Meanwhile, on Pluto

It is catastrophically cold. Monday it was 40°F. Tonight, it's projected to reach -20°F, with a windchill factor of -50°F. This is the worst cold I've ever been in. Once, years ago (1985?), I was in Chicago on a night where it was -20°F, but the windchill was only -40°F that night. That's the night some scoundrel stole my gloves, and from inside a church, no less! Tonight I'm safe and warm, though.

A Pail of Air, by Fritz Lieber, to set the mood.

Spare a thought and a prayer for the poor birds and animals. Chicago is parking busses in areas where the homeless congregate, to use them as a sort of temporary shelter. That seems a clever expedient. I think there's a very real fear there that they'll be finding frozen corpses here and there over the next few days.

I'm quite with the POTUS, in that we need that "global warming" to start kicking in.

*****

Is there anyone over the age of twelve or so who honestly believes that Bolton walking out on stage with his brand-new notepad bearing the single line "5000 troops to Colombia" in large, legible writing was an accident?

Cold

It's so cold they've stopped running the trains. Apparently they fear that the rails have contracted to the point where the weight of the train will cause the fasteners to break.

And, the cold has stayed the postman from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.

I don't recall either of those ever happening before.

Windchill overnight here got to -46°F, instead of the -50°F predicted.

Like a Twelve-Wheeled Dog

Tonight should be pretty similar to last night. The current local conditions are showing N/A on the Weather Service site, so I'm gonna suppose the cold worked some fell mischief on their data link.

The Canadians, of course, are laughing at us for being such big babies.

I put out dried corn on the cob for the local rabbits. They seem to have been coming over just after sundown from the brushy field across the road, and poking around beneath the feeders, looking for stuff the birds lost, so they're evidently hard up. Their approach path is under the shrubberies where they're a bit sheltered, so I tossed some corn under there for them to find.

The corn I bought is, I'm pretty sure. Reid's Yellow Hybrid, which from 1900 through 1975 or so was about 80% of the corn grown in America. Mom and I were talking the other day about how much we both loved roasted corn on the cob before it turned so sugary you can hardly stand the stuff anymore. I'm pretty sure it was Reid's we were getting. It's considered mainly livestock feed now, but it used to be the general-purpose corn that was used for everything except popcorn, sweet corn, and decorative corn. The stuff you get handed now when you ask for corn is the soft small-kernelled white/pale yellow stuff that we'd have called sweet corn or peg corn when I was a child. Reid's is big chewy kernels, and an intense reddish yellow. I'm keeping some back to plant, and we'll see.