Friday, January 19, 2007

Winter Finally Shows Up

Well El Niño, Global Warming or whatever other meteorological phenomenon that was holding off the cold finally conked out on Tuesday and it got very cold very quickly. Yesterday saw a short flurry of snow that went away as soon as anyone noticed, but this morning we have real inconvenience snow.

As in, not enough to settle so the kids can play in it and the snowplows can deal with it, but enough to wet everything down nicely so that the LIRR switches1 will freeze in time for tonight's commute.

Bah!

  1. People in the UK will snarl to themselves that the real term to use is "the LIRR points" but in fact that is a widely believed misconception, and as wrong as the term switch is2. The correct term in either country is "Turnout", an engineering term, since the switch is actually the bit that moves and the points are the ends of the switch. Before anyone writes to me to dispute this, the Wikipedia entry is wrong
  2. These people should, of course, begin demonstrating some of the supposed but oh so rarely demonstated British Superiority by figuring it out and moving on without comment. They are blowing the cachét by telling everyone about it instead of deploying the Stiff Upper Lip

No comments: