March-April 2015

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

First off, a profound thank you to all the folks who have subscribed and contributed over the past few months. Your support has been an enormous help.

Secondly, over there in the right sidebar is an ad for How Come?: Every Kid’s Science Questions Explained, the latest book by Kathy Wollard (who happens to be my wife). It’s a completely revised and rewritten selection of fascinating science questions and lively answers drawn from the previous three How Come? books. More than 400 pages long and full of amusing illustrations, it’s both rigorously researched and lucidly and entertainingly written. Trust me on this — I was there. Anyway, Amazon is selling both the paperback and the Kindle edition, but the paperback is much bigger, easier to read, much more fun, doesn’t need batteries and will still work after the cyber-apocalypse, so you should buy that version. Plus it doesn’t report what page you’re reading to Jeff Bezos. Anyway, check it out. (Note: the Amazon page is a bit confusing because they also list the first three How Come books (How Come?, How Come? Planet Earth, and How Come in the Neighborhood), but this 2014 edition, a compendium of the best of all three, is the one you want.)

Onward. I suppose you’ll be wanting to know what ever became of the February issue. Well, for starters, it got very cold. We didn’t have all the snow that NYC and points east and north got, but it got very cold here. Double-digits-below-zero cold, and that’s the real temperature, not that phony “wind chill” flapdoodle. And if your furnace is not functioning, living in a house built in the 1860s and insulated with horsehair becomes very unpleasant very quickly.

So it’s 4:30 am, a foot of snow on the ground and the temperature is eighteen degrees Fahren-freakin-heit below zero. I’m kneeling in the snow behind the house wearing fourteen layers of clothing, but I can’t cover my face because if I do my breath freezes up on my glasses and I can’t see. In my right hand is a long-handled vegetable brush with plastic bristles. I’m trying to scour ice off the grating on the air intake of our furnace so the damn thing will start working, but it’s slow going because my hand is numb. After I get most of the ice off, I have to search around for a twig I can use to poke the ice out of the holes in the grating. This is the second time tonight I’ve had to come out to do this, and I always seem to go through three or four twigs before I get it clear. The furnace quit about 15 minutes ago and it’s about 50 degrees in the house and falling fast.

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