Every summer, wise Floridians (and residents of other subtropical nations and states) become very familiar with the National Hurricane Center website (www.nhc.noaa.gov), with daily (or multiple-times daily, depending on how grim the situation is) readings about which tropical waves could develop into hurricanes and which hurricanes threaten the flat, reclaimed swampland where I reside. Having recently moved from a rare area in my city not in any evacuation zone to somewhere in Evacuation Zone A (meaning I may be particularly itinerant this hurricane season), I will be paying even more attention (if that were possible) to the business of hurricanes and tropical storms as I go about my affairs in work and school.
This particular year has started early with regards to tropical storms. Despite it being only the beginning of May, on May 9th Subtropical Storm Andrea formed in the Atlantic just off the coast of St. Augustine, slowly drifting west towards the state in dry, unfavorable atmospheric conditions. This brave little storm is already dissipating, but it marks the first storm of what could be a busy season. Ironically enough, some people (including Florida's Governor) were hoping that the tropical storm would bring some much needed rain to Florida. No dice.
What could drive people to wish for a tropical storm to hit Florida when the last few years have been less than kind to Florida in that regard (lest anyone forget, during the 2004 Hurricane Season, Florida was hit by four major hurricanes, the last two of which knocked out power where I lived for over a week)? In 2005 Florida was hit by another three hurricanes, one of which destroyed part of Miami International Airport (and delayed my flight back to Tampa from New Jersey, though it indirectly gave me first class tickets, so I suppose I can't complain too much). The reason is that Florida is as dry as my sense of humor right now.
Florida and Georgia are so dry right now that a swamp is burning (!) and the air quality earlier this week (thanks to a fire near Gainesville) was so bad it reminded me of the smog in Los Angeles (as well as my experiences with fires out there, which threatened Griffith Park Observatory earlier this week, one of my favorite spots in LA). One fire, the aforementioned fire on the GA/FL border, has burned over 100 square miles of land and is now threatening towns on the stateline. Another fire has burned part of northern Minnesota and is now heading into Canada. Drought conditions have prevailed over much of the United States, and the droughts are turning quite ugly as hotter weather has turned dry grass into a tinderbox.
However, other parts of the United States (like Kansas and Nebraska, and other parts of the midwest) are having floods right now from rather severe rains, the worst floods since 1993. Those floods, by the way, were so severe that they forced some towns close to the rivers of the midwest to move further away from the river to avoid being in the floodplains. If cities and towns in Florida were moved away from the floodplains to avoid damage from flooding, there would not be much of Florida left suitable for habitation, but I suppose that is another subject for another time.
It appears that, however you look at it, this year already is shaping up to be a wacky one with regards to the weather. A late start to winter in Europe created serious problems, and the end of winter featured dramatic temperature swings from spring-like weather to late blizzards. No matter what reason one uses for the weather being as it is, the weather is truly bizarre, clearly not right. While it may keep some of us glued to the weather channel (or various other equivalents), it should force us to think as well how much our lives and livelihoods depend on the fickleness of our increasingly erratic weather.
It would not surprise others to know that my life and livelihood, like everything else in my existence, has an ambivalent relationship with the weather. For one, I live in an area rather vulnerable to hurricanes, living near the coast (a bay, to be precise). However, as a reviewer of modular building plans, I get more work when modular buildings need to be built as replacements for destroyed buildings as well as construction trailers for building sites post-disaster. So, while I dislike disasters, and the stress that hurricane season brings for me as I stare at menacing looking storms in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean, I profit off of the same. Like the ironies of the weather, the ironies of my life are many.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
On The Sinister People
I have a confession to make: I am a sinister person. I say this somewhat jokingly, but truth be told, as a left-handed person, I am a sinister fellow. Sinister, a word with nearly uniformly negative connotation and denotation, comes from the latin word for left. In Latin, as in Hebrew and Greek and many other languages, left is given a host of negative meanings and right is given a host of postive meanings. The word left even comes from the Old English and means "weak." It is worthwhile to note some of these relationships first before I go on:
Left/Sinister:
Bend Sinister: signifies the bearer of the coat of arms is an illegitimate child
Sinister is also contained in the names of villians in Marvel Supercomics as well as the Underdog
Sinister is also used as a synonym for evil.
Left does not only refer to the direction, but is also the past tense of "leave" in such expressions as "left behind."
The word left in French, gauche, means awkward or clumsy.
Right/Dextrous:
Dexterity, from the Latin word for right, refers to manual ability, as the opposite of clumsiness, and is often used in role playing games for statistics related to skill in tools and weapons.
Right is not only used for the direction, but is also a positive expression used in "right brain thinking" (referring to creative thinking as opposed to the narrow quantitative thinking known as "left-brained thinking").
Right is also the name of those freedoms which are most treasured and sought after (such as "The Bill of Rights" or the "Civil Rights Movement") and is used to refer to something which is correct and proper as opposed to something which is wrong.
Perhaps these are not noticed very frequently because most of the world is right-handed (different estimates figure the proportion of right-handed people to be about 85-90% of the total population), and it is easy to ignore what is common and obvious. In an entire semester of watching movies, I saw exactly one person writing left-handed, and he happened to be Marshall Mathers, better known as Eminem. When I saw Shawn Mullins write left-handed in the music video to "Everywhere I Go," I was pleased, because it is unusual to see people writing left-handed on-screen. Even had I not already noted that I am left-handed, the fact that I even bother to notice what hand people write with should give away that fact, because right-handed people are not prone to notice what hand anyone writes with at all, while left-handed people like myself are always seeking out allies in our battle against a world designed hostile and backwards for the sinister people.
