Good Morning from OYIT [Tuesday, March 9, 2009]

By Nate

Jake told me I could do a Good Morning post. I'm very excited. Writing this post is going to help me procrastinate for my paper that's due Tuesday. I procrastinate a lot. Probably because my name, Nate, is in the word procrastiNATE. My parents doomed me for this. At least they didn't name me Crass!


To begin, I have a critique of how the weather has been presented in the past.



For my weather I turn to www.weather.gov instead of that flashy, low-substance, and often inaccurate www.weather.com. As you can see by the image above there are a lot of very colorful weather warnings out there. I like to look at the warnings map because it makes the weather a little scarier, plus some of the color-coding colors are very similar and it's hard to tell if there's a storm warning or a high surf advisory in your area. Is that a Special Weather Statement, a Hazardous Weather Outlook, or a Fire Watch across the south? I don't know. I can't really tell those colors apart on the chart on the website. Maybe it's a Lake Wind Advisory. Who knows? At any rate, you're getting more information here than the plain, old temperature map that is usually posted. Speaking of...



This is the www.weather.gov temperature map. It's much more accurate than the general color shadings of www.weather.com. The temperature won't tell you what this next map does though: whether your house will be consumed by water!



Look out upper-Midwest! You've got some flood stage warnings going on!

Besides these daily maps, you can see the radar, satellite, national forecast, climate, and air quality maps. Maybe I'll post these in the future if Jake lets me do this again.

My Weekend

The hot topic around the office on Mondays is always the previous weekend's activities. Last weekend I went to Hannibal, Mo, for the annual Democrat Days event. You can read about what I did by searching "#demdays09" at www.twitter.com. I was a tweetin' machine! Glenn was following intently and told me he really appreciated my hourly updates.

The highlight of the weekend was at the big banquet on Saturday night when US Senator Claire McCaskill made a joke about my tweeting! She had been reading them, too! All the young Democrats busted up laughing while the rest of the crowd who was over 45 years old sat quietly in a dumbfounded stupor.

Today's Stupid Quote

Today's stupid quote comes from the debate over the "coercive abortion" bill that is currently in Missouri's state house. The bill would make it illegal for anyone to suggest to a pregnant woman that she get an abortion. Pretty serious stuff with heavy consequences. But then Representative Cynthia Davis, R-St. Charles, brought the tenor of the debate to a new low when she said on the floor, "Usually when I talk about reproduction it's about making copies on the copier."

Really?

She's known for these kinds of comments like when she argued that Fmr. Senator Chuck Graham, who is in a wheelchair, couldn't be recognized on the floor because he could not stand. Obviously it wasn't cool yet to ask Chuck to stand up until Vice President Biden said it last year.

Today's Music Video

Today's music video is the single to the latest David Byrne and Brian Eno album Everything that Happens will Happen Today. I recently got a copy of it, and this song really gets me going in the morning. Sometimes I just play the song "Strange Overtones" on loop. It's definitely my new pop jam. You can download the whole album and get other cool things here.



[Note: Sorry I couldn't find a real music video or a live version]