The Polar Invasion
This weather event, henceforth localized to the “the blood will drain out of your feet” weather event has been termed the Polar Invasion in the US. (the successor to last year’s Polar Vortex)
Colorado perished last night and the Texas Panhandle recorded a temperature of -10.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean there was localized flooding in Ireland with the yellow alert being raised to an Orange alert.
Here we have -2 for an overnight low, dipping to -5 in the mysterious titled sheltered areas. (Definition forthcoming)
Here’s the full forecast. I am too timid to click on Edmonton, so click amongst yourself if your fingers aren’t already frozen.
Consider: The mighty kidney
“Each kidney (bean-shaped organ) weighs about 5 ounces and contains approximately one million filtering units called nephrons. Each nephron is made of a glomerulus and a tubule. The glomerulus is a miniature filtering or sieving device while the tubule is a tiny tube like structure attached to the glomerulus.”
This is the closest I could find to an image of one nephron.
Weekend view
This was my Saturday/Sunday view. 12th floor at VGH. It was somehow redolent of Legoland that H. Heliport landing.
Thank you to the nurses & doctors for their excellent care. Thanks be to everything else for public health care and Sir Alexander Fleming for inventing antibiotics.
Sorry, Mrs O’Duffy
My latest piece for the LRB blog can be found here
“I should like to apologise to Brigid O’Duffy (née Davis), who served in the Irish Citizen Army during the Easter Rising in 1916 but did not see her military pension until 1937. Her pension application (MSP34REF20583 in the recently digitised Military Service Pensions Collection) is date-stamped December 1936 by the Department of Defence. The files of 433 other women have also been unveiled.”
Middling: A Berlin Chronicle
“It is likely that no one ever masters anything in which he has not known impotence; and if you agree, you will also see that this impotence comes not at the beginning of or before the struggle with the subject, but in the heart of it…” Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle from Reflections. Translated by Edmund Jephcott