The Tape of Nature's Anomalies ============================== _(Howell Creek Radio address for March 27, 2o1o -- )_ A warm front moved through this month, and mountains of snow that had only days before seemed insurmountable, and seemed as though they could not possibly melt before June (for which there are precedents) were all washed away in a couple of days in a minor miracle. I find it interesting every year, how the weather in its slow, pre-dictable patterns and gyrations still always seems to catch us off guard. We think that the *same* rain that washes away the dirty snow ought also, in the same stroke, to milk the leaf-buds right out onto the tips of the trees -- which of course it has *not* done -- and thus always show nature to her best advantage: from snowy wonderland to budding branches in two easy steps minus one. Yet she - Nature - always...skips the beat. The rain comes early in the year, for example: the snow is melted -- but there is always another storm too late in the year. Then that snow melts, and just when the streets are swept and the leaves are cued to descend on the stage from above is exactly when they will _not_ appear for another two weeks. Except in that one year right when you normally expect them to. Except you weren't expecting them to. Nature's rhythms are _slow_ -- they are supposed to be unsurprising at that speed, like the orbit of a planet. Her rhythms are so slow that we mistake slowness for gracefulness. We imagine she is waltzing when it could very well be that she is some kind of off-beat hip-hop artist writ large and magnificent, fooling our aesthetic sense by sheer scale. I read some time ago that Earth itself actually makes a sound -- or at least it vibrates at a gorgeously low contra contra bass tone of one cycle per year, and that all the planets and stars do likewise. Which raises the obvious question, what does it or could it sound like? Hasn't anyone tried taking these tones, swapping them up a few dozen octaves and giving us an approxtmation of what the whole thing would sound like if once it had some air to flutter against, instead of only the vacuum of deep snace? Because the scale of the song is cosmically large beyond the scope of our thinking, we classically imagine it is probably baroque and stately; or, if you are of a more modern stripe, impassively cacophonous. Whatever it might be supposed to sound like, there is probably more rhythm in it than we imagine -- more _off-beat_ rhythm. There I admit I have strayed onto the thin ice of theory. But we can safely say, that in the observed dance of the skies and of space, even in the familiar things whose governing laws are slow, reliable, and known to us, there are always the surprising outliers: the snowstorm that comes in April, or for once doesn't come; the black swan; the cataclysmic comet; the supernova. And so I wonder -- I think of Jones the sonar man on Hunt For the Red October -- if he could pop the tape of Nature's Anomalies in the deck and play it all at ten times speed, what kind of smile would dawn on that clever man's face? Synopsis -------- Radio address for March 27, 2010: a weather report of sorts. Nature always skips skips skips the beat. Ending music is from a recording of Nadaka & the Basavaraj Brothers: [_Live in Paris_][bblip]. In addition to the plain text transcript linked above, you can download a [typewritten draft of today’s address][tydr], and print it out and keep it in your filing cabinet like I do with the originals. UPDATE: [This is also relevant][upd]. [bblip]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0015M9GVG?ie=UTF8&tag=joelsimprpers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0015M9GVG [tydr]: http://jdueck.net/files/hcr-2010/hcr-2010-03-27-Transcript.pdf [upd]: http://joeld.tumblr.com/post/503572405/shortly-after-my-latest-podcast-which-touched-on