San Juan Mountains Weather Report–Halloween– October 31, 2011–09:16–
Tuesday afternoon/evening we’ll see a fast hitting, but moderate storm along with a cold front moving through the San Juans and exiting Wednesday afternoon. Today (Monday) a similar day like Sunday with warm and abundant sunshine.
Today there is a Pacific shortwave over Washington state that will quickly dig a upper level trough tonight and move into western Colorado as an open wave Tue. night. The trough is supported by a cold front moving south from Canada & being pushed by gusty winds just ahead of the front. NW Colorado is favored with this small quick moving storm & the San Juans will probably see only a few inches of snow even in the alpine regions because of limited moisture.
By Wednesday afternoon the system should move east of our forecast area with clearing skies through Thursday then a strong trough of low pressure developing off the west coast will begin moving inland into the Great Basin and strengthening by Friday accompanied by a surface cold front. We will see snow Friday night through Saturday evening favoring NW facing slopes. As the storm moves east Sunday, there will be clearing with high pressure ridging.
No estimate of snow amounts yet, will have to wait for newer pressure/precipitation maps to make a guess.
Visualizing How A Population Grows To 7 Billion–LISTEN–
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/31/141816460/visualizing-how-a-population-grows-to-7-billion
The U.N. estimates that the world’s population will pass the 7 billion mark on Monday.
Much of that growth has happened in Asia — in India and China. Those two countries have been among the world’s most populous for centuries. But a demographic shift is taking place as the countries have modernized and lowered their fertility rates. Now, the biggest growth is taking place in sub-Saharan Africa.
Due in part to that region’s extreme poverty, infant mortality rates are high and access to family planning is low. The result is high birth rates and a booming population of 900 million — a number that could triple by the end of the century. Population expert Joel Cohen points out that, in 1950, there were nearly three times as many Europeans as sub-Saharan Africans. If U.N. estimates are correct, there will be nearly five sub-Saharan Africans for every European by 2100.
As NPR’s Adam Cole reports, it was just over two centuries ago that the global population was 1 billion — in 1804. But better medicine and improved agriculture resulted in higher life expectancy for children, dramatically increasing the world population, especially in the West.
A Musical Style That Unites Mexican-Americans-
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/29/141723031/a-musical-style-that-unites-mexican-americans
It’s a warm evening at Tia Chucha’s Bookstore in Sylmar, in California’s San Fernando Valley, not far from the neighborhood where Ritchie Valens created a rock ‘n’ roll version of the most famousson jarocho tune “La Bamba.” Tonight, Aaron Castellanos is one of eight students in a music class held at the store. He’s learning to play the eight-string jarana, the main instrument in the musical style of son jarocho.
“I like the way that the jarana sounds,” he says. “I like how son jarocho invokes so much energy into the playing and into the singing.”
Students learn the jarana in a Son Jarocho class at Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in Sylmar, Los Angeles.
Son jarocho comes from Veracruz, a state in the Gulf Coast region of Mexico, where three different cultures — Spanish, indigenous and African — came together more than 500 years ago. Castellanos is actually learning the “mosquito,” one of the smallest jaranas, which has a noticeably high pitch.
“This is the first instrument that I’ve ever learned, so I want to keep playing,” Castellanos says. “I want to buy my own jarana and just continue practicing.”
Castellanos’ teacher is Cesar Castro, a key figure at the center of the Son Jarocho explosion in Los Angeles. Castro says that, since he moved to L.A. from Veracruz eight years ago, the number of son jarocho musicians has been growing, and the quality of the music has been improving.
“When we had the first fandangos here in Los Angeles, the music was not that good. But the energy, the will to do these fandangos, it was very strong,” Castro says. “The music is getting better, still in a very respectful traditional format.”
Fandangos are at the heart of son jarocho. They’re kind of like jam sessions, where musicians gather to play, sing and dance around a wooden platform called a tarima. At the Zona Rosa Café in Pasadena, the fandango is hosted by Castro’s band Cambalache, one of a dozen son jarocho groups in the L.A. area. Within an hour, more fandangueros arrive and join in, playing, singing and dancing.
San Juan Mountains Weather & Snow Pack Report.–Thursday, October 27, 2011–09:40
Weather
Yesterday’s storm system has traveled east of us with remaining residue/garbage clouds that should partially burn off by mid-day then a NW shortwave trough will cover the area helping keep air temps. on the cool side (low 40′s) and promote cloudy conditions today. Warming temps tomorrow (low 50′s) but not quite seasonal norms then the atmosphere will slowly warm through the weekend with temperatures in the mid- 50′s to low 60′s in the Ridgway area.
Clear, dry weather until Monday when an approaching low pressure trough moves in early next week, but too early to tell what we’ll see. One model shows some precipitation for the San Juans and others show the trough confined to the northern Colorado mountain.
Snow Pack
Still seeing snow flurries on RMP early this morning, but should be shutting down soon.
SNOTEL sites:
IDARADO 0.4″ H20 0.2″ new/24 hr. Probably 6″ of snow or less with settlement.
COAL BANK 1.5″ H20 0.8″ new/24 hr. Equates to 20″ or less with settlement.
RMP 1.2″ H20 0.4″ new/24 hr. Probably 15″ total storm snow.
Weather stations/web site still not working on the Hwy 550 corridor.
Fiesta chair greets
October storm-
summer only a memory
San Juan Mountains Weather Report-Wednesday, October 26, 2011–08:53
Yesterday’s forecast seem confirmed this morning. RMP and Coal Bank SNOTEL sites show 0.7 ” of new H20 translated to probably 8″ of snow & the Idarado site on the N. side of the pass showing 0.1″ translates to very little new snow.
We should see widespread snow in the mountains & snow/sleet/rain throughout the day in the valley’s decreasing from the NW by evening. The mountains could see another 8-10″ of snow today. Clearing skies later today and drying out tomorrow with mixed forecasts for this weekend.
Carlsberg Brewery Pulls Brilliant Guerrilla Marketing Stunt In Cinema
Beer adverts usually follow the same storyline about who has the coldest chilling system, the best sports offers or the hottest models but a new campaign from Carlsberg is highly original and features a night out at the cinema. It’s a guerrilla campaign that is secretly filmed and features a cinema full of burly scary looking men with the only 2 seats in the place being sold to unsuspecting couples. CHECK OUT THE VIDEO, IT’S GREAT…
THE ZEN LUNATICS “POETS ON THE PEAKS’ Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the Cascades Text and Photographs by John Suiter — A Review by Dick Dorworth for the Mountain Gazette
This is a very cool book. Buy it. Read it. Let its story sink in, slowly, with appreciation, like watching a mountain at sunup. It is a scholarly book about the connections between people, places, cultures (and culture), politics, religion, scholarship, wilderness, mountains, rivers, poetry, literature, ecology, community, environment and revelation. It is full of information, insight, inspiration, history and wisdom. On the back cover of the bound galley copy I received it reads, “….it tells how the solitary mountain adventures of three young men helped to form the literary, spiritual, and environmental values of a generation.”
“Poets on the Peaks” does that and much more. Those three young men, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen worked as fire lookouts in the North Cascades in the early 1950s. Snyder was the leader, the pioneer, the guide, the only one of the three with a mountaineering background and the temperament and training to flourish in a solitary, isolated environment surrounded by wilderness. It was Snyder who convinced his two literary friends to take jobs as fire lookouts. First Whelan, then Kerouac. All three were (Snyder and Whelan still are) serious Zen practitioners, and Snyder quoted the zen lunatic Han Shan a thousand years earlier: “Who can leap the world’s ties/And sit with me among the white clouds?” Suiter writes, “Gary could, Whelan could; and so should Jack.” An experienced and accomplished northwest mountaineer by the time he was 20, Snyder and his young friends climbed “….to develop a fresh mountaineering mind set that was totally opposed to the notion of conquest.” He writes, “I and the circle I climbed with were extremely critical of what we saw as the hostile, jock Occidental mind-set that thought to climb a mountain was to conquer it….I always thought of mountaineering not as a matter of conquering the mountain, but as a matter of self-knowledge.”
This is not the sort of writing about mountains that tends to make it into Climbing Magazine or The American Alpine Club Journal, but it did help form the core values of a particular generation of mountaineers, backpackers, writers and readers that, in turn, has influenced the generations to follow. Still, climbers of all attitudes and intentions will be charmed to find Fred Beckey, of all people, popping up in the text somewhat the way he has popped up in the mountains of the world for the past 65 years. This book has too many layers to explore here, but the top one is the effect the solitary fire lookout experience had on the thinking and work of these three major American writers. There are several other layers in “Poets on the Peaks,” all of them fascinating, well-researched and eloquently described. Suiter had access to “scores of previously unpublished letters and journals” as well as recent interviews with Snyder and Whelan and others, giving a fresh perspective and quality and a deeper dimension to a story of great significance to American literature and thought, and to members of America’s “rucksack revolution.”
Anyone who has read Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums” will remember the character Japhy Ryder who is based on the person of Gary Snyder, and remember, too, the climb up Matterhorn Peak in the Sierra described in the book. It is one of the most memorable climbs in American literature. The actual climb which Kerouac used as the basis for what he wrote cemented the friendship/brotherhood between he and Snyder. Kerouac’s alcoholic withdrawal from Snyder, Buddhism, the West and the zest for life that had driven his best work and best times is presented here in his own sad, fascinating words.
The Evil Axis of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee makes an appearance, as it must, in this record of the connections between politics and the life of the mind. Snyder was blackballed by McCarthy and the HUAC as not patriotic enough to work any longer as a fire lookout for the U.S. government. Such jingoistic stupidity would be humorous but for the serious impact it had on Snyder’s life. Unfortunately, such stupidity is still alive and well and active in American life, like a cobra living under the front porch.
Snyder made poetry out of such viciousness:
“I never was more broke & down
got fired that day by the usa
(the District Ranger up at Packwood
thought the wobblies had been dead for
forty years
but the FBI smelled treason
–my red beard)”
Suiter writes, “In the end, his blacklisting from the Forest Service had not been a huge catastrophe for Snyder. Unquestionably his rights had been egregiously violated—as were those of many thousands others—but in Zen fashion Gary managed to make the latest obstacle part of his journey.”
Each of the three made the Cascade experience a part of his own literary, spiritual and personal journey. In the spring following his first season as a fire lookout, Whalen found the experience running through his work. Suiter writes, “….Philip began thinking of the mountains again. A sharp memory of the Avalanche Lilies on Sourdough boring up through the thin snowdrifts above Riprap Creek the year before touched off a short naturalistic poem with a twist:
‘Now and then they ask me
To write something for them
And I do’”
It seems to me that John Suiter had a sharp memory of Snyder, Whalen and Kerouac in the Cascades boring up through their fine body of literature, and they asked him to write something for them, and he did. And it is good.
AMAZON REVIEW
A beautifully illustrated portrait of Beat icons Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen and the years in the Cascades high country that shaped their lives and work. . This is John Suiter’s first book, and it evolved from a magazine assignment that took him to Jack Kerouac’s remote fire lookout on Desolation Peak on the fortieth anniversary of the publication of The Dharma Bums. For two weeks in the summer of 1995, Suiter-an East Coast city-dweller all his life-lived in Kerouac’s still-standing fire lookout, making photographs for his magazine project. Meanwhile, the awesome beauty and profound solitude of the surrounding North Cascades worked their magic-as it had for Kerouac and countless others since. In 1996, Suiter met the poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, who had also worked as fire lookouts on peaks in the North Cascades in the 1950s. It had been Snyder-the real-life model for Kerouac’s fictive “Japhy Ryder”-who had first come into the Upper Skagit country as a fire lookout in 1952 and blazed the way for Whalen and Kerouac to follow. Suiter returned to the North Cascades during the next few summers for further shooting-hikes on Crater, Sourdough, and Sauk mountains. Illustrated with thirty-five beautiful photographs, Poets on the Peaks tells how the solitary mountain adventures of three young men helped to form the literary, spiritual, and environmental values of a generation. Based on scores of previously unpublished letters and journals, plus recent interviews with Snyder and Whalen and several others, Poets on the Peaks creates a group portrait of Kerouac, Snyder, and Whalen that transcends the tired urban clichs of the “Beat” life. Poets on the Peaks is about the development of a community of poets, including the famous Six Gallery reading of October 1955, and contains unexpected cameos by fellow poets and mountain-climbers Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. Poets on the Peaks is also a book about Dharma and the years of Dharma Bums-from the 1951 roadside revelation in the Nevada desert that led Gary Snyder to drop out of academia and head for Japan, to Kerouac’s lonely vigil with The Diamond Sutra on Desolation Peak, to Philip Whalen’s ordination as a Zen prie Finally, Poets on the Peaks is the story of the birth of a wilderness ethic, as well as a photographic homage to the Cascades landscape, a landscape virtually unchanged since these men journeyed there thanks to the environmental protections they helped inspire.
Published on Tuesday, October 25, 2011 by Rolling Stone OWS’s Beef: Wall Street Isn’t Winning – It’s Cheating by Matt Taibbi–LISTEN/WATCH—IT’S GOOD!–
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/10/25-6
I was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zucotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he’d heard on the news.
A protestor’s sign expresses the sentiment of the Occupy Wall Street movement at a Occupy Wall Street protest in London. (BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images)”I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO,” he said. “I think that’s funny.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “Why is that funny?”
“Well, I heard they’re trying to decide what back to put their money in,” he said, munching on hors d’oeuvres. “It’s just kind of ironic.”
Oh, Christ, I thought. He’s saying the protesters are hypocrites because they’re using banks. I sighed.
“Listen,” I said, “where else are you going to put three hundred thousand dollars? A shopping bag?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s just, they’re protests are all about… You know…”
“Dude,” I said. “These people aren’t protesting money. They’re not protestingbanking. They’re protesting corruption on Wall Street.”
“Whatever,” he said, shrugging.
These nutty criticisms of the protests are spreading like cancer. Earlier that same day, I’d taped a TV segment on CNN with Will Cain from the National Review, and we got into an argument on the air. Cain and I agreed about a lot of the problems on Wall Street, but when it came to the protesters, we disagreed on one big thing.
Cain said he believed that the protesters are driven by envy of the rich.
“I find the one thing [the protesters] have in common revolves around the human emotions of envy and entitlement,” he said. “What you have is more than what I have, and I’m not happy with my situation.”
Cain seems like a nice enough guy, but I nearly blew my stack when I heard this. When you take into consideration all the theft and fraud and market manipulation and other evil shit Wall Street bankers have been guilty of in the last ten-fifteen years, you have to have balls like church bells to trot out a propaganda line that says the protesters are just jealous of their hard-earned money.
Jobs’ Biography: Thoughts On Life, Death And Apple—LISTEN—
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141653658/steve-jobs-a-computer-icon-on-life-death-and-apple
When Steve Jobs was 6 years old, his young next door neighbor found out he was adopted. “That means your parents abandoned you and didn’t want you,” she told him.
Jobs ran into his home, where his adoptive parents reassured him that he was theirs and that they wanted him.
“[They said] ‘You were special, we chose you out, you were chosen,” says biographer Walter Isaacson. “And that helped give [Jobs] a sense of being special. … For Steve Jobs, he felt throughout his life that he was on a journey — and he often said, ‘The journey was the reward.’ But that journey involved resolving conflicts about … his role in this world: why he was here and what it was all about.”
When Jobs died on Oct. 5 from complications of pancreatic cancer, many people felt a sense of personal loss for the Apple co-founder and former CEO. Jobs played a key role in the creation of the Macintosh, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, the iPad — innovative devices and technologies that people have integrated into their daily lives.
San Juan Mountains Weather & Snowpack Report–Tuesday, October 25, 2011–12:30
NWS Grand Mesa Radar. 12:30
Weather
Our beautiful autumn weather since the Oct. 5th storm is coming to an end today. Snowfall in the mountains will be wet and moderate for the San Juans. An original look at the dynamics of this short lived storm seemed to have potential for a good shot of snow, but this morning’s vorticity maps and various models don’t live up to the earlier views.
A cold front working into northern Colorado will move south and reach the north San Juans by daybreak Wednesday & push through our mountains during the day. Anticipate locally heavy precipitation along the frontal boundary. The precipitation should begin tapering off after sunset on Wednesday.
The storm could produce up to 12″ above 10,000′ or more in favored locations, but because of warmer temps. in the lower valley’s we’ll see rain/sleet and some snow that shouldn’t accumulate because of the warm ground. The low pressure trough will move east Wed. night when a flat ridge of high pressure moves in from the west bringing warmer temperatures and dry conditions. This balmy October weather has surely been a pleasure.
Snowpack
The annual San Juan horror show began with the early Oct. storm. Although there have been warm temperatures and melting of the light snowpack above tree line the past weeks, the faceting process of the snow crystals has been happening. The basal layer is weak from kinetic metamorphism and will be a problem for the rest of the winter, especially on shady aspects in the high country.
What little snow expected from this storm will probably not bond that well with the early Oct. layers of facets (very weak layers) and suncrusts (very hard/slick surfaces). It doesn’t take much snow, especially with wind drifted snow to create hazardous avalanche conditions when traveling/riding/skiing on it. Most early season avalanches don’t run that deep, but the consequences of being dragged over rocks and through dead fall is serious business… Put on your avalanche awareness glasses, travel lightly and prudently to avoid early season injuries.
Check out the CAIC forecast. Scott Toepher wrote a nice piece.
A Grizzled Troubadour Dusts Off His Bowler–LISTEN—
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/arts/music/tom-waitss-new-album-bad-as-me.html?_r=1
ON an impulse, or so it seemed, Tom Waits pulled his S.U.V. onto the railroad tracks that run behind his favorite defunct truck stop: a place formerly called Rhinehardt’s, now locked up and out of business with its old Formica lunch counter still visible in the dusty interior. About a half-hour earlier, as we were conversing in the parking lot, a train had rushed past with its whistle hooting. “What if I just turned the car off and I can’t get it started again?” he asked. “You O.K. with that? Let’s just live dangerously.”
He cut the engine and gazed out along the tracks. And after a suitably dramatic pause he started up again and pulled off, smiling at the little burst of what-if adrenaline. “It’s a lifesaver, adrenaline,” he said in his famously gravelly voice. “I think I have an adrenaline addiction, no question about that.”
Adrenaline and restlessness course through “Bad as Me” (Anti-), Mr. Waits’s new album and first full set of new songs since “Real Gone” in 2004. Mr. Waits, who largely shuns interviews, was diligently promoting it, showing some personal landmarks in the Northern California town where he has long resided.
At 61 Mr. Waits is acclaimed as an American marvel: a songwriter who can be smart and primal, raucous and meticulous, ethereal and earthy, bleak and comical. He has sung about drunks, tramps, carnies and killers, spinning tall tales and reeling off free-associations that somehow add up; he has also shown a vulnerable side in tender, unironic love songs. He has been recording for four decades and persisting on his own terms, particularly since 1980. That’s when he married Kathleen Brennan, who became his partner in songwriting and production and helped forge a sound to match his voice and their lyrics: part old weird America, part junk sculpture, part mad-scientist experiment, part cartoon, part hellfire sermon, part throw-down.
Tom Waits: A Desperate Voice For Desperate Times
Tom Waits generally sings like a psychotic carnival barker or a drunken lounge crooner. And I really mean that as a compliment.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, that voice. Pushed to extremes like the characters in his songs, his voice is an exaggeration full of truth. He’s a singer of blues sentiment like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or Howlin’ Wolf or Radiohead‘s Thom Yorke. His latest album is called Bad As Me, and the songs on it sound truer than ever — partly because Waits’ songwriting and arranging are still extremely potent, and partly because his thematic desperation fits this particular moment in history like a ragged glove.
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/26/141693893/tom-waits-a-desperate-voice-for-desperate-times
Tom Waits: The Fresh Air Interview
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/31/141657227/tom-waits-the-fresh-air-interviewTOM WAITS ARTICLES
Tom Waits recorded his new album Bad As Me,his first collection of all-new studio recordings in eight years, in his studio, which he calls “Rabbit Foot” for good luck. The space, a converted schoolhouse, still has class pictures dotting the walls of each classroom.
“I never had my own place before,” he tellsFresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “[In a studio], you know there was a band before you and you know you have to pack up at the end of your session because there was a band behind you. You have to photograph the board so no one changes your settings. Now, this is my own rig. It’s my own trailer.”
Tom Waits Articles
On Broadway, John Turturro Offers Three For One–LISTEN–
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/23/141587085/relatively-speaking-three-comedies-in-one
October 23, 2011
Stroll the cross streets along Broadway in New York, and you’ll notice the names of movie stars jostling for marquee space with theater heavyweights. Hugh Jackman, Angela Bassett and Brooke Shields are the latest round of screen stars drawing crowds. But come to a stop at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on 47th Street, and the movie star winning the attention is John Turturro.
Turturro is best known for roles in movies by Spike Lee, the Coen Brothers and others, but this month he’s making his debut as a Broadway director.
That’s no easy task, considering Turturro is actually directing three one-act plays by three big-name writers: Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen. The show involves several sets and 15 actors ranging from Steve Guttenberg to Marlo Thomas. If it sounds hectic, that’s because it is.
Three for the Seesaw
HE PLAY’S THE THING Relatively Speaking writers Ethan Coen, Elaine May, and Woody Allen, photographed in New York City.
