Word of the Day

Anthrax (n.), trail made by ants.

I didn't even have to look outside this morning to figure out that it must either be raining or it had rained not so long ago. I have one of those wireless thermometers sitting on my desk. It not only tells me what the temperature is inside, it also tells me the temperature recorded by a remote sensor out on my back patio. It tells me the time. It tells me what day it is. But on top of all that, there's this round face (two eyes, no nose and a variable mouth), which currently is giving me a rather unhappy look. I can only assume that the wavy line mouth means he's not exactly happy. Right next to this face, I can read that the humidity is at 97%. If I wasn't smart enough to figure out that this percentage of humidity was rather high, the word WET is printed right next to the unhappy face. I've seen where you can get other wireless thermometers that are far more complicated then mine. I could have bought one that would tell me all about how windy it is outside. I could have bought one that would have given me barometric readings. I could have even bought one that would have measured how much rain we got last night. I didn't. We don't get all that much rain here where I live in Arizona. If I'm all that desperate to know how much rain we get here in Arizona, I could buy one of those rain gauges like I have in Wisconsin. It's huge. You can read the rain amount from a great distance. OK. You can stand inside, safe and sound, warm and dry and read the rain amount from the nearest window to the gauge while it's raining like cats and dogs outside. I'm not all that desperate at this point. I really don't care too much about barometric pressure readings. I never could figure out what the heck they meant anyway. The pressure is rising? The pressure is falling? Whatever. And then if I really needed to know if the it was windy outside, I'd be able to figure it out by looking at the trees outside. I can even figure out which direction the wind is coming from that way. If the trees are leaning to the right, the wind must be coming from the west. If the trees are leaning the left, the wind must be coming from the east. The wind in our part of the desert usually comes from the west...or the southwest. If patio furniture is being thrown about, it's too windy to go outside. And if the sky is really brown, and you can't see the back wall of your patio? It's a dust storm. You can pretty much figure out that it will be followed by some rain. See? I don't really need to spend a lot of money for a more extensive thermometer here in Arizona. I doubt I'll get one for Wisconsin either. I mean if the sky turns green and the leaves are showing their silvery bottoms and then the clouds start looking really dark and weird, and the patio furniture is rotating in a circular fashion on your patio, and the neighbor's cows moo at you as they fly by, you probably should have gone down to the basement when you heard the tornado warning sirens go off. If you need an expensive thermometer to tell you that, you have bigger problems. Oh. When I let the dogs outside this morning, I could see that the patio was all wet. My thermometer was right. Though it wasn't raining at the moment, it had rained and the ground was still wet.

Murphyism of the Day

IBM Pollyanna Principle

Machines should work; people should think.