May 31 2023 - All Fired Up

 

With climate change we now have to learn the fire verbs.  It snow, it rains, but it doesn't fire.  Lately we see the verb to blaze, and that's equivalent to blizzard.  I wonder if there will be a meteorological word for wild fires. So far there is burn, rage, deviate and blaze.   I checked out the wildfire glossary - it is from British Columbia and is HERE.  There are no fire-related words starting with A, but B has blow-up - a sudden and unexpected major increase in rate of spread... Can meteorologists help fight wildfires?  It seems they can.  As Incident Meteorologists, they camp out with fire crews and help fire crews to plan operations.   On the other hand, there have been a number of meteorologists "fired" for various reasons.

This is one of Floyd Elzinga's works - it looks like the hills are "ablaze".

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Nov 21 - 2021 - All Clear in A#

 

All Clear, or All-Clear.  This is a reminder of the Second World War when air raid warning systems alerted citizens to the dangers and then sounded the end of possible danger.  We baby boomers remember these, too, as they were used for nuclear attack practices.   The UK system was a discontinued in 1992.  There are still countries with All-Clear signals on their warning sirens.  Canada is one of them.  The others are Denmark, Singapore, Kuwait, some areas of the U.S., Afghanistan, and Israel.  The alert to danger was a rising and falling tone, and the All-Clear signal was a continuous tone.  I found a study of alert systems in the U.S. and this is the range of sound: "The signals available for use by siren technology normally fall between the 300 Hz to 1 000 Hz range (FEMA 1980), with the steady (or mid-range) frequencies surrounding 500 Hz or 600 Hz and dual frequencies at 460 Hz and 920 Hz. Some manufacturers discuss the benefits of signals with dual frequencies as better able to reach a wider listening audience." So where does that put the sound in musical terms? Middle C is 264 Hz. A above Middle C is tuned to 440 Hz.   So our range would be the octave from A# above Middle C to A# the next octave.   You can read the chart to find it. We are long past the distant nuclear threats.  Present and personal are the dangers of floods, earthquakes, fires, shooters, and more. There are many first world citizens who are "inconvenienced" by middle-of-the-night alerts for kidnapped/missing children or by a test alert on their phones.  They will no longer have the luxury to the minor irritations that give rise to complaints and groans.These are the emotions of the uninvolved.  That is on the cusp of being nostalgic. The west coast heat dome of 2021, the fires and then the floods are signals that alert systems could sound frequently and apply to us - each and every one of us.   It seems likely to me when I consider my sense of climate change this year vs last year I have experienced a shift in social consciousness.  Here it is: Move over COVID And share the sofa -  The crisis that has come to stay.   Hum along the A# song to the lyrics of Greta's "Blah Blah Blah" These two pictures are from 2010.  They are graffiti on outdoor chess boards at the park behind the subway station at Bathurst and Bloom.  I returned numerous times to take progressive pictures, but the progress was declining and these were the very best.

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Sep 16 2020 - Existential Dilemma

 

Existentialism was a dominant philosophy in theatre plays written from the 1940s through the 1960s.  We enjoyed theatre of the absurd - there was much comedy infused in it. The original idea of existentialism is a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual subject as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.  The view of the existentialist, the individual's starting point has been called "the existential angst" or a sense disorientation, confusion, or anxiety in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. The notion of the absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning in the world beyond what meaning we give it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness" of the world. Because of the world's absurdity, anything can happen to anyone at any time and a tragic event could plummet someone into direct confrontation with the absurd.   Global catastrophic risk has become associated with the risks to all of human kind, and we've now named the highest risk level -  existential risk - the one leading to the destruction of all humanity.  e An existential risk one that either destroys humanity entirely or prevents any chance of civilization's recovery. So the question is whether COVID-19 can destroy humanity in its entirety.  The risk levels of of COVID-19 and of Climate Change are being distinguished at the most serious levels: between existential and global catastrophic risk.   The philosophical version can be found in many jokes: After my existential crisis, I decided to take a job as a feeder at the local dolphinarium Now I’m serving a youthful porpoise Why did the dictionary have an existential breakdown? He couldn’t find the meaning of life Existential Java: I mixed de-caf coffee with regular coffee and they must have cancelled each other out because now I feel nothing If I had a dollar for every time I had an existential crisis Would it even matter? What do you think?  COVID-19 vs Climate Change.

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What Everest Throws Up!

The hindustantimes headline is incredible and macabre proof of climate change: "Melting glaciers throw up bodies of dead climbers on Mount Everest" The article from the Indo Asian News Service in Kathmandu says this is the result of melting glaciers and snow - bodies of climbers on and around the world's highest peak are being found.  Did you know that more than 200 mountaineers have died on the peak since 1922? That's when the first deaths were recorded. There wasn't much else in the article - the headline seemed to be the news. The sources quoted in the article had the surname "Sherpa".  And I thought I knew a sherpa was a job. Initially it is a group of people who migrated to Nepal from Eastern Tibet.  And it is a job description on a formal trekking crew - this is separate from the ethnic Sherpas.  In the article on Sherpas, there is a picture of three men.  The caption is: "Pemba Dorje Sherpa (center), Nima Gyalzen Sherpa (left) and Phurba Tenzing Sherpa (right). Many Sherpas are named after the day of the week." There it is again, people with the surname Sherpa.  And there's more to their names than I could imagine.    "When a Sherpa is not a Dorje Lhakpa, he is a Lhakpa Dorje. Moreover, the Sherpa custom of naming children after the days of the week leads to too many Pasang Sherpas, Pemba Sherpas, and Phurba Sherpas," wrote Thamal. "Many Sherpas are named after the day of the week. Pasang is Friday, Pemba is Saturday. This custom places the child under the protection of that day's deity. Many Sherpa children also receive a virtue name such as Lhamo which means "beautiful," or Gyaltshen which means "courageous speech." On top of this there are a bunch of commonly used names such as Tenzing (meaning steadiness and support) from the scriptures of Tibetan Buddhism.  Here is a list of Sherpa names: www.sherpakyidug.org." All this information comes from CNN travel - Sherpafacts. I have been continuing on the Lakeshore Living series.  This one is a work in progress - I want to get the Port Dalhousie carousel into the series.