Tag Archives: global warming

Storm of The Full Moon

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Many of you long-term readers of the blog know that *The Institute has its own private highway, known as Hwy 287, here in Northern Colorado that connects us with the small hamlets in the area that support The Institute. By support we mean supplying us with foodstuffs, some services that we cannot or do not provide for ourselves such as nuclear power plant maintenance, a supply of interns drop-outs from the college located there, some medical services that our in-house clinic doesn’t provide, or for when we are over booked with those that we do. Just last month we had to send three intracranial reductions to the little medical facility in the largest hamlet in the area. Fortunately our helipad was not in use so we were able to get our patients out without having to ask the medevac helicopter to circle while we off-loaded some of our favorite guests.

Actually we need to clarify “owning” our private highway. It is a week to week lease arrangement with The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) which is a division of the United States Department of Transportation. They pay us a fee of several dollars a year to watch and “keep an eye out” for funny business on the stretch of highway that comes closest to The Institute’s holdings. That means watching for those using the highway and ascertain whether their use constitutes anything “funny”. The definition of “funny” is left up to our discretion. All we can say at this point is there has been a whole bunch of “funny” behavior that we have had to report. We have two full-time staff members on this program and they have their hands full, we can tell you. But we’re not here to talk about “funny business”. No we’re here to talk about the storm of the full moon.

Last night as we’re were returning to The Institute after having dinner with some of the visiting dignitaries in the area at a pizza joint nearby, not a chain, a local place, you wouldn’t know it, sorry we can’t divulge our friends names at this time but let it suffice to say that they are leaving office soon and leave it at that, they deserve their privacy just like you and we do. As we left they headed south, and we headed north up our highway when we were besieged by a fast-moving snow storm that came out of nowhere. This was a ground blizzard, a nasty little bugger, with high winds blowing horizontal snow across our highway causing extreme low visibility and ice on the road. Fortunately we were in one of The Institutes expedition vehicles that we use for our far northern explorations, so we were reasonably safe. However we were perplexed.

We had no storms scheduled in our weather modification department’s storm list. Again for those long-term readers of the blog you know about our huge weather modification program that has been in effect for some time here at The Institute. If you’re new to the blog simply type weather modification into the search box and you’ll have access to just about everything we’ve done, except for the secret stuff of course. The only people that can access that information is a legally sitting president that is not like totally nuts.

We hurried ahead slowly, reaching The main Institute grounds well after dark having had to crawl up the mountainside in double-low granny gear and headed up to the ready room in the weather department to find out what was happening. Sending our weather techs up to the observation deck way up on the third tower of the science wing they snapped the image above with our new weather intensive, highly functional digital DSL camera set at Holy Moley, which gave us some clues as to the make up of the storm.

Firstly, we didn’t do it. That alarmed us because it gave credence to what every one is calling that Global Warming. Global warming is apparently a phenomenon that is taking place where the weather goes all over wonky of a sudden on its own with no rhyme or reason. (Note to self: Get those weather guys on this global warming thing. We can’t be behind on this stuff. We’ll look like idiots.) Having had near total control over our local weather in the past this was a shock to us.

What we found was somewhat unusual in its own right and unbelievable on the surface when looked at with any common sense at all. It seems that some goofball Greek history students from the local college were sitting around in a micro brewery down on the flatlands, showing off, making extremely rude comments in Latin and stuff, about an obscure Greek goddess named Chione, whom I’m sure you all remember is the goddess/personification of snow and winter. As we understand it she is normally in pretty good spirits, kind of  a fun-loving chick as it were, but these asshats must have caught her at a bad time because she suddenly became all about burying their dumb asses in as much snow as she could muster.

To top it off her powers become multiplied when there is a full moon, and yes there was a full moon last night. So she let loose with a little Saskatchewan Screamer tailor-made just for this area. Those smart guys showing off are in so much trouble, I mean trouble, as their stupid clowning around caused our friends private jet to be grounded at DIA, and the only room they could get was at a Budget Inn over in Commerce City and to say they were really cheesed off is really an understatement. There was talk of re-instituting the draft just long enough to send these bozo’s to a forward observation site in Afghanistan. Plus they were permanently 86’d from the brewery. We wouldn’t want to be those guys.

