Not this Day of the Dead

Yes, I have been procrastinating.

It’s Friday already Halloween is over and today is Day of the Dead, which in a predominantly Catholic country like Brazil means “HOLIDAY!”

After a sweltering week the weather changed overnight as predicted and today is overcast and cool. I never noticed before but apparently Finados (what the Brazilians call Day of the Dead) is often wet. There was a little rain overnight, but there doesn’t seem to any real threat at the moment.

While public holidays are good for the soul, they’re not so good for the pocket, all my private and weekend students have cancelled which mean a sharp drop in available beer funds.

The dark laden clouds of the spring rains

Sandy sure was a naughty girl, she didn’t do any favours for New York. The surprising thing is that scientists have been warning that such storms will be of increasing magnitude because of global warming and nobody listened. The whole world is affected by global warming. Even here in Rio de Janeiro in October and November we are supposed to have ‘chuvas de primaveira‘ (spring rains). Where were they last year? Where are they this year? This little bit of rain we had last night is the result of a cold front, not the ocean sourced winds that cause the spring rains. The spring rains mean torrential downpours daily in the late afternoon, streets flooded in a matter of minutes, saturated people running everywhere; then after an hour they stop and the sun comes out and the people are dry again in 20 minutes. Tell me that global warming is not happening. Tell the Argentinians whose grape harvest is down 24% it’s not happening. Tell the people in New York it’s not happening.

I’m not laying the blame of global warming solely on the industrial machine, my reading tells me it is the precursor to an ice-age, a natural cycle of the planet, but sure as heck the industrial machine isn’t helping it. I read the other day of the likelihood that an ice-age could well reduce the global population to isolated pockets of humanity totaling as few as 20,000; that’s a big reduction from 7bn. But then Mother Nature has a way of balancing things in her favour. My guess is that we don’t really count. If you look at things closely, we are nothing more than an infestation of fleas on a dog; and Mother Nature is about to have  good scratch.