During the Middle Ages, left-handed people were considered tools of the devil and were burned at the stake (I would not have survived in the Middle Ages for other reasons, notably my intelligence, my intolerance for unjust hierarchies, my outspokenness, and my religious beliefs, but being left-handed would have added to the reasons why I would have received the death penalty in those dark times). Even in the United States in the 20th century, left-handed students were beaten on the wrist until they wrote with their right hand--this happened to my father as well as my mother's father, both of whom were born left-handed but who had it beaten out of them rather literally in school.
Left-handedness plays a role often unrecognized in military history as well. In the Bible, Ehud, a left-handed Benjaminite, used his left-handedness to slay Eglon, king of the Moabites, by sneaking a weapon on the right side of his body, where the guards did not check. Later in Judges, the notably left-handed Benjaminites dealt two defeats to the rest of the Israelites before being nearly eliminated as a tribe. Many fortresses in the Middle Ages were built with towers with stairs ascending clockwise, which would allow a right-handed person to defend them easier.
The Bible even adds to the general hostility towards the left-side in Jesus' parable of the sheep and the goats--the goats (symbollizing those who are not to be saved) are put on the left side, and the sheep (symbollizing those who are to be saved) are placed on the right-side. Yet, despite the often negative connotations of the word left (and the awkwardness in writing and drawing left-handed), and even the various hostile theories about the origin of left-handedness in people (including high amounts of stress at birth and brain damage), left-handedness endures and even has some positive connotations--including a prediliction for high intelligence and creativity.
So, in the end, perhaps the sinister people of this world like myself can have the last laugh--left-handed people are likely the only ones who even notice what kind of handedness most people have, and they are better at tennis and other one-on-one sports (like boxing) due to the assymetry of handedness. Living in a hostile world does have its advantages after all.
Left/Sinister:
Bend Sinister: signifies the bearer of the coat of arms is an illegitimate child
Sinister is also contained in the names of villians in Marvel Supercomics as well as the Underdog
Sinister is also used as a synonym for evil.
Left does not only refer to the direction, but is also the past tense of "leave" in such expressions as "left behind."
The word left in French, gauche, means awkward or clumsy.
Right/Dextrous:
Dexterity, from the Latin word for right, refers to manual ability, as the opposite of clumsiness, and is often used in role playing games for statistics related to skill in tools and weapons.
Right is not only used for the direction, but is also a positive expression used in "right brain thinking" (referring to creative thinking as opposed to the narrow quantitative thinking known as "left-brained thinking").
Right is also the name of those freedoms which are most treasured and sought after (such as "The Bill of Rights" or the "Civil Rights Movement") and is used to refer to something which is correct and proper as opposed to something which is wrong.
Perhaps these are not noticed very frequently because most of the world is right-handed (different estimates figure the proportion of right-handed people to be about 85-90% of the total population), and it is easy to ignore what is common and obvious. In an entire semester of watching movies, I saw exactly one person writing left-handed, and he happened to be Marshall Mathers, better known as Eminem. When I saw Shawn Mullins write left-handed in the music video to "Everywhere I Go," I was pleased, because it is unusual to see people writing left-handed on-screen. Even had I not already noted that I am left-handed, the fact that I even bother to notice what hand people write with should give away that fact, because right-handed people are not prone to notice what hand anyone writes with at all, while left-handed people like myself are always seeking out allies in our battle against a world designed hostile and backwards for the sinister people.
During the Middle Ages, left-handed people were considered tools of the devil and were burned at the stake (I would not have survived in the Middle Ages for other reasons, notably my intelligence, my intolerance for unjust hierarchies, my outspokenness, and my religious beliefs, but being left-handed would have added to the reasons why I would have received the death penalty in those dark times). Even in the United States in the 20th century, left-handed students were beaten on the wrist until they wrote with their right hand--this happened to my father as well as my mother's father, both of whom were born left-handed but who had it beaten out of them rather literally in school.
Left-handedness plays a role often unrecognized in military history as well. In the Bible, Ehud, a left-handed Benjaminite, used his left-handedness to slay Eglon, king of the Moabites, by sneaking a weapon on the right side of his body, where the guards did not check. Later in Judges, the notably left-handed Benjaminites dealt two defeats to the rest of the Israelites before being nearly eliminated as a tribe. Many fortresses in the Middle Ages were built with towers with stairs ascending clockwise, which would allow a right-handed person to defend them easier.
The Bible even adds to the general hostility towards the left-side in Jesus' parable of the sheep and the goats--the goats (symbollizing those who are not to be saved) are put on the left side, and the sheep (symbollizing those who are to be saved) are placed on the right-side. Yet, despite the often negative connotations of the word left (and the awkwardness in writing and drawing left-handed), and even the various hostile theories about the origin of left-handedness in people (including high amounts of stress at birth and brain damage), left-handedness endures and even has some positive connotations--including a prediliction for high intelligence and creativity.
So, in the end, perhaps the sinister people of this world like myself can have the last laugh--left-handed people are likely the only ones who even notice what kind of handedness most people have, and they are better at tennis and other one-on-one sports (like boxing) due to the assymetry of handedness. Living in a hostile world does have its advantages after all.
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