Vic Socotra

July 2009

Poolside

God, I love the summer. I wish I was spending more time in it and less writing cheery business fantasy. There are several mysteries in progress, and they need examination. Inquiring minds want to know.

I’ll get off the whole weather thing presently, but you have to admit, with el Nino happening again and so much strangeness, it is worth some time.

There is a distinct and measurable change in the pool environment, though I confess it is anecdotal in nature. Montana has drifted south, and reliable reporting indicates she had moved her portable mattress, supply cart and personal music equipment from the shaded area to the north to the equatorial area of he pool, all he way to the black tile band that marks the dramatic difference between the “shallow” and “deep” ends of the pool.

The band, like the new child-resistant covers on the drains, was mandated by the County, and ruthlessly enforced by the pert Pool Control Officer, though Big Pink is a private concern, and should be “grandfathered” out of changing regulations to meet emerging social needs due to our advancing age. The expense required to bring our facilities up to code was really only intended for public accommodation facilities, which we are militantly not.

I have done my research. Satellite imagery of 2007, the latest available, shows the diving board is sill in place at the pool, though evidence of the human eye reveals that it was removed due to the outrageous demands of the insurance firm that provides the basic policy on the building.

They are committed to reducing their risk, or at least making us pay for it. The newer residents, the ones whose influx has caused a change in the nesting and migration patterns of the poolside residents are quite amazed that we had a cool capability and then meekly gave it away.

Chad is committed to the full exercise of the capabilities we have left, which includes the propane grill outside the pool fence. I support the propane grill as part of the comprehensive Pickens Plan to end dependency on foreign oil.

General T. Boone Pickens is quite clever about his plan. You would think that any comprehensive plan to clean up emissions and end dependency on the oil Mullahs would include the new nuclear technology that could take on a significant role in eliminating the need for “clean” coal and some of the other hair-brained schemes like growing corn to turn into gasohol and starving the world in the process.

General Pickens is too smart to take on the no-nukes crowd. His plan is a compromise, and an exercise in realpolitik. He adds the fight against global warming into the agenda, which was a consensus world scientists reached back in 2007, ending the great controversy about whether human beings have caused an increase in the global temperature.

As a collective, we have decided to end the debate, and adopt the position that we have.

I am in inquisitive being though, and wonder about things. There is a curious cooling trend that has emerged over the last decade. Even the sea-ice coverage in the arctic is back, though scientists hasten to point out that it is not as thick as it once was, and the spread could be a temporary phenomenon, like human life.

The sun has been quiet of late, and there appears- not that I am a scientist- and some say that it is only now starting a late cycle of activity. Maybe that is something to take into account, like the correlation between feeding programs and increased foot traffic in the parking lot.

It gets stranger, too, and the best of us cannot make a solid prediction about what it truly mean. A quiet solar cycle in 1859 produced a monstrous eruption that bathed mother earth in energy so profound that it was possible to read a newspaper at midnight in Boston under the aurora borealis, and two telegraphers were able to tap-tap each other for hours with the batteries disconnected from their keys.

Imagine what that would do to Montana’s iPod or the ