyed my time at the Garfield Avenue festival on Saturday with our 78 degrees. :-)
Shalom,
Bobby Valentine
http://stoned-campbelldisciple.blogspot.com/
Welcome. Thank you for commenting and providing me yet another reason not to move to Arizona. I couldn't hack it.
Stoogelover,
So, so true. I went to college down there and LA local news is the absolute worst. If you were to ask them where to draw the line between reporting news and overhyping mundane events for pure entertainment purposes, they would not even understand the question.
Randy, no sympathy from someone moving from DC to northern CA? I can't imagine.
Bobby, Milwaukie sounds better and better the more you talk about it. I'm going to have to see if I can't find a Milwaukie client so I can justify a trip back there.