The hurrier I go...

[altivo]

*gallops*

Picking up some speed from familiarity with the pattern and the techniques needed to square the designs, but it still takes between 2 1/2 and 3 hours to weave each 15 inch square block. Also realized this morning as I was winding bobbins that out of nine people other than myself for whom I have to weave these blocks, six of them chose shades of purple for their color. Ack. And they laugh at me when I say that purple is way overused and therefore trite. My own color selection is a cornflower blue. The other three non-purples are a sandy beige, a deep blue, and a darkish brown. No reds, pinks, yellows or greens at all. Strange, I think.

I am really getting disgusted with the marketing stunts the desperate magazine publishers are trying to pull now. When I let a subscription lapse, I do so on purpose. Do not start sending me repeated "bills" marked "Overdue" and "Please remit now". I did not ask you to extend the subscription, and I am not going to pay this. Two nasty notes sent now to different magazines, but it looks as if both have the same fulfillment agency and that's probably where the sneaky tricks are coming from.

Then there are the book clubs. I'm down to just one, and they pester me mercilessly by e-mail when I don't buy anything for a few months. I bought two books in November, so they sent a coupon good for a free book if I buy one more. I've been waiting for them to have two that I actually want, and they finally did so this week. So when I go online to order the two titles, the postage will be $2.49. OK, that's fine. Now apply the coupon. Yup, one of the books is now free, but the postage goes up to $6.48 for the two books. Whether media rate or third class, I know very well that the cost of shipping those two books is not anywhere near that high. By the time they add sales tax onto it, the cost of the two books is no longer a bargain, even with one being free. I could get both in the publisher edition, with better bindings, for less from Amazon, and with free shipping. I think it's time to cancel out this book club, even though I've been a member for more than 30 years.

Oh, and the threatened snowstorm was pretty much a dud. Though the news reported cars off the road and in crashes all over the place, I could see no reason for it. We only got maybe an inch of fluffy stuff, no ice, and the roads were almost entirely dry and clear this morning.
Farrier tomorrow, or at least supposed to be. Gotta get some sleep.

Comments

[avon_deer.livejournal.com]

It's part of the deal. You send them your name and address, and they send you junk mail for the rest of your natural life.

[altivo]

Junk mail I can toss in the recycling bin without opening, and often do. Stuff that is dishonestly marked "Overdue" and "Remit now" in big red letters on the outside forces me to open it. And of course, that's just what they want. In fact, they want to intimidate me into paying the renewal. Not working.

The two periodicals that have been trying this scam are mere shadows of what they once were, almost entirely devoid of content and packed full of advertising that disguises itself as actual content. A waste of glossy paper and ink.

[treppenwolf]

I don't get it. Is the consistently inaccurate weather reporting a political scare tactic or what? Personally, I'd rather be walking down a dry road, dressed for a rain shower, than drenched and freezing in the streets because weather forecast predicted partly cloudy, +8 Celsius afternoon. Which is what I've been getting from a couple local stations, and it is just not cool, man, not cool.

Also, I'm not sure, but I think precipitation is measured in terms of probability. So it could very well be that your weather bureau is just blindly converting these numbers into stock phrases (i.e. "30% = no chance of rain; 70% = floods all the way to the Mississippi!") and you just keep rolling the side of the die that says "no rain/tornados/tomatos/whatever".

[altivo]

I think the poor quality of forecasts is a combination of several factors. One is persistent budget cutting. During the Bush administration, a faction of Republicans tried to completely kill the National Weather Service by cutting its budget to zero. They argued that commercial sources would take up the slack. The military objected strenuously to having to rely on a commercial source for that information, and so did the aviation industry. So they reduced the budget again and again without eliminating the department.

This resulted in departure of the most experienced staff, through early retirements, migration to other jobs, etc. What's left appears to be inexperienced raw meteorology graduates who rely entirely on computer models and never pay attention to actual field information themselves. So if the computer says it's raining, it's raining on the weather forecast, even though in the field the rain is not reaching the earth's surface due to other conditions that are deflecting it or causing it to evaporate aloft. That's just an example.

There are also politics involved. After Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast so hard, there were many complaints that the warning had not been strong or insistent enough. As a consequence, the frequency and "dire language" of all weather service warnings seems to have been intensified by about 100%. This turns into an escalation war, as people start viewing the more frequent warnings as "crying wolf" and ignore them. (Sort of like police sirens, which have been raised in sound intensity at least three times in my lifetime, so that now being exposed to one without any hearing protection is a truly horrible experience. "Painful" isn't sufficient to describe it.)

They do give probabilities in the written forecast, but over the radio the percentages are often omitted (probably because someone complained that they were too "hard to understand" since either it's raining or it isn't.) What we do get is a waffle statement at the end of every warning or advisory that says in essence "Of course we could be wrong and it's not possible to make a 100% perfect prediction."

In the end, though, the main thing is probably just a political concern about a disastrous storm hitting without enough strident warning in advance. So now they have gone off the deep end and we get blizzard warnings everything a snowflake appears on the horizon.