Courtesy of Australian national treasure Tim Blair, here’s how the Sydney Morning Herald is portraying February weather conditions throughout Europe:
REGIONS across Europe sustained another deluge of extreme weather over the weekend, prompting a deadly avalanche in Kosovo, snarling air and train travel, and blanketing Rome with a rare dusting of snow for the second time in a week…
Rome, hit last week by the worst snowstorm in 26 years, prepared for the latest blizzard by shutting schools and public offices and putting snow-removal crews in place to avoid massive traffic jams.
The snowstorms, considered to be the worst since the 1980s, have also wrought havoc on agriculture.
As Blair points out, what they call “extreme” is what us crazy wingnuts sometimes call “cold.” He has some fun imagining “going extreme turkey” and “getting extreme feet” and stuff like that.
And of course, this is your fault for driving a car, using electricity, etc. Speaking of the way everybody knows the globe is getting warmer colder extremier because shut up, teabagger, the phenomenon actually saved me $12.99 the other day. I was thinking about buying Josh Bazell’s new novel, Wild Thing, for my Kindle. It’s the sequel to his first book, Beat the Reaper, which was a blast. But then I read a few of the customer reviews, and a quick Google search later, I found this from Newsbusters:
Hawking his new novel on Wednesday’s NBC Today, author Josh Bazell launched into a rant against the GOP and Rick Santorum specifically: “If I were to create a character who, say, had been the senator from Pennsylvania…get up at a debate and say that global warming was a hoax and that we had to change the Constitution to limit the rights of gay people. No one would believe that.”
I’ll put aside whether Santorum has ever said that second thing there. (If it’s a reference to his opposition to gay marriage, the only difference between his opinion and Obama’s is that Santorum is honest about it.) I’ll put aside Bazell’s insistence on slurring Palin in a book he wants me to buy. But does Bazell know that some scientists are forming a very different theory of global warming? Does he know that some scientists think it was happening for a while, but it was due to fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field and not anything human beings have done? How does Bazell explain away the theory that global warming wasn’t anthropogenic, and that it stopped 15 years ago and now we’re experiencing global cooling? Does he think those scientists aren’t really scientists because their theories don’t conform to his prejudices?
So that saved me 13 bucks. Which I can now put toward my heating bill. Brrrrrrrr!!
(By the way, Mr. Bazell: Fozzie Bear texted, and he wants his voice back.)