January Thaw or Spring Preview

I don't understand why it happens, but I'm glad it does. We are experiencing (and if you're in an area that gets cold and snowy in winter, I hope you are as well) a January thaw, though the exact reason has never really been something I've been good at grasping.

You can check this out--I really liked "where z is a threshold anomaly," probably because that's what the bartender in Mosco's Tavern, near Douglass College up in the heights section of New Brunswick, used to call me before throwing me out on my jacks. At least that's what I understood her to be saying, but I was pretty far gone and the auditory sense fades quickly under an alcohol onslaught (she threw real hard for a girl, too).

The most telling line in the study (and I enjoyed the entire paper because I can more or less follow it), if you're a statistician you may feel very differently and be correct, is "people will find patterns in the world around them, whether or not those patterns result from coherent underlying causes."

That's a truism that covers a multitude of events. And in the end, the report concludes that there may or may not be a real January Thaw. Rush Limbaugh had one of these cause and effect epiphanies last week for why bad things happen to Haiti (and who benefits) and it only bolstered some wags' cause and effect arguments on why Rush is one of the bad things that keeps happening to the Republican Party. To each his own, I suppose; it's as you like it.

We could both stand outside this morning without over jackets, Rush and I, maybe waiting to see if Norwich Is Moving Forward, which was such a popular turn of phrase not all that long ago around here, and see which one of us turns blue first. Truth to tell, I don't think he'd stand a chance, being deep in the heart of Connecticut and everything. Heck, there are some who argue Joe Lieberman is hardly blue at all and look at how long he's been here.

All I know is it's above freezing again today, and in the middle of January that's about as close as we get around here to a heatwave. The cold will return, because it always does, but whatever you call what we're having right now, means winter's days are numbered.....
-bill kenny