Day 4.304: Gust: wind-chill

I couldn't believe my ears as I drove home listening to WAMC tonight. It turns out that in North Dakota and north-west Minnesota, the wind-chill warnings are being phased out in favour of extreme-cold warnings.

Shocking right?

No? Well, bear with me!

This shunning of wind-based warnings (which seems very sensible indeed incidentally) was being announced by the gentleman pictured here.

His name is Greg Gust.

Oh yes.

[Picture from noaa.gov]

Day 2.191: What's he drinking?

Exile #2 tells me she missed the best of E5N1's karaoke-with-the-radio session today.

Frankly after more than 12 hours at work, I was happy to have anything to use for today's post - and these are definitely a lot better than nothing!

Part 1

Part2

And so to bed.

Day 1.027: Lettuce - listen

What would induce someone to buy a car with fake wood-effect transfers on it? No, I've no idea either - but someone somewhere in a marketing office thought it would sell, and it looks like they were right.

The hard-sell is big over here of course and charitable organisations are amongst the hardest. I have had more people than I can count phone me to ask me if I can just support their brave firefighters/veterans/victims/police deputies... I have now decided to just say no to people who phone me, but that does leave me either giving nothing to charity or having to decide who to give to. This evening we decided to give a modest donation to our local NPR station. This is connected in some way I don't fully understand with promoting the school and Exile #2 in particular is an avid listener, so it makes some sense.

In reality, NPR doesn't really make sense at all. It is non-commercial (hence the donations) but it does run 'statements' from major donors - these are not allowed to sell any particular product or encourage you to do anything so they are not commercials. Of course, as any student of Naomi Klein knows, these days the global market place is about brands not products and these statements certainly get the brand name out into the marketplace. None of this really matters when the programming is good and you don't get much better than the BBC News (a real breath of fresh air in the news world over here) and since we don't pay our license fee any more, it's probably reasonable for us to make a contribution.

We actually wrote a check, but had we paid with a bunch of greenbacks we could have (maybe) seen why they call it lettuce.

Day 165: Why K and W?

Exile #3 did this a few days ago (it was before her birthday - because the 4 is her age. I don't know who helped her but he's 36. She actually needed very little help with the alphabet, but did need some help finding the letters in the bubbles in the bath.

For some reason 'k' and 'w' were missing. Maybe so that I can share a bit of unexplained culture-shock. I asked someone why all the radio stations have four letter codes starting with W. The answer, which was not very satisfying, was, 'On the west coast they start with K. No-one knows why.'

Someone must know.

My in-car radio station is WFLY or just Fly 92.3, it's a great station. Not too many adverts, amusing presenters and a play-list you can really get to know - in general they seem to have about 8 songs on very heavy rotation and they change I would guess about one of these each week, so you know what you're going to get if you do a reasonable-length journey. The girls are constantly close to note-perfect on all of them. Not word perfect though - Exile #3 likes to substitute phrases she knows for the ones she doesn't and Exile #4 just makes words up for the bits she doesn't understand. Neither of them take kindly to being corrected.

As for P and Z, well she managed to approximate them, and they don't have anything to do with radio as far as I know.