Tuesday 28 March 2006

Pic of the day: Picture from real life. The side of the car is sheltered by a half-roof, which is why you can see it at all rather than a vague bump in the snow like just another snowdrift.

Winter culminated

Or at least I think this is the end of it, because mild weather ensues for the rest of the week. I am not a person much affected by the weather, but I certainly don't mind some spring right now. Of course it probably won't be long before I whine about the unbearable heat. It doesn't take much heat for it to be unbearable to me, I am pretty far removed from our tropical ancestors and tend to pull the courtains on the summer sun.

Coworkers and old people on the bus claim that there hasn't been a snow winter like this here on the south coast for over 40 years.

A pious friend of mine told me that he had prayed to God to mess up the weather to make people pause and think. (Elijah prayed to God and it did not rain in Israel for three and a half year, then he prayed again and it rained again. Yes, my friend did mention this precedent.) Then again he could hardly have found a better time to pray such a prayer, I think. Another pious friend of mine mentioned right after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe that he had prayed for that to happen. I strongly suspect that communism would have failed even without his prayer, but then again we pray to our Heavenly Father to give us our daily bread even if we are gainfully employed. You never know. And in any case, it feels good to be on the winning side when the good guys win.

I guess that's how I feel about spring too, especially late springs like the one I remember from my childhood on the west coast, which were like an invasion of the victorious sun. It feels good to be on the winning side when the good guys win.

And it is no accident that my Norse ancestors believed that Niflheim, the afterlife of punishment, was a place of searing, numbing cold. The climate in the Viking age was similar to Norway in the 90es, but the architecture was rather less developed and people huddled close to their fireplaces or kept their animals close around them for warmth against the icy winds.

I have mentioned elsewhere how the Greenhouse Effect seems indistinguishable from God's Wrath: If it is too cold, if it is too hot, drought or flooding, storms or new diseases, it is the Greenhouse Effect. Or God's Wrath. In any case, the only way to get out of it is to renounce our current life of luxury and return to something like the old days, only better. And even then the curse will probably follow our descendants for three or four generations.

Perhaps prayer is indeed the best course of action. But I don't think I'll pray for more chaos, despite the name of my journal. I expect us to see plenty of that for the rest of my tenure in the flesh.