CSotD: Here in the Between Time
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This is an odd time of the year when you might as well take a vacation because nearly everybody else is going to.
When I was a reporter, it meant that the only stories to cover were about fires and accidents because you couldn’t get hold of sources so you could write anything more substantive, and, besides, nothing more substantive was happening.
On Christmas day itself you had the mandatory “Who’s working on Christmas?” stories. Some of those panned out, most were forgettable. But the rest of the week it was even harder to find anything to write about.
Which is why your newspaper and the newscasts on your radio and TV are currently full of those year-end wrap-ups, which are compiled ahead of time to fill the annual vacuum.
To which I would add that Winslow is afraid we’ll get back to normalcy next week, but he shouldn’t worry because it hasn’t been normal.
Juxtaposition of the Day
This week is particularly hard for workaholics, which would include freelancers like Adam. I can relate, because I share that feeling that there’s something I ought to be doing and the worst part of that is that a true workaholic can always find something, even if it’s pointless.
I asked my son once if he thought I was a workaholic and he said, “You mean to the point where it interferes with your social life?” and started laughing.
As Bub says, the trick to doing nothing is to avoid the guilt, and this week offers a splendid opportunity to avoid being productive, at least up here in the northern portion of the Northern Hemisphere where it’s too cold to finally clean out the garage and the lawn is under a layer of snow.
Your own weather may be warm and cheerful, but it’s 5 degrees out as I write this, and that’s Fahrenheit and that’s far from cheerful. Even the dog understands the mission when we go out and isn’t too picky about finding a good spot, but at least we’re not in the belt that got walloped in the past 24 hours.
Nor were we supposed to be. That “let’s-see-what-happens” line is far more typical these days than it was back when I was in TV, and it’s an educated guess. But our local meteorologist correctly predicted 2-4 inches, which is all we got.
I worked in TV back in the days when the weather guy was also the national ad sales guy and had no more idea of meteorology than anyone else. He’d stick a few clouds and suns up on a felt board and remind the cameraman to stay close-up so nobody’d see that he was wearing blue jeans under his sports coat, then read the National Weather Service prediction from the TelePrompter.
These days, the person doing the weather may be the best educated member of the news team and lays out the possibilities in some detail, explaining the most likely outcome and what could change it. If you pay attention, they’re nearly always right because you’ll know why things turned out as they did, even it wasn’t that likeliest outcome.
But we may soon be going back to felt boards, rip-and-read predictions and blind guessing, since the Dept of Defense has quit sharing vital weather information, (UPDATE: Good news!) NOAA has had substantial cuts and now Dear Leader has decided to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research because it keeps making scientific statements about climate change, which Dear Leader assures us is a hoax.
It’s worth remembering that the lack of warning for the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, which killed thousands of people, was the disaster that sparked demand for improvements in the science of predictions.
Those who do not learn from the past etc etc etc
If you are planning to stay inside, this is both an excellent day and the correct day to break out a deck of cards, Dave Whamond reminds us, though he truncates Cassius Marcellus Coolidge to the fellow’s middle name.
I have a particular affection for the original of Coolidge’s most famous painting, a copy of which hung in the barber shop where I had my hair cut as a lad, and my interest intensified later in life when I poked around and discovered that the artist had lived in our neck of the woods.
You can read all about him, and about dogs playing poker, right here at the memorably named http://www.dogsplayingpoker.com.
Turns out that Cash Coolidge did a number of paintings of dogs playing poker, though somehow this one became the most famous. And if that weren’t enough of a contribution to American culture, he also took out a patent for those large paintings with a hole that you could stick your face through for a photograph, though I suspect he didn’t follow through on getting compensated for them all, since he never became wealthy.
Coolidge wasn’t the only artist from that part of the country. Frederic Remington also hailed from Northern New York, and there’s a museum of his work in Ogdensburg, which also has a logical URL, https://www.fredericremington.org/
However, I have been there and while it’s a very nice collection, it does not have any pictures of horses playing poker or perhaps Remington would be as well known as Cash Coolidge, though he did touch upon the same theme on occasion, albeit not in so much of a light and playful atmosphere.
Note that, while the locations are different, the card sharp appears to be the same fellow, and he’s still available for another game.
They should have asked him to stick around.
As Cliff says, we’ve got three more days to accomplish whatever resolutions we set for ourselves last year, which means we’ve also got three more days to make whatever resolutions we’ll fail to carry out in 2026.
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