Anniversaries and natural rhythms

Today's the anniversary of the Hail Hell. On November 15, 2006, a storm with hailstones big as golf balls brought Rosario to its knees. The effects are felt even today. You can still see its marks in some cars, whose owners could not or would not repair, and the hysteria that ensues every time hail is mentioned in a weather forecast as a slight possibility shows that people haven't forgotten.

I've always said that having a car is like having a child. A very dumb child who never grows up and demands constant attention and lots of expensive food and gear. Some actually treat their cars as they would treat their children (or better). A car will never learn to avoid hail, and so people who can't be bothered to walk ten blocks every morning and choose to clog the streets with their cars are doomed to be always on the alert, so they can run to their little babies and put them under a roof if the need arises.

(If you think the above rant is a personal digression of mine aimed at specific people, you're right. But it may apply to you, so think about it. For the most part a car is not needed for everyday activities here in the big city. You know that.)

As befitting the anniversary of a weird weather event, today's weather is also messed up. There's not a cloud in sight and no hail is possible, but the morning looks and feels like it was June instead of November. I've never seen a mid-spring season like this, with temperatures falling below 10 degrees Celsius as soon as the sun goes down. Yesterday, though the sun was blasting, it was cold and windy even at noon. Half the people I know (including myself) caught a cold or something worse last week.

Up until a few years ago, there used to be a certain day in the year (it could be September, it could be October) when your mother said "Well, kids, let's take all the warm winter clothes out of the drawers and off the hangers, fold them and put them away neatly in the closet's top drawers which you have to use a chair to reach. We'll take them down next year when the cold season comes. We won't need any of it until March." Such a thing is impossible today. We live by cold fronts and heat waves today — no seasons.

Cold, dark winter

I'm quickly running out of interesting things to do here at home. But I just can't go outside. Not unless I have to. It's raining, it's windy, and it feels very, very cold. I'm just back from a common cold and I don't want to catch another one, common or worse. And sometimes the feeling is painfully cold. I'm a skinny guy — I don't have a thick layer of subcutaneous fat to insulate myself. And I don't have a bar of strong drinks at home, at my disposal. Why can't I be a fat drunk, happily oblivious to the polar wave?

I've moved Vista Rosario, as I announced, and I've been working a lot on it. I've had a lot of time. I've been checking pictures from last year, and discovered a few gems among them, such as several historical buildings whose pictures I took, at the time, because "they looked so cool" (I guess). Most of the pictures are "burned" on one side, or too dark because I didn't care about the lack of sunlight, or simply not well composed, but some are just fine. Add some Gimp-powered tampering, and voilà.

(By the way, do check out Vista Rosario, link to it, mark it as a favorite Technorati blog, StumbleUpon it, etc. It helps. If I don't promote myself, who will? Exactly.)

I've also been reading Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is a very fine book, except you need to take it in small doses or your brains will be splattered on the walls. It's about self-reference in fields such as mathematics and logic, though also in other places, such as Johann Sebastian Bach's fugues. A fugue is a piece of music composed of a basic theme repeated over itself in different scales, speeds, and even directions, and Bach was a master at them. I don't dislike math or logic, and I'm just an amateur at music, but it's actually far more entertaining for me to read about Bach's incredible skills than about Gödel's Theorem.

I did not go to see the Simpsons movie, and I think I won't. I'm a huge fan of The Simpsons; I grew up with them and I can pull out Homer's quotes about all sorts of situations in a second... in the Latin American Spanish version, of course. I didn't like how they changed the voices because the Mexican dubbers were asking for a salary raise, but I could live with it. But I couldn't stand by the series when Matt Groening left and it degraded into badly executed fake intellectual comedy. Homer was a nice fool, now he's just stupid, incoherent, and nasty; the kids simply have no character anymore, and the newer episodes usually don't manage to make me laugh — something the old series achieved every ten seconds during whole episodes.

So keeping the good things for the movie while we, the loyal TV followers, are left with the trash, is not OK with me. From what I've heard, the movie is just an overproduced long episode. I'm not going to pay for that. (Maybe when I'm old and President of the Supreme Court, I will allow myself to watch it.)

In short, I think no movies and no strong drinks will make Pablo go crazy. I should go back to my old pictures...

So cold

Did I tell you already I'm freakin' cold these days, all day?

This is not normal. Sure, those cold waves from freezing airmasses coming from Antarctica are not uncommon at all. Just not like this, in mid-autumn, and lasting a week, and featuring those lovely sub-zero temperatures every day. It's almost 10:00 PM and we're still under freezing point, and it's terribly humid, and yet this weather is so ill-behaved that it's not snowing as predicted. It hasn't happened in Rosario since 1973, but it may this winter, though. It's already snowed in places of Córdoba Province and in Mendoza — both on the same latitude as Rosario. So, no adorable pictures of snow-white parks for you.

People are dying as a result of the cold, and there are serious problems with the power generation and distribution, and the supply of natural gas. Those who don't live in Argentina may not fully appreciate what that means for us. Electricity, except for lighting, is comparatively expensive, and so are most fossil fuels. Natural gas (as a real gas, or compressed and liquefied) is employed for home heating, to heat our bathwater, to cook, and to power cars (Argentina has the greatest absolute number of LNG-powered vehicles). Industries use loads of natural gas for all sorts of processes, and power stations burn it to generate energy. When there's not enough, they have to use fuel oil, which is four times the price (and that, only thanks to Mad Hugo up there).

Now, we produce a lot of gas and export a lot of it to Chile, but when demand is high the flow is stopped so as to supply internal consumption first. Since this is the case now, the Chileans are mad at us. Chile made the mistake of planning its energy future based on Argentina's abundante supply of cheap gas (we all know you can't pin your future to Argentina's anything!). Interestingly, Bolivia, which sits atop a veritable ocean of liquid and gasseous hydrocarbons, provides us with a lot of extra gas, and has more than enough for Chile too, but due to a territorial dispute they refuse to sell it to them (and only sell to us on the condition that we don't re-route it to Chile!). The dispute could be solved if only Chile gave back to Bolivia a strip of land that reaches up to the Pacific Ocean, which it stole ages ago; but that won't happen soon.

Back to Argentina and to Rosario and to me: I'm cold (did I tell you already?) and I also officially have a nasty cold as of today, which is a pity since these days are so sunny they motivate you to go outside, but I can't risk catching something worse. On the other hand, better get some antibodies now than during my winter vacations.