How I spent the weekend (so far)

This weekend has been weird. Perhaps it has been for many of us I suppose. I think maybe what's felt oddest is that my weekend has been actually rather normal. It's the other stuff, the coronavirus crap, which makes it feel unusual.

Myself, I have done little differently. I spent close to six hours at my Shop playing catch up yesterday. I washed a load of towels because it seemed there were an overabundance of towels in the laundry basket. I took my morning walk and will take another by 8 or 9 this morning. I ate Chinese.

Whatever the reason for the general panic it didn't hit downtown Detroit. Our local supermarket, indeed all nearby stores, stayed stocked and operating. They even had plenty of toilet paper. Oh, Lysol and hand sanitizer and the like were gone. But nothing else was different at all.

It was very strange not to go to Church. I take my mother to Saturday Mass and of course that didn't happen. Detroit and many Catholic dioceses have closed the Churches to large (or, sadly, large-ish) gatherings such as Church services. I'll watch Mass on TV sometime this morning (I've already checked my options and I have several) yet I know that just won't seem right. I'm not a shut in. At least, not by choice, though I suppose most shut-ins rarely are.

I read, but I've been doing a lot of that anyway the last several years. I watched a quite charming movie yesterday, Yesterday, on On Demand. It was about a man who, after a bizarre event, was the only one to remember The Beatles and their songs. It was one of those movies 'they don't make anymore', charming and engaging and, at the risk of sounding puritan, clean. After watching and liking Gran Torino a few weeks back I am beginning to rethink my attitude on recent cinema.

Though I don't watch sports all that much it was very weird to find no live sports on TV. Very weird. I watched a bit of bowling but it had been taped.

I'm going to stop here because I don't really want to get preachy. I only want to reflect on things. And I've just ended up simply shaking my head.

Detroit Illustrates Global Warming fears Unjustified

Yesterday, Metro Detroit was hit by a series of showers and thundershowers. None were severe, and there was no damage other than a bit of localized and minor flooding. It was not a particularly newsworthy event. Detroit experienced little more than a normal late summer day, except for one thing.

There wasn't supposed to be thundershowers. It was supposed to be a pleasant, sunny day. At least, that was the forecast as of Sunday, a mere 48 hours earlier.

That still does not qualify as as news. Or does it? Seen against the bigger picture, it may well be of note. When the specter of global warming is considered, where we are expected to believe in things which will not be for 50 to 100 years, or well into the future (Orwell?), there is something to give one thought. Seeing as weather predictions are based on computer models and that global warming forecasts are based on such things too, how can we trust the cry of global warming? If our presumed experts can't get a 48 hour weather projection right, how can we trust them to be correct over things they assure us will happen over an entire century?

To be sure, we'll be told that anomalies will occur. Certainly an anomaly of some sort happened between this past Sunday and yesterday afternoon's inclement weather which changed things significantly. Things do happen; no one disputes that. Yet it really only adds to the trouble. If what surely were minor glitches happened which changed our predicted weather in just two days so considerably, how many glitches might happen over one hundred years which would alter the likelihood of global warming as currently predicted? Indeed, how can we trust that science can accurately predict what will happen over the whole world over many decades when it can't necessarily predict what will happen in one small part of that same world over two days?

To be fair, our weather forecasts are generally accurate. They call for a series of sunny and warm days now in Detroit, and we will almost surely get them. Still, it seems that the inaccuracy of yesterday's forecast ought to be a serving of humble pie, not merely for our local weathercasters, but for their friends higher up the scientific food chain as well. If we can't be right in the short term when being right ought to be relatively easy, we must then predict the far future with greater reserve, a and quiet calm.