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From today’s Irish Times: “The unusually dry spell has left much of the country in near-drought conditions, according to Met Eireann. Many parts of the country have enjoyed at least 15 consecutive days with no rain.

“…The dry weather conditions have kept the Dublin Fire Brigade busy, with gorse and bush fires reported on a daily basis.

“…Farmers around the country will be relieved to hear that the recent dry spell will be interrupted today with some showers.

“But Met Eireann is forecasting that today’s rain won’t last longer than tonight, with a quick return to sunshine.”

(By the way, for some reason I had to substitute a normal capital E for the E-with-fada that would normally begin the word Eireann. The blog wouldn’t publish until I made the substitution. Anyone know whether this is a “feature” in Blogger?) 🙂

Meaning that it’s still really nice out. Temperature’s about 60 F at the moment; the sky is cloudless. Oh, a little haze near the horizon, but nothing serious.

And it’s been like this, almost without a break, for something like ten days now. This is in its way as unnerving as when I was in Leukerbad and it snowed, without pause, for a week straight. Seven feet plus. (And the locals just scraped it off every couple of hours and kept on going.)

The weather map is strangely equivocal. That trench which I thought was likely to go away after a day seems to be persisting. Now I’m looking at that high out in the Atlantic and wondering whether that’s going to slide in here and prolong this good weather even further.

Don’t get me wrong…I’m not complaining! But this is a part of the world where, in summer, if it doesn’t rain for two weeks, they declare a drought. Ireland has very little in the way of water reserves precisely because it rains so frequently, and the main reservoir which serves Dublin was built for the needs of a much smaller city-and-suburban-area than Dublin is today. Since I haven’t heard any concern about this on the news lately, I can only surmise that our winter was wet enough so that the water table at the moment is in good shape (we get our own water from a well), and that Poulaphouca Reservoir is well topped up. Sure hope so…

Dave Barry on helping write jokes for Steve Martin at the Oscars.

Today’s “Saturday Science” article from NASA talks about astrophotography on the ISS, some intelligent tinkering, and noseprints on the windows. There’s photography of Earth, too: aurorae and city pictures (like this image of London at night. Pratchett fans: in the larger version of this image on the article’s page, you can clearly see at least part of the dread rune Odegra. …That’s the M25 ring road, to the rest of you). …If you’re interested in hunting down images of your own area, look here: this link is the gateway “search” page for astronaut photography.

…And check out this image of the Wicklow Mountains under snow. Hey, I can see our house!

— If you’re interested in receiving a space science story like this every day, you can sign up at http://science.nasa.gov/news/subscribe.asp.

If you haven’t come across this web page in your travels, you should take a look at it. Dave Mackey is building a filmography of Warner Bros. cartoons there, including a title card gallery and a field guide to titles and credits. Invaluable.

And another site worth visiting for those who (like me) are passionate about cartoons: The Termite Terrace Trading Post message board, one of the Toonzone forums. They’ve just completed an upgrade to vBulletin 3.0, and the place looks spiffier than ever.

Cynthia Armistead writes to say that Out Of Ambit is being syndicated on LiveJournal at / as http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=outofambit. Welcome, guys!

The things you find while cruising other people’s blogs…. I’d completely forgotten about this wonderful miniseries by Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragones. Now I have to find where the heck it is, and make time to re-read and re-appreciate it. (It’s probably in the storage, twenty miles away, dammit.)

I hope Mark doesn’t mind me linking to this image from his page. Green Lantern was always my favorite… (The Hal Jordan GL, I should say. It would also be correct to add here that the “Young Wizards” universe owes a considerable debt to the Green Lantern Corps. The old Corps, when there were 3600 of them, and you could have a decent-sized cocktail party with the whole group between Threats to the Universe.)

…Yeah, and I liked Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, too. Though I confess to emitting occasional tormented shouts of, “Hey, Amy! Lose the goddamn fluffy stereotypical flying unicorn!” …By the way, there’s an interesting overview of the series here which points out similarities between Amy Winston and Harry Potter.

Possibly a good moment to have another look at this. (NB: not updated since 1999, apparently.)

I almost forgot…

The one thing I’m going to stay up for: Peter O’Toole’s acceptance of his special Oscar. That should be worth seeing.

Meanwhile, I’ve shifted my two buckets of dirt and stones for this hour. I can’t believe the effort digging that hole must have caused Peter. (You can see the [temporary] result of his labors alongside. This picture was taken before the various water plants died off for the winter. But there are plenty of leaves from the huge beech trees that line the opposite side of the road. Every now and then I alternate hauling buckets of dirt with pulling a bunch of the leaves out in a futile attempt to keep the water from turning into beech tea. But they just keep coming back, the way the kitchen sink somehow just keeps filling with dishes… Anyway, still plenty of work to do on the pond, as you can see. Shelving stones need to be added all around, more stones added in the back, etc etc. I’m not going to do any of that until the rockery work to the left is finished. Sometime in 2004, at this rate.)

I have this awful feeling that we may be in the middle of it.

We’ve had this happen before. Often enough, at least in this part of the country, we get some of our best weather of the year in late March and early to mid-April. The weather goes sunny and still, and though nighttime temperatures can drop to freezing, daytime temperatures rise into the high 60’s if not the low 70’s F — pretty warm for this part of the world. Then May hits and it starts to rain…

Today would be the sixth or maybe seventh day straight of this kind of weather. The cats have been having (literally) a field day in the increasing hours of sunlight, doing a lot of hunting in the grass of the the “paddock” or empty fenced field next to the house. The kittens seem to have found a nest of mice, and every day more livestock of various kinds gets brought into the kitchen to be played with and lost under major appliances (if said livestock is still alive, which is often the case). We’ve had mice and shrews and various large bugs, and I expect the first frog any minute now.

It’s good weather to garden in. Every hour or so I get up from writing to go out and do a few minutes’ worth of work on the second part of the rockery I started building the year before last. Originally this was just a rock-studded, weedy dirt bank with rocks and various ancient garbage embedded in it, and a hedge growing on top. During 2001 I dug that bank out, got rid of the weeds, rearranged many rocks, added some new ones, and put in various alpines and rockery plants. In 2002 we ordered in a fishpond “shell” to replace the cinderblock-and-pool-liner fishpond we’d erected in the walled-up spot where there had once been a gate into the yard.

With great labor (because the substrate ground is rocky) Peter dug out the hole for this shell. (During part of that period I was away on business, and the neighbors started teasing Peter about the hole he was digging, and the fact that they hadn’t seen me for a week or so.) Now it’s become time to deal with the bank on the left side of the fishpond. There’s no digging to do there — it’s just a place where the hedge grows on and in the older stone wall, part of which kept that joyriders’ car out of our house the other night. What I’ve been doing is taking the “spoil” that Peter dug out from the fishpond site and dumping it, bucket by bucket, at the foot of that wall, while adding some big stones to continue the rockery. The plants — heathers, daphne, skimmia, mahonia, various others — are lined up are all ready to plug in, in their appropriate order, as the groundwork is laid for them. Pretty soon this side of the rockery will extend right over to the wire fence that keeps the sheep out on the left side of the house. When that’s done, I’ll finish the rockwork around the front of the pool, making a place for the cats to sit and look at the fish, and in back, a waterfall.

There’s some slight urgency about all of this, since there’s never any telling how long this kind of weather will last. This morning’s map from Digital Atmosphere suggests that the high that’s been sitting over us has now passed on, leaving us for the moment with a benign but not very permanent “pressure trough”.

Better go out and move a few more buckets of dirt, before it all turns to mud…

Philip Morris loses a $10 billion verdict. …But don’t worry, guys; I’m sure the damages will be “light.”

If you gather that I think smoking is suicide — commercially-assisted suicide via an addictive substance — and that cigarette companies deserve every bit of the punishment they’re getting at the moment, then you’d be right. Peter’s dad died relatively young of complications of smoking, an event which still profoundly affects Peter: and in my early nursing days, I had to care for entirely too many people dying of lung cancer who were still resolutely smoking cigarette after cigarette through their tracheotomy stomae. The memory burns.

Time for the Saturday-morning cartoon-time sugar rush. (Boy, what would I have thought when I was eight, if someone had told me I would live to see a day when I could watch cartoons all day long? …Then there’s the flip side, possibly slightly depressing in retrospect: how would I have felt if someone had told me when I was eight that, when I was forty, I would be writing cartoons all day long? [Sometimes, anyway.] …Of course, to the kid I was then, I suspect it would have looked like heaven. I can just hear myself. “Wow, people write those? People pay you to write those? Yay, I can’t wait to grow up!!”)

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the sugar rush. Try Topher’s Breakfast Cereal Character Guide.

…A random thought as I wander through this site. Some of you will probably have seen the “Powerpuff Girls” episode in which the girls decide that their present personae aren’t cool enough. (I particularly love Buttercup’s dark enthusiasm about an antihero who looks suspiciously like Spawn: “He has scabs that never heal!“) …Anyway, Bubbles reinvents herself as a manga-originated, Hello-Kittyish knockoff called “Harmony Bunny”…who, when called upon to function, suddenly comes out with a declaration that sounds very, very, very much like the General Mills-sponsored Underdog’s old one: “When X is in danger, I am not slow: for it’s [in Harmony’s case] hop, hop, hop and away I go!”

Which leaves me wondering who on Genndy Tartakovsky’s staff put him onto this stuff. His bio says he was born in Moscow in 1970 and didn’t come to the US until 1977, at which point Underdog was long gone.

That’s enough mystery for one morning. Time for some cereal.