THE
BLUE BOX (Recycled Ideas)
by Don Cox
Back to the index
The month of July is history now, and the future has a bright
new look....I'm back, and Nostradamus isn't. There's just
one small proviso, if you or Nostradamus use the Julian
calendar, it's still July. So wait until the middle of August
before you close the book and stop scanning the skies for
a sign.
Speaking of scanning the skies, there's been a lot of that
going around lately. What a summer! When we aren't baking
in tropical heat, watching and hoping for rain for our parched
gardens, we're on a weather watch for microbursts and tornados.
In heat like we've had this summer, it takes a lot of determination
just to move around. The best strategy is to turn the fan
on high, get a cool drink, and log a lot of time at the
computer keyboard.
I've been using the computer to follow an internet chat
group in Belize, where I went for a holiday last winter
you may recall. It's a novel experience to read their concerns
about crooked politicians, greedy utility monopolies and
neglected education systems, and to realize that other folk
have a situation that's worse than ours. On top of that
I've found out that the Caribbean weather is a challenging
part of life in that part of the world. We have maybe four
months frozen into the land, and they have about four months
living in terror of being blown off theirs. There have been
a few storms brewing up in the Caribbean recently but none
have reached hurricane status yet. Preparations are starting
already however, I read messages about setting up emergency
communications, distribution of medical and other aid, and
location of shelters if needed. I can almost feel the adrenaline.
Of course this explains why the people in the Caribbean
are so happy and smiling when we get there in the winter.
They're happy to still be alive. Personally I prefer to
live with the Great Manitou, He slides quietly down on a
curtain of white and freezes us in for a while, but He very
rarely gets physical and throws things around.
They don't know about the Manitou in the tropics, at least,
no one that I spoke to there did. Instead, they have an
Ocean Goddess called Yemanja. You can throw a wreath of
flowers into the ocean and make a wish, and if it floats
out to sea Yemanja will grant your wish. What a deal! With
a sharp eye on the tides and the wind, you should be able
to get all the wishes you could find flowers for. The down
side is that when She gets in a bad mood she throws the
wind and the sea around. This happens when it's the wrong
time of the year, and in my opinion is a straightforward
case of prethalassic stress.
There's one correspondent on the Belize chat group, John
L., who posts excellent commentary on the Caribbean weather
maps that are available on the web. These give the positions
of storms and have colour maps of the temperatures. I was
amazed to see that the tops of the storms are cold, really
cold, around -80 Celsius or worse. I had always thought
that when April came the Manitou
slunk off north to hunker down in a snow fort and wait out
the summer. Now it appears that's not the case at all, He
doesn't go north, He simply gains altitude and hangs around
the tropics.
I wonder...I just wonder if the Manitou and Yemanja have
something going......
Bluebox ©2001 Don Cox
Website ©2001 OttawaWEB
