Tropical Storm Claudius

Temperatures fell with a thud this week in northern Illinois, colder than even early December ought to be, if you reckon things by comparing averages over the last century or so. Single Fahrenheit digits last night, they say, and not much warmer during the day today. Repeat 90 to 120 times, and that’ll be winter.

Today I talked on the phone with former colleague Angie, who drove with her husband to Baton Rouge, where her mother lives, for Thanksgiving week. She said part of a fence on her mother’s property had been blown down by Katrina, and that labor is so scarce that she hasn’t been able to find anyone to rebuild it.

Also, Angie and her husband drove into New Orleans to see what they could see—something I would have done, too. One telling detail she reported was an open Burger King offering a $6000 signing bonus for workers and $20 per hour after that. Now we know what comes after the deluge: a labor crisis.

Ed, professional traveler and old friend of mine, has just left the Canary Islands for London. A tropical storm with the pedestrian name of Delta whipped into the islands while he was there, knocking things down and killing seven people, six of them in a boat of asylum-seekers from mainland Africa; talk about bad timing. Ed’s a fine writer (see his piece on the subtleties of honey.). I suspect he’s going to get a better-than-usual travel piece out of his experience.

Why Greek letters? That’s erudite, I suppose, but not very interesting. Maybe next time the b-list storms can be named after Roman emperors. Delta, then, would have been Tropical Storm Claudius.

In this country, I suspect—I didn’t follow it closely—that Delta got scant attention in major US media outlets, but I did pull up some articles on the Net. The BBC, Euronews.net and Science Daily all had items. Definitely out of the majors when it comes to American media.

A line from Euronews.net intrigued me: “The famous Finger of God standing stone on Gran Canaria was blown over.” The Finger of God? An image of it before the storm was only a Google image search away. First the Great Stone Face in New Hampshire, now this. Been a bad decade for famous rock formations.