This fall, the distinctive voices of three giant American authors can be heard under the same roof when a collection of their one-act plays, Relatively Speaking, opens on Broadway. The voices belong to Woody Allen, Elaine May, and Ethan Coen, the roof to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. This is not a play like Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, where three separate comedies happen on the same set. “ ‘Sharing’ is not the word of the day around here!,” observes the show’s set designer, the celebrated Santo Loquasto. Each author gets his or her own set—in some cases, two: Coen’s play, “Talking Cure,” is set in a mental institution with a second set in a dining room. “George Is Dead,” May’s play, unfolds in an apartment on the Upper West Side and ends in a funeral parlor. Allen’s “Honeymoon Motel” takes place in a motel on a highway in an outer borough. When Allen (for whom Loquasto has designed 22 films) saw the colorful, comical design for the motel, with its circular bed and pink Jacuzzi, he said, “Oh, so it’s going to be like that, is it?,” to which Loquasto replied, “Yes! It’s not like we’re doing The Wild Duck !”
The plays are being directed by John Turturro—a man of immense gifts himself—but the authors, who direct their own work on film, have their own distinctive visions here. Loquasto has designed sets for each play that suggest each author’s film persona. Each author approaches the production differently: Allen and Coen come in for run-throughs and some rehearsals, but May is there for everything, all the time. “The greatest challenge for me,” said Loquasto, “is just figuring out how to manipulate the space so I can get all their sets on and off. The evening starts with Ethan’s play—that’s two sets right there—and then there is a pause. A big pause. Possibly a five-minute pause. No one wants to do an intermission there, so they may slightly raise the lights and sell drinks and things in the aisles. Then there is Elaine’s play and a real intermission and then Woody’s. To make room for Woody’s play, Elaine’s set will be pulled back against the wall and then the floor of that set will be hoisted up and back like a drawbridge until the whole set has folded up flat; the furniture has been bolted to the floor to keep it in place.” He sighs. “The origami school of design.”
EL NIÑO/SOUTHERN OSCILLATION (ENSO) DIAGNOSTIC DISCUSSION issued by CLIMATE PREDICTION CENTER/NCEP 6 October 2011- ENSO Alert System Status: La Niña Advisory
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Synopsis: La Niña conditions are expected to gradually strengthen and continue through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2011-12. During September 2011, La Niña conditions strengthened as indicated by increasingly negative sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies across the eastern half of the equatorial Pacific Ocean (Fig. 1). The weekly Niño indices continued their cooling trend and all are currently at or below –0.5oC (Fig. 2). Consistent with this cooling, oceanic heat content (average temperature anomalies in the upper 300m of the ocean, Fig. 3) remained below-average in response to a shallower thermocline across the eastern Pacific Ocean (Fig. 4). Also, convection continued to be suppressed near the Date Line, and became more enhanced near Papua New Guinea (Fig. 5). In addition, anomalous low-level easterly and upper-level westerly winds persisted over the central tropical Pacific. Collectively, these oceanic and atmospheric patterns reflect the continuation of La Niña conditions. Currently, La Niña is not as strong as it was in September 2010. Roughly one- half of the models predict La Niña to strengthen during the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter (Fig. 6). Of these models, the majority predict a weak La Niña (3-month average in the Niño-3.4 region less than -0.9oC). In addition, a weaker second La Niña winter has occurred in three of the five multi-year La Niñas in the historical SST record since 1950. However, the NCEP Climate Forecast System (CFS.v1) predicts a moderate-strength La Niña this winter (between –1.0oC to –1.4oC) and CFS.v2 predicts a strong La Niña (less than Across the contiguous United States, temperature and precipitation impacts associated with La Niña are expected to remain relatively weak during the remainder of the Northern Hemisphere early fall, and to strengthen during the late fall and winter. It is important to note that the strength of U.S. impacts is not necessarily related to the strength of La Niña across the equatorial Pacific. During October-December 2011, there is an increased chance of above-average temperatures across the mid-section of the country. Also, above-average precipitation is favored across the Pacific Northwest, along with a higher probability for drier-than-average conditions across much of the southern tier of the country (see 3-month seasonal outlook released on 15 September 2011). This discussion is a consolidated effort of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NOAA’s National Weather Service, and their funded institutions. Oceanic and atmospheric conditions are updated weekly on the Climate Prediction Center web site (El Niño/La Niña Current Conditions and Expert Discussions). Forecasts for the evolution of El Niño/La Niña are updated monthly in the Forecast Forum section of CPC’s Climate Diagnostics Bulletin. The next ENSO Diagnostics Discussion is scheduled for 10 November 2011. To receive an e-mail notification when the monthly ENSO Diagnostic Discussions are released, please send an e-mail message to: ncep.list.enso-update@noaa.gov.
