Achenblog

The new snowcialism

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:02:11 -0500

Another storm coming. They come every three days now. Here in Nome-on-the-Potomac, our nerves are getting frayed as we hear talk of another foot or two of snow. Hard to believe, but not so long ago the meteorologists referred to possible snowfalls in terms of inches. Soon they will switch to the yard as the unit of measurement. This next storm could separate the men from the boys. The cross-country skiers from the downhill skiers. The glove-wearers from the mitten-wearers. Some people feel good because they have their own generators and abundant supplies of gasoline. Others feel even better, because they have their own personal nuclear power plants. Some of these lawyers around here have the uranium brought in by private rail. The city has done a bang-up job so far, I must say. I heard the snowplow before dawn this morning, scraping up the street. Such things are

I don't believe what I just saw

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:34:27 -0500

So I guess this is why they play the game. On paper, the Colts were the better team. On the field, they looked pretty great, too. Peyton Manning did not have an off night. In fact, he threw some of the most immaculate passes we've ever seen. Even when the Saints took the lead in the fourth quarter, you knew Manning would lead the Colts back for the tying touchdown. It was just this side of inevitable. Manning hadn't thrown a bad pass all game. He was a surgeon operating on that Saints defense. And then: Whaaaa.....? Tracy Porter. Who dat? Apparently he's the guy who steps in front of Reggie Wayne and takes it back all the way, six points, game over. There were other big plays in the game, like Sean Payton's gutsy decision to attempt an onside kick at the start of the second half. But

Greetings from Mount Crumpit

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:07:10 -0500

I guess it's time to take the trash back to the alley. If you don't hear from me within an hour, call 911. The alley. Do not venture there without a shovel and a flare. Listen. It's the Whos down in Whoville. Singing! Already sleepy suburb now in snow-induced coma. Excuse me, WHERE ARE THE CABS???????? Heard a pitiful yelping in the night. It was the Weber. New sport: Palisade-jumping. You just hurl yourself off the cliff and you can't get hurt. (But you go first.)

Snowmaggedon: The musical

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:28:06 -0500

Was it not Edgar Allan Poe who said, after the Titanic hit the iceberg, "I rang for ice, but this is ridiculous"? This is the view out the front door first-thing this morning, with many more hours of snow still to come. What I find disturbing about this snowscape is that there's a car right in the middle of it. We'll have it dug out by June is my guess. Whatever you do, don't drive in this storm. Unless, of course, you feel really compelled to do so. Angus has an SUV with something like 18-wheel drive (18WD). Also we needed to rescue some people freezing in a house with no power. Do not attempt: Closed course, professional driver. We came upon a man felled by a giant windshield wiper. Freaked us out something fierce. This is how we roll. This was taken hours ago, and by now the

The Washington white-out

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:16:40 -0500

3:55 p.m.: Pip is nervous as he surveys the first flakes of Snowmaggedon. He knows that if this gets really ugly he becomes someone's lunch. 4:45 p.m.: Cynics deride my photographs for being mere "snapshots" in the same way that Capote said Kerouac's writing was just "typing." But if that's true, how come I get these incredible action shots of wildlife? In flight??? Give me a camera and it's like an instantaneous National Geographic situation. 5:00 p.m.: Poe has snow on his mind. 5:45 p.m.: The blueing hour. Some call it twilight, but in a big snow it's all skews blue. 9:10 p.m.: Reconnaissance of outdoors reveals increasing snow accumulation and trees fending for themselves. I wanted to take this tree indoors and give it warmth by my hearth. Then it occurred to me that it could actually be used as fuel for the aforesaid fire. Am getting chainsaw

The storm before the storm

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:29:49 -0500

Waiting for the Big One. Again. This might make the Snowpocalypse of Dec. 19 look like a dusting. It's going to be like a Roland Emmerich movie. There will be so much snow that it will destabilize the earth's crust. Hidden volcanoes will erupt in once-tranquil neighborhoods. There will be devastation followed by obliteration. I stand guard on my front walk with shovel in hand. I want to meet the storm head-on. No level of frozen precipitation or wind can drive me indoors. Later, when it's all over, I want neighbors to walk by my house and say, "Wow, what a nice snowman they made!" and then suddenly realize: IT'S JOEL. Bring it on. Already this morning I have made the Safeway run. It's getting frantic and desperate there -- I believe the technical term is Hobbesian -- particularly in the produce section. People are feeling the fierce urgency of

The snowy winter

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:15:02 -0500

Please shoot me when I no longer want to get out in the snow. Just end the whole thing. Being from the Deep South, having grown up in a place where our idea of a sublime alteration of the natural landscape was the passage of the mosquito fogger ("The fogger! The fogger!" the Achenbro and I shouted as we ran outside and chased the poison-belching city truck), I still am easily amazed and amused by frozen precip. In the snow, old bridges appear out of nowhere. Any second you think you'll encounter a soldier in a Civil War outfit. I wish instead of hiking I could ride a horse on snowy mornings. My horselessness is at the top of my long list of regrets in life. I came upon a remarkable cave. God knows what lives in there. Bears. Wolverines. My horse always refuses to go in there. The

Who lost the moon?