As we crawled up out the clouds on The Institutes long entrance way we could clearly see the extent of the storm and how cleverly it was put together. The Institute is located at an altitude of approximately 6400′ and you can see quite clearly the top of the storm down in the valley below, which is approximately 5000′ in altitude, as it moved through our section of hwy 287, which is located at the bottom of that storm cloud. Having satisfied her desire to wreak havoc rather quickly Chione went back to whatever pursuits goddesses have and with lack of attention the storm gently dissipated and broke up leaving a small amount of windblown snowdrifts and a lingering cold.

The moral of this story if there is one, is, “Don’t be sitting around getting hammered making fun of people you don’t know anything about. It can come back and freeze your keister off. Big time. Or get you sent to Afghanistan. Or both.” So be nice.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Blues and Purples and Greens

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Blues7412

OK, you know it is July right, and we’re heading into August, not typically your coolest month of the year. Some people say it is unseasonably warm even if it is summer. That’s the kind of understatement that makes it very clear we were once a British colony. It’s kind of like saying that Donald Trump is somewhat opinionated. We for one are comforted by our governments pronouncement that there is no such thing as Global warming, as otherwise this heat might cause us to despair.

Given all that we are still freaking hot. Even up here where The Institutes main headquarters are located, halfway to the sky amid the cooling breezes of the upper stratosphere, one feels like a guppy placed out on the blacktop to wait while your bowl is being scrubbed out. We feel like we could be quite sharp with whomever it is that schedules summer heat.

It is not unusual then that we turn our thoughts to cooler places. Not places like the Arctic, which as you know is melting away, and you have to use sunscreen to be safe out on the ice. What is wrong with a world where you have to put sunscreen on so you don’t sunburn to death while you’re standing on an ice shelf. That’s sort of a rhetorical question so no answer is expected as it is too ridiculous to contemplate anyway.

We’re thinking of places that aren’t so ludicrous. Places where you can walk into the cool shadows of giant cedar trees, where the deep spaces are filled with emerald green moss, and water drips quietly down the face of deep purple walls to splash into tiny pools of cobalt blue water.  A place where the silence is barely broken by a bird call or the slight rustle of branches swaying high above you. A place like this.

As you come down off the Going To The Sun highway on the western side, there is a hidden trail that leads into old growth cedar trees called the Trail of The Cedars. It is a wooden walkway elevated above the forest floor, with twists and turns and places to stand and look at incredible views that surely Tolkien must have used to create Lothlorien, the land of the Silvan elves. One of those places is located at an abrupt turn of the trail where you cross over a wooden bridge and can peer down into this hidden grotto.

The feeling of the cool moist air that floats out of the grotto to envelope you in its delightful mist is an experience that is as profound as is it is enjoyable. It is so enjoyable in fact, that we here at The Institute are in delicate negotiations with the National Park Service to move this grotto and its stream to The Institute grounds where we can keep it safe from any natural or manmade disaster. We do this with no thought of personal gain or benefit, but simply as a service to the American people. So far they have been tough negotiators but we are nothing if not persistent so our hopes are high at this time.

You too can visit this place if you are pure of heart and don’t throw anything in the pool, because if you do you are immediately transported to Death Valley in your skivvies. With no sunscreen. Rocks melt in Death Valley. Be warned. Just go to Glacier National Park and look for the small sign that says “Trail of The Cedars”. Be prepared to be stunned. Most people aren’t used to this much beauty in one place.

Twin Suns : Planet Earth

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TwinSunsPlanetEarth2315click to enlarge

Every one has been complaining that this summer was one of the hottest on record and it was. We had drought, record temperatures, forest fires, unusual weather, irritated wildlife, irritated spouses, disgruntled outerwear manufacturers, happy soft drink purveyors, and just about every kind of social problem you could imagine. It was not a good year to be working on the chain gang under the hot Alabama sun. That blacktop just would not set up and the straw boss would only let you have so much water. Everyone blamed global warming.

Unfortunately global warming was only part of the problem. This is going to be difficult to confess but we’ve always been straight with you, our readers, and if anyone needs to know the truth it is you. As you know we have many different research programs going on here at the Institute, what we may not have fully disclosed due to advice from our attorneys, was that we have a program that is experimenting with “Interdimensional Travel”. We always use capital letters when we refer to it because it is like really important and it can’t be confused with other stuff we do that is kind of important but not quite so hazardous for the human race.

“Interdimensional Travel” is really complicated and needs very smart people to work on it. You have to have graduated from an extremely intellectual college that does science and academics and stuff, not from a tech school or an online university, and have gotten at least C’s in all of your classes. This is important, we check. After all, a program that daily confronts the mysteries of Inter-dimensionality, Astral travel, time-warping, quantum mechanics, math, algebra, long division, Interdimensional Portal creating (remember that one because that one was pretty darn important) and other complicated stuff that is really hard to spell.

“Just what the hell happened?” you asked. Well it’s complicated. When you travel between dimensions you have to have a door, or more correctly, an “Interdimensional Portal” other wise how you gonna get over there, right.  Creating one is the tricky part, it’s where you use all that science and Math and stuff, and it has to be done very carefully and monitored constantly because if you make one little mistake it can end life on earth as we know it, so you need to pay attention. No taking breaks whenever you feel like it, no running off to the bathroom just because you have to go, no x-box, no sexting with your girlfriend, you’ve got to be on the ball and focused, above all focused.

One of the critical aspects of maintaining an “Interdimensional Portal” is that it is possible, no very likely, that if you can go through it, you can also come back through it, not just you but anything or anyone else that’s on the other side too. In other words its a two-way street, or door, so to speak. That’s why it is important to pick nice dimensions with friendly stuff in it when you open one of these cosmic doorways. We keep a list of all the dimensions that it is OK to go to and a list of all the ones that are bad. These lists need to be clearly marked on the top of the page in black highlighter, we use Bic ones for this, whether it is the good list or the bad list. These lists are then posted on the fridge where we keep the Red Bull so everyone knows what page we’re on.

The dimension we’ve been investigating lately is a close one proximity-wise, right next door to our dimension in fact, and it is very similar to ours with the exception that it is almost exactly 50 years behind us in comparative time. We labeled it dimension 23 left. So, no rap, no meth, lower taxes, lots of tie-dye, you only had three channels, all the usual stuff. The only kicker is that this dimension has two primary suns orbiting their earth. Yeah I know, cool huh? but the downside is it is a lot hotter over there, and that kind of brings us to the problem of our weather here in our dimension.

When you create your Interdimensional Portal you should only keep it open for as short a period as you can, after all its expensive and it creates a hell of a draft between the two places. Remember all those hurricanes we had last year? Due to lots of engineering and R&D we have been able to reduce our hardware needed to do all this stuff down to fit into a tuff-shed and a small storage unit. The machinery needed to create the Interdimensional Portal has been reduced to the size of a Sears 12v battery charger with an 11″ diameter cable running up over to a wall switch, similar to what you have in your home but about the size of a Volkswagen. It take two husky lads working together to throw this switch and it is a tough job. You need Pop-eye arms. Since this program is fairly new, only a few years old, we can’t pay much more than minimum wage to our researchers and occasionally a wimpy one sneaks through our extensive evaluation process. And that’s what happened.

It was a Friday night in early spring, there was free beer and all the burritos you could eat over at the dining room/mess hall and our people on duty were in a hurry to get over there before all the burritos were gone. The Portal had been open because we  had been ferrying over some hazardous waste and it needed to be closed. When you throw that switch that shuts the portal down you need to listen for the click it makes so you know it is completely closed. They didn’t listen for the click. The click didn’t happen. Since this click is about the same decibel level as a sonic boom it is hard to image how they missed it but they did. The portal was mostly closed but not all the way. This allowed what we call in the business, “leakage”. Unfortunately the leakage was in the form of the Electromagnetic Spectrum which is of course, X-ray ~ .01 μm, Ultraviolet ~ .1, μm, Infrared ~ 10 μm, Visible from .39 μm to .76 μm, Microwave ~ 100 μm’ and Radio wave >10 mm. In other  words, heat. And because there are two suns in that dimension that is why you are hearing everyone say “this summer is twice as hot as I remember from last year”.

I know, I know, don’t write me about this, the feds have been all over our butts constantly, like this is some big deal or something. We changed the switch, now a Girl Scout could throw it, a pair of brownies even, so that problem is not going to happen again. There’s a bill in Congress to raise the minimum wage again, that should help us recruit better people. Sometime stuff happens. The government does crap like this all the time and you don’t hear everyone jumping in their face. Anyway that’s why it’s been so hot lately. Sorry.