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JERRY’S WORLD VIEW
What’s this mean for the San Juan.. La Nina returns for another winter season but will be about 50% of what is was last year (we were about 20 % above average last year). Probably above average snow fall for the northern Colorado mountains, average snow totals for the central mountains and average to below average for the San Juans. Long range forecasts are dodgy at best (you all know the axiom for predicting weather—only fools and Texans) and it only takes a couple of large storms to change the winter forecast and that’s what is happening down here with global warming… Fewer, but larger storms.
Stirring Up Dust in the Desert–LISTEN-
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5415315
Billions of tons of dust blow off of arid lands every year — and blow around the world. These dust storms make people sick, they kill coral reefs and they melt mountain snow packs.
In the Southwestern United States, dust storms are largely the result of tires and hooves, which are destroying natural biological barriers that once kept dust on the ground. But there are people studying, and trying to protect, the layer that can protect the planet from dust storms.
Jayne Belnap is one of those people. She’s an ecologist, and you might call her Doctor Dust. She works for the U.S. Geological Survey in Moab, Utah. Recently, she gave Colorado dust researcher Thomas Painter a tour of the red-rock desert she calls home.
New Biography on Philip Whalen due soon..
Gary Snider and Philip Whalen sit outside a temple above the village of Shimoyama in Japan
Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder were leading lights in 20th-century American poetry and in the establishment of Zen Buddhism in the West. Their lifelong friendship, like other famous literary and dharma friendships, helped shape them both, as well as countless others whose lives they touched. A new biography on Philip Whalen coming out soon by David Schneider.
Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis by Philip Whalen
I praise those ancient Chinamen
Who left me a few words,
Usually a pointless joke or a silly question,
A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin
of a quick splashed picture – bug,leaf,
caricature of Teacher -
On paper held together now by little more than ink
& their own strength brushed momentarily over it.
Their world and several others since,
Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it -
Cheered as it whizzed by _
& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars
Happy to have saved us all.
LETTER FROM NUCLA, COLORADO Dr. Don The life of a small-town druggist. by Peter Hessler
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/09/26/110926fa_fact_hessler
In the southwestern corner of Colorado, where the Uncompahgre Plateau descends through spruce forest and scrubland toward the Utah border, there is a region of more than four thousand square miles which has no hospitals, no department stores, and only one pharmacy. The pharmacist is Don Colcord, who lives in the town of Nucla. More than a century ago, Nucla was founded by idealists who hoped their community would become the “center of Socialistic government for the world.” But these days it feels like the edge of the earth. Highway 97 dead-ends at the top of Main Street; the population is around seven hundred and falling. The nearest traffic light is an hour and a half away. When old ranching couples drive their pickups into Nucla, the wives leave the passenger’s side empty and sit in the middle of the front seat, close enough to touch their husbands. It’s as if something about the landscape—those endless hills, that vacant sky—makes a person appreciate the intimacy of a Ford F-150 cab.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book)-
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/13/141265366/new-in-paperback-oct-10-16
Jon Stewart and the writers behind his popular comedy show present a hilarious summation of humanity in a book of photos, graphs, charts and some nudity that applies The Daily Show‘s trademark wit, irreverence and intelligence to every facet of human existence.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE END OF AUSTRALIA—Want to know what global warming has in store for us? Just go to Australia, where rivers are drying up, reefs are dying, and fires and floods are ravaging the continent
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/climate-change-and-the-end-of-australia-20111003
By JEFF GOODELL
It’s near midnight, and I’m holed up in a rickety hotel in Proserpine, a whistle-stop town on the northeast coast of Australia. Yasi, a Category 5 hurricane with 200-mile-per-hour winds that’s already been dubbed “The Mother of All Catastrophes” by excitable Aussie tabloids, is just a few hundred miles offshore. When the eye of the storm hits, forecasters predict, it will be the worst ever to batter the east coast of Australia.
I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. “In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions,” Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere. “Australia is the canary in the coal mine,” says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. “What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future.”
As Yasi bears down on the coast, the massive storm seems to embody the not-quite-conscious fears of Australians that their country may be doomed by global warming. This year’s disasters, in fact, are only the latest installment in an ongoing series of climate-related crises. In 2009, wildfires in Australia torched more than a million acres and killed 173 people. The Murray-Darling Basin, which serves as the country’s breadbasket, has suffered a decades-long drought, and what water is left is becoming increasingly salty and unusable, raising the question of whether Australia, long a major food exporter, will be able to feed itself in the coming decades. The oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, leading to the all-but-certain death of the Great Barrier Reef within 40 years. Homes along the Gold Coast are being swept away, koala bears face extinction in the wild, and farmers, their crops shriveled by drought, are shooting themselves in despair.
With Yasi approaching fast, disaster preparations are fully under way. At the airport, the Australian Defense Force is racing to load emergency supplies into Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters. Entire cities have shut down, their streets nearly empty as I drive north, toward the center of the storm, through sugar plantations and ranch land. Dead kangaroos sprawl by the side of the road, the victims of motorists fleeing the storm.
Five Jazz Sides For The Age Of Prohibition-LISTEN/WATCH
In 1926, everyone did the Charleston on ice.
It’s easy to romanticize or oversimplify the relationship between jazz and Prohibition, but the banning of alcohol and the subsequent rise of speakeasies clearly played a role in the music’s evolution during its early days. Jazz musicians found ample employment opportunities in the numerous new nightclubs, formed friendships with gangsters (who were sometimes their biggest fans and occasionally their foes or protectors), and benefited from vital scenes that flourished in cities rife with corruption. For better or worse, the Prohibition years also stigmatized jazz with a mark of transgression, which for many only enhanced the music’s sense of authenticity and excitement.
It wasn’t just Prohibition that helped spur jazz’s popularity; the 1920s were a period of profound transformation in American life. The nation’s population continued to shift from rural areas to cities, and more and more people embraced the automobile as a new and independent mode of transportation. At the same time, the template for our modern media culture began to form, with phonographs, radio and talking pictures connecting Americans through an increasingly electronic network of sound. Jazz caught the buzz, in more ways than one. With filmmaker Ken Burns’ three-part Prohibition documentary on tap for PBS starting Oct. 2, here are five sides for imbibing the high-and-not-so-dry spirits of the age.
Everybody Talks Smack About The Weather; Why?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130373159
Have you noticed that more and more we talk about weather like it’s an enemy combatant? We speak of attacking tornadoes, deadly winds, killing frosts, sinister clouds. We treat heat waves like crime waves, storm threats like terrorist threats.
Granted, for the unhealthy and the homeless — and for those caught in the wrong storms at the wrong time — extreme weather can be extremely disastrous. But for most people, winds are not wicked and sun is not sinister.
To hear some people talk about it, though, weather is out to get us:
Spalding Gray’s Tortured Soul–
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/magazine/spalding-grays-tortured-soul.html?hpw
Spalding Gray revealed his meditations about life onstage. Now his journals reveal his innermost thoughts.
Spalding Gray moved to New York City in 1967, shortly after his mother’s suicide, when he was 26. He lived with his girlfriend, Elizabeth LeCompte, in an apartment on Sixth Street and Avenue D, on the Lower East Side. To make ends meet, Gray occasionally worked as a stock boy, while LeCompte sold postcards at the front desk of the Guggenheim. But mostly they were finding their places in New York’s avant-garde theater world.
The late ’60s and ’70s were a period of great artistic and personal ferment for Gray, as he struggled through a nervous breakdown and the dissolution of his relationship with LeCompte and toward the confessional monologue for which he would later become famous. Throughout his work with the Performance Group, Gray honed his sense of self as a performer. In one play, he portrayed a character named Spalding, based on how Schechner saw him — an observer commenting on the action. Later he and LeCompte began collaborating on theatrical pieces — he as actor, she as director — that explored Gray’s family history and the death of his mother. As he increasingly mined his own life for material, he simultaneously grew adept at keeping parts of himself private, shaving just the top layer of a secret and offering it up as a convincing whole. “The well-told partial truth to deflect the private raw truth,” Gray once observed about his monologues in his journal.
What Spalding Gray Left Us
In “Swimming to Cambodia” — the monologue that made Spalding Gray (relatively) famous, about the time he spent in Thailand playing a small role in “The Killing Fields,” the film about the Cambodian genocide — Gray tells a strange, disconcerting story about the death of Thomas Merton. Merton, the Trappist monk celebrated for his devotion to an eloquently spiritualized silence, was “a hero of mine because he knew how to shut up,” Gray, the compulsive verbalizer, tells us.
THE JOURNALS OF SPALDING GRAY
Edited by Nell Casey
Illustrated. 340 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.
As Gray describes Merton’s death, “the Trappists sent him to Southeast Asia to research Buddhism. He stepped out of a bathtub, touched an electric fan and died instantly.”
This account, as it happens, dramatizes the conflict found throughout Gray’s extensive journals: between his own relentless search for transcendence (“perfect moments” and the like) and the often shocking absurdity of worldly contingency of the sort that will, eventually, tragically, short-circuit him too.
Jerry Roberts
