An Orderly Disorder

I just ate some campbell's soup- condensed. a favorite. i thought you should know because other than the ache in my head- left side, cause unknown, i'm feeling warm and cozy if not slightly salty and consequently thirsty. i'm still staring out the window and the weather is beginning to chill and storm watch of 2004 bears down upon us as if a giant wave hadn't killed a whole bunch of people. (stupid news)

Tonight
Dec 30 Showers Late 47° 50 %

A couple days ago I tuned into a PBS special on the "Terra Nova" and it was a show I stage managed back in '98. Just hearing what happenend makes me teary eyed again, let alone watching them die 4 days a week for 2 months.. What was it?

http://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/History/Robert%20Falcon%20Scott2.htm

Well, I'll tell you. Robert F. Scott wanted to be first to the South Pole and well face it, a much more craftier Norweigen, Roald Amundsen, beat him too it- bcs he ate his dogs and trained by leaving his window open in the middle of the night- which steels me against the cold whenever I think of it. So I leave my window open too. But the point of the PBS special was about a meteorologist named Simpson who predicted the weather Scott would face. Because that's really what killed them. So imagine the guilt he felt when he found out they had weather into -50, got picked off one by one by frostbite only for the last 2 and the captain himself to die ONLY 11 miles from the safety depot- But you see he wasn't wrong, that's the thing. It should have been balmy and breezy for the arctic. and 15 out of 16 years he would have been right! How messed up is that? And now with data gathering machines and what not this woman found out it wasn't because Scott was inept or the plan wrong- they just didn't know. It's messed up really.

And infact according to this book on CHAOS, that I have as yet to get through (so 2 years, no big deal), it talks about how the chaos theory sprung up from a guy watching clouds- the weather as it turns out is Aperiodic- "systems that almost repeat themselves but never quite succeed- animal populations that rise and fall almost regularly, epidemics that come and go on tantilizingly near-regular schedules..." It's a pattern with disturbances.

Weather despite it's deadly consequences is still pretty fitfully amazing. And it clearly sucks to land on disturbance. But most of drama hinges on those distrubances, life in fact. For where would we be without it. Profound disturbances like tsunami's... I can't imagine standing on the beach and watching the tide go out and wondering, wow, that's weird, why did it just do that? I know I would have run, wouldn't I have? And it's nature in its awesomeness that make people surf the North Shore or climb Mt. Kilimanjaro or walk around in the rain eating ice cream with metal spoons in the rain... or racing for the pole. Maybe.