Endless Winter

Was that a song by the Beach Boys? It might have been, if they’d grown up in Minnesota. The winter storm that was forecast for the Twin Cities yesterday mostly missed us; we got some snow and sleet, but not the six to eight inches that had been predicted. The storm hammered northern Minnesota, however, with Duluth hit by what the local paper called an “ice hurricane,” a foot of snow with howling winds off Lake Superior. These photos are from yesterday’s Duluth News Tribune. I thumbnailed them pretty small; click to enlarge.

This tree was blown over onto someone’s car:

This photo of a guy snowblowing his sidewalk shows the depth of the snow:

Downtown Duluth during the storm:

What’s remarkable about this photo is that the large vehicle that’s gotten stuck in the snow is a snowplow:

Walking along the shore of Lake Superior during a winter storm can be an awe-inspiring experience. This shot was taken at Beaver Bay:

When I was in elementary school, the most fun part of the year for my friends and me was ordering books from the Scholastic Book Club. We would pore over the catalog, order as many books as we could get away with, and look forward to the best day of the year, when boxes of books would be delivered to our classroom and we could dig in and find the ones we’d ordered. I can remember some of those books decades later: The Golden Eagle Mystery, The Great Pyramid Mystery, and the one with Nazis in it that had a submarine on the cover.

The Scholastic Book Club still exists and the kids, including my 11-year-old daughter, still look forward to it, but I’m not sure it’s quite the same. When I came home from work on Thursday, my daughter was looking through the catalog. It includes no fewer than three propaganda books on anthropogenic global warming: You Can Save the Planet–does anyone ever stop to consider how dumb it is to tell little kids that they can save the planet?–Earth In Danger, and a children’s version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Needless to say, no contrary views are offered, and there is no suggestion that these books are based on models that are known to be wrong.

As she pondered these titles, my daughter was looking wistfully out the window at our frozen, snowy yard. What I keep wondering is, if we’re going to have to suffer through all this endless do-goodism, bad light bulbs and all the rest, couldn’t we at least get the benefit of having it be a little warmer?

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses