Fascinating. Love your "most conceptually boring para ever written" - you hooked me with it. Really interesting, the idea that "weather is boring" is code for "country folk are beneath us": we the ubermenschen in our cities are above the weather. I've always thought politicians ought to be required to spend a month alone in the wilderness, relying only on themselves, seeing the moon and the stars, and experiencing the weather.
Meanwhile, here is my favorite satire on "weather is boring and the English always talk about it": extract from Michael Frayn's "Twelfth Night: or, What Will You Have." The whole thing runs to about 3 pages, and is a brilliant takeoff of Shakespare's plots.
Setting is a cocktail party. They all introduce themselves, ending:
... Lord Worcester, may I introduce Lord Leicester?
My noblest Gloucester, meet your brother Chester.
My Lady Chester and My Lady Leicester,
Meet Ursula, the sister of Lord Bicester.
ALL: Hail!
GLOUCESTER: Well, now, hath Phoebus quit these climes for ever?
WORCESTER: Ay, are we now delivered quite to gales,
And spouting hurricanoes' plashy spite?
CHESTER: Sure, 'tis foul weather.
LEICESTER: Why, so 'tis.
NORTHUMBERLAND: 'Tis so.
I couldn't find the whole thing online, but if you can find an edition of John Julius Norwich's MORE CHRISTMAS CRACKERS, it's in there. I think it's also in the Faber Book of Satires.
I assume you've got a long reading list but if you're interested in adding an amazing book to it, I recommend Richard Hofstadter's book 'Anti-Intellectualism in the American Mind.' I started it thinking it was going to be boring and was reminded on the first page just why it won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction.
More to the point, Hofstadter is an amazing thinker. It's entirely possible that you're familiar with him already but if you're not, his writing is so prescient of public events that it's alarming. The present feels like Chapter 10 of a story he's been narrating since Chapter 1.
Thanks James. Good tip on Hofstadter. A bunch of old stuff is new again such as Adorno on the authoritarian personality and Hofstadter's book on the paranoid style in American politics. Hold tight. Gettin' bumpy out there!
Fascinating! It seems like climate change has (at least subconsciously) reminded us all of how spectacularly insignificant humans are in comparison to the scope of nature
A good thunderstorm will do that, but I agree that climate change is a stark reminder of how dependent we are on everything going right in the sky. There's a reason the weather gods wind up at the tops of their pantheons. :-D
There are gods because everything must be explained by agency. Hence, the townsfolk convinced that a minor weather god strode among them.
I used to spend a lot of time on bicoastal conference calls. As people called in and were waiting for things to get rolling we'd talk not business, but someone would inevitably ask "how's your weather." People in SF were unaffected by the weather in NYC and v.v. In fact, since most of us spent all our waking hours indoors or in a car, we were mostly unaffected by our own weather. Finally, it occurred to me that it was a way of taking the temperature of the virtual room. Were people in a sunny mood or gloomy?
I'll be happy to look into that--this whole article took about three hours to write, and was meant to be a quick response to a single artifact (the quotation from the New Hampshire Board of Agriculture book). I'm still researching, so I'll look into Haarp as well.
As far as I knowq (I'm a Swedish-speaking Finn) the Finnish god of thunder is Ukko, not Utto. The word for thunder or storm in Finnish is "ukkonen", a diminutive form. In Swedish we use "åska" or "åskstorm". Just sayin'.
Thanks for this! I just went back and fixed it. Also, since I was checking, I looked at the other names and found out I messed up the spelling of another god (the Dagda) as well. I've taken care of both of those now, so thank you for raising the point.
Fascinating. Love your "most conceptually boring para ever written" - you hooked me with it. Really interesting, the idea that "weather is boring" is code for "country folk are beneath us": we the ubermenschen in our cities are above the weather. I've always thought politicians ought to be required to spend a month alone in the wilderness, relying only on themselves, seeing the moon and the stars, and experiencing the weather.
Meanwhile, here is my favorite satire on "weather is boring and the English always talk about it": extract from Michael Frayn's "Twelfth Night: or, What Will You Have." The whole thing runs to about 3 pages, and is a brilliant takeoff of Shakespare's plots.
Setting is a cocktail party. They all introduce themselves, ending:
... Lord Worcester, may I introduce Lord Leicester?
My noblest Gloucester, meet your brother Chester.
My Lady Chester and My Lady Leicester,
Meet Ursula, the sister of Lord Bicester.
ALL: Hail!
GLOUCESTER: Well, now, hath Phoebus quit these climes for ever?
WORCESTER: Ay, are we now delivered quite to gales,
And spouting hurricanoes' plashy spite?
CHESTER: Sure, 'tis foul weather.
LEICESTER: Why, so 'tis.
NORTHUMBERLAND: 'Tis so.
I couldn't find the whole thing online, but if you can find an edition of John Julius Norwich's MORE CHRISTMAS CRACKERS, it's in there. I think it's also in the Faber Book of Satires.
Allegra,
Thank you so much for this, and sorry for the delayed response. First, I'll track down the satire you're talking about.
And second, I am all in favor of exiling politicians to the wilderness. I'm also in favor of most of them staying there. ;-)
J
"After a time, the people began to think that the instruments set up by the observer had something to do with it;"
Yeah, if we could just get rid of all them damn scientists, things would be so much better. Oh wait, we are!
Baird,
I assume you've got a long reading list but if you're interested in adding an amazing book to it, I recommend Richard Hofstadter's book 'Anti-Intellectualism in the American Mind.' I started it thinking it was going to be boring and was reminded on the first page just why it won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction.
More to the point, Hofstadter is an amazing thinker. It's entirely possible that you're familiar with him already but if you're not, his writing is so prescient of public events that it's alarming. The present feels like Chapter 10 of a story he's been narrating since Chapter 1.
J
Thanks James. Good tip on Hofstadter. A bunch of old stuff is new again such as Adorno on the authoritarian personality and Hofstadter's book on the paranoid style in American politics. Hold tight. Gettin' bumpy out there!
Fascinating! It seems like climate change has (at least subconsciously) reminded us all of how spectacularly insignificant humans are in comparison to the scope of nature
Milana,
A good thunderstorm will do that, but I agree that climate change is a stark reminder of how dependent we are on everything going right in the sky. There's a reason the weather gods wind up at the tops of their pantheons. :-D
J
There are gods because everything must be explained by agency. Hence, the townsfolk convinced that a minor weather god strode among them.
I used to spend a lot of time on bicoastal conference calls. As people called in and were waiting for things to get rolling we'd talk not business, but someone would inevitably ask "how's your weather." People in SF were unaffected by the weather in NYC and v.v. In fact, since most of us spent all our waking hours indoors or in a car, we were mostly unaffected by our own weather. Finally, it occurred to me that it was a way of taking the temperature of the virtual room. Were people in a sunny mood or gloomy?
You’re not mentioning Haarp and military weather experiments
I'll be happy to look into that--this whole article took about three hours to write, and was meant to be a quick response to a single artifact (the quotation from the New Hampshire Board of Agriculture book). I'm still researching, so I'll look into Haarp as well.
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/holes-in-heaven/
Interesting. Just one detail:
As far as I knowq (I'm a Swedish-speaking Finn) the Finnish god of thunder is Ukko, not Utto. The word for thunder or storm in Finnish is "ukkonen", a diminutive form. In Swedish we use "åska" or "åskstorm". Just sayin'.
Thanks for this! I just went back and fixed it. Also, since I was checking, I looked at the other names and found out I messed up the spelling of another god (the Dagda) as well. I've taken care of both of those now, so thank you for raising the point.
J