Just made it! Whew! We are now at a few days past the shortest day of the year, the longest night (Lat. 42 Lon. -82.). That statement could also be made in a metaphorical sense. With Trump near the end of his mind-numbing reign as a foreground figure, the days are growing longer and we are tilting back toward the sun. Colour returns to Pepper-Land, everything, or some stuff, is looking up. The promise of a vaccine for the China-flu lies before us. With gratitude, I offer my sigh of relief. That the future is looking better, you would never guess by the relentless back and forth whining of the mass media. “It’s always something..” as Rosanne Rosannadanna might say. Well yes, it is always something. Today, it is cold.
It is a bone-chilling cold and a steely grey sky outside my little barely-warm place. I shiver. What cold I feel is not that deep February chill, it’s more the ‘about to do the freezing rain bit’ kind of low temperature. It has been said that In the far north, folks have a bunch of different words for snow. The words are very particular to the kind of snow. It turns out that it isn’t quite true…the truth is that there are a bunch of different languages and they have blended at times so that it appears there are ’50 different names for snow. We do need a special word for today, something better than lengthy descriptive phrases. Maybe ‘pfreeze’, meaning pre-freeze? ‘.
In the far-north, there are many different kinds snow, they are the same different kinds of snow that near-north English describes. I discover this with a Google search. I am chagrined. It was a poetic idea, thinking about multiple variations, multiple single word descriptions of the snow’s quality, something that would encapsulate…’crisp, more crisp, super-crisp, soft, more soft, super-puffy…etcetera. It gave me a sense of how the Inuit are much more connected to their environment than we might be. That fits with my world-view, my stead-fast liberalism, my ‘snow-flake’ belief system. Inuit are inherently good…europeans, bad colonialists. Truth be told, Inuit aren’t necessarily more righteous, I see them whizzing across the tundra on snow machines. More truth? Europeans aren’t necessarily evil. We are equal in human strength, human weakness. We have an equal number of faults and an equal number of names for faults.
Long ago, I saw a movie called ‘Smilla’s Sense of Snow’, based on a book named ‘Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow’. The advertisments and trailers for the film suggested the idea of multiple, more accurate descriptions of snow. It promised that the film would have a certain depth, a certain poetry. Turns out the movie was just about killing and fucking and tracking someone through the wilderness, like all of our movies are now. It did have an interesting snow-twist and some nice location scenes, but… (It also cost 35 million to make and earned 23 million at the box office…oooops)
All of the above notwithstanding, it is kinda chilly today. Looks nasty out. I shall attempt not to warm myself with a nice hot donut and cup of chocolate or a piece (large) of warmed up apple pie. There are, indeed, fifty words for fat…
Robert On The Air 