Cool Solutions

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BeatHeat-0146

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There have been reports trickling into the Institute regarding heat and excessive amounts of it appearing over much of the continental US and affecting our naturally born citizens by causing them to feel hot. To many this is an uncomfortable feeling. The general question on everyone’s mind is ‘Why isn’t somebody doing something about this? The second question is ‘How come nobody’s doing anything about this?’ The third question is ‘Damn it I pay taxes, Why am I hot? Well, where IS the relief? Who IS doing anything about it? These are questions just begging for answers. Where are our elected officials now I ask you when there’s hot topics afoot. They’re in their air-conditioned lounges deep in the bowels of the earth under the house of Representatives building at a cool 64 degrees watching skiing movies and drinking mimosa’s with those little umbrellas in them, that’s where.

Feeling let down by those in charge? Looking for answers in all the wrong places? Well unlike some governments we could name we’re here to help. That’s right the folks at the Institute have stepped up and assumed responsibility for bringing you, our readers, some much-needed help and advice to solve this problem and bring you that needed relief. Many of you were unaware that the Institute for Regained Knowledge, or IRK, has a department full of heavy thinkers. They’re not only large, they think a lot. They’re known locally only as “The Thinkers” and work in our ‘Think Tank’, not to be confused with our ‘Drunk Tank’ located just down the hall, preferring to shy away from the lime light and remain anonymous. They do this because in case any of this BullPucky they spout backfires on them and gets them in jail, I mean, they get their accolades from doing their best to come up with original ideas and provide service to the community.

They have identified the problem by breaking it down, analyzing it and providing a working solution that anyone could implement in the safety of their own homes using the barest minimum of expensive equipment which luckily is available here at IRK for a modestly inflated price payable only by cashiers check or cash, we don’t take checks or credit cards and sent to you without a return address.

Here it is then. The Problem: Heat is hot. This makes you sweat and others to stand up wind from you. It can also cause you to collapse in a heap making you an obstacle and an impediment to traffic. Analysis of Problem: Reduce heat’s effect on the individual. Possible solutions: Lock them in large cold storage containers. Impractical, hard to trick more than a few of them when they see what’s going on. They scatter and become hard to catch. Everyone gets issued those suits that deep-sea divers wear that circulate water through the suit to heat or cool the individual. Impractical. Hoses needed to run suits restrict ones ability to commute. Productivity would suffer, markets would crash, hoses produce tripping hazard. Also could not tell friend from foe as everyone looks alike.

Then one of our most genius of big thinkers came up with a scientifically based solution that is so simple you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it your self, you big dummy. Heat is a function of height. The lower you are the hotter it is. If you’re really short you’re going to be a lot hotter than say, Wilt the Stilt will be. He’s like nine feet tall. If you look at a map you will see that every place that is red is hot and every place that is blue is cold. Mountains which have a lot more height than plains are blue so they’re colder. An example of a mountain top is shown above in case you are unfamiliar with them. These happen to be in Rocky Mountain National Park but they can be found in other places also. So reasoning would tell you that you should go to the mountain tops and you’d be cooler. Except if you’ve ever looked at a mountain top close-up you’ll notice there’s not a lot of room up there. ( See Image above ) You’re only going to be able to fit like four to six people on each mountain top. That’s not enough. But here’s where the beauty part comes in. Science. Science says you don’t have to go to a mountain top to get cool. You just have to go up. That’s the simple part. Just go up. How, do you say? Airplanes are expensive, balloons are unreliable but there is one sure-fire way to do it. Trampolines. Big fat enormous trampolines. Get your municipalities together and construct dozens of huge trampolines in the outlying areas of your community and gather closely those you can trust to keep the rhythm going and start to jump. Everyone hangs on to everyone else so you can all jump in unison and if the group is large enough you will gain heights you never imagined. Even modest gains in height will produce a cooling effect. Our experts here at the Institute figure that you can obtain enormous cooling benefits with as little as seven to eight hundred feet gain in elevation. More and you’ll need a jacket. The cost analysis breakdown proves conclusively that you can construct a suitable trampoline for much less that it would take to fly everyone to the mountains, rent guides, buy freeze-dried food etc. Think of it. Relief in moments from the wretched heat and even figuring in the travel time up and down on the trampoline you’ll still be reaching that rarefied, cool, clear air in less time than you can make it through security and you won’t have to deal with those fascist, I mean special individuals from the TSA. The ones that have vowed to make your travel experience a truly unique and special time.

There it is then, a simple, clean, non-polluting solution to a grave problem that will have you finding relief as fast as you can say “Wait, let go of me, I don’t think this is a good idea…” and it didn’t cost you a dime. This entire process that has been carried out by the Do-Gooding folks here at the institute is just one more service we provide to our fellow-man. You can thank us when you’re cooler.