When weather forecasters cry wolf

For the last few days of last week, culminating in Friday evening, up to 9 inches of snow were predicted to arrive on Friday night. It even got to the point where the National Weather Service broke into the radio with the "we want to get your attention so we'll hurt your ears" tones to say there was a severe snow WARNING in effect for tonight, don't travel if you don't have to, put food and a flashlight in your car, etc. etc. blah blah blah. When I stopped at the grocery store on the way home, there were four registers open and the lines at all of them were four or five people long.

Saturday morning dawned bright and clear, with…no snow whatsoever. (We got about an inch of it Saturday night, but not enough to matter.)

It was amusing to visit the website of the local TV station with a big reputation for weather forecasting expertise and see the lengthy article they wrote, hastily explaining where the snow was that we didn't get. It seemed that a thin layer of warm air lurked right between two of the altitudes where they had sampled temperatures, completely invisible to the forecasters, and melted the snow as it came down. Those sneaky layers of warm air, huh? Even now, there's a lengthy article at the bottom of the tv station's weather page (if you're reading this very long after the posting date, it's probably gone) explaining the process by which weather is forecast. It's interesting to read, even if it does smack of an embarrased foot-shuffling "Um…we're smart. We know stuff. Really!"

Any bite-sized writers?

Anybody out there willing to take a swing at writing story bits in 1024 byte chunks?

Ficlets.com is a site where you write a 1024 byte (1 kilobyte) chunk of story and post it, then someone else can come along and write another K of story as a prequel or sequel to it, then someone else can write a prequel or sequel to that, or can write another prequel or sequel to the original to take the story in a different direction. Chains and branches can go on for quite a while.

The problem is, there are a number of older stories I'd like to continue, that have aged off the front page of the site so nobody goes looking for them, but it just doesn't feel right to write all the sequels myself. If I were going to do that, I'd just go somewhere like writing.com where length didn't matter.

So, would anybody like to take a whack at writing something only 1024 bytes long? :)

30 years of "Peace on Earth"

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the following memorable performance:

There's an interesting story behind it, too. It all came about because David Bowie really really hated the song "Little Drummer Boy" and wanted to sing something else. The songwriters quickly banged out a new counterpoint, and history was made—as well as Bing Crosby's final hit song, as he would be dead only a month later.