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:17:52 -0500

I feel bad for the people who worked on Constellation. The new NASA boss, Charles Bolden, compared it yesterday to a death in the family. We need to give them time to grieve, he said. But they're not just grieving: They're furious. One made a YouTube [via NASA Watch] that's worth watching, contrasting campaign-trail promises by Obama with the decision to blow up Constellation even after it had started cutting metal for spacecraft. These folks were doing their best to get America back to the moon. Ain't gonna happen. I also feel bad for the taxpayers. Constellation was -- or is, technically, since it hasn't yet been shut down -- an $11.5 billion fiasco. We're told that NASA has spent $9 billion so far on the plan. There's another $2.5 billion over two years that the White House estimates will be necessary to shut down the existing contracts. Something

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Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:17:52 -0500

The coming moon war

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:51:39 -0500

Major doings at NASA! Rocketships canceled. A moon mission spiked. Fury in Congress. I tuned in to the NASA telepresser and, when the Q&A time came, asked one question -- where, exactly, are we going to go other than the ISS? Answer: TBD. But we're going to develop new technologies. We'll have orbital refueling. We'll have new propulsion. So we'll be all dressed up and ready to go -- somewhere. [Here's my web story on the NASA budget.] The battle over space has begun. And it's likely to be brutal. The Obama administration is attempting to kill NASA's ambitious back-to-the moon program, an effort that carried the imprimatur of George W. Bush. The Constellation program had already run through about $9 billion to develop a new crew capsule, Orion, and a new rocket, the Ares 1. Both are vaporized by Obama's new NASA strategy. Instead of going back to

Buddy, can you spare a trillion?

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:38:04 -0500

It's Budget Day! Always a big day here in Washington, as we learn of new ways that the government will spend more than three and a half trillion of our dollars. That's about one and half trillion dollars more than the government receives in revenue. How is that sustainable? Easy: We call China! China has money. All will be well. The great thing about debt is that it doesn't have to be repaid until the future, which conceivably might not even happen. The future, remember, is just a theoretical possibility, hardly more than a hypothetical. The key characteristic of the future is that it hasn't happened yet; thus by definition the arrival of the future is merely some probability less than 1. Sure, the future is something physicists tell us is just as "real" as the past, but if so, how come there are all these non-fiction history books

Lost moon

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 08:45:27 -0500

Watching the snow fall...hoping for a blizzard but happy to get even a couple of inches...and thinking about the moon... We're not going back to the moon. We've known this since the summer. We had a front-page story saying approximately as much (the lede: "NASA doesn't have nearly enough money to meet its goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020 -- and it may be the wrong place to go anyway"). There's lots more on this at NASA Watch, in the Orlando Sentinel , and from the AP. See also Ed O'Keefe's blog. Although President Obama has said hardly a word about his vision for space, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to see that the moon is no longer on the NASA manifest and the Constellation program championed by President George W. Bush and former NASA boss Mike Griffin is effectively kaput. This

J. D. Salinger

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 07:58:27 -0500

Holden Caulfield lives. Half a century of reclusiveness by his creator couldn't make Holden disappear. He's still required reading. I found him to be optional reading too: It's a little book, and you can take another run at it on a whim. How many books have been re-read as often as "The Catcher in the Rye"? Maybe Gatsby. Help me here. You could probably make a long list of reasons why J.D. Salinger's reputation was undeservedly outsized, and there's no question that he was an odd duck. But he has the immortality that comes to anyone who can create a vivid literary character. Holden Caulfield is still the iconic alienated teenager who runs off to the big city, who has bad habits and a good heart, who affects cynicism but is painfully sensitive. "The Catcher In the Rye" didn't invent the first-person, coming-of-age novel, nor was it the first

Justice Alito mouths not true

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:53:57 -0500

Obama is wrong: It's not true that every day in Washington is Election Day. Every day is The Circus Has Come to Town Day. The whole point of gathering the entire House of Representatives, the entire Senate, the entire presidential Cabinet save for the one human backup plan, the entire Supreme Court, much of the White House staff and various American heroes in a single chamber for an evening is so that the following morning we can discuss who didn't clap enough or who said the wrong thing or who, in this particular case, mouthed something to himself. [Link via Memeorandum, where, even before I looked, I knew it would be the top item, even higher than the text of the speech itself.] The last time Obama addressed Congress, we wound up spending about a week discussing Joe Wilson, the decline of civility in politics, and the looney bin

Live-blogging the State Of the Union address

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:52:34 -0500

8:53 p.m.: On CNN they just announced that someone named "Shaun Donovan," who is apparently the Housing secretary, has not attended the joint session on the off chance that in an unfortunate turn of events someone will be forced to take over leadership of the Free World. Why does this not inspire me with confidence. Why was I hoping for someone more like the guy with the cowboy hat. (Wasn't Shaun Donovan a famous teen actor? Always popping up in 'Tiger Beat'?) 8:59 p.m.: They said Obama's been tweaking his address up until the last minute. What you bet he just inserted a line: "On that health care thing: Never mind!" 9:00 p.m: Wolf Blitzer's widescreen-monitor must have cost as much as "Avatar." 9:02 p.m.: The two military cops who downed the Fort Hood shooter are sitting with FLOTUS. 9:03: Stephapopulopulopolis says FLOTUS is wearing purple to look centrist.

Apple tablet announcement

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:04:57 -0500

I'm always a bit slow to adopt new technologies, and have only just recently gotten around to buying one of these newfangled things called an "adding machine." I really don't know why people soured so badly on slide rules. In any case, I'm all abuzz about the new Apple tablet, or iPad, or whatever Steve Jobs calls it. Here are some of the things the iPad can do: 1. Surf the web. 2. Check e-mail. 3. Compose documents 4. Heal the sick. 5. Discern molecular components of exoplanet atmospheres. 6. Achieve nuclear fusion. 7. Link directly with another iPad and produce, after just 24 hours, a litter of tiny, squealing iPads. 8. Explain jokes you don't get. 9. Wake you up in the morning (digital clock display!!!!!). 10. Serve as a doorstop. So you can see why everyone's going to want one. What I like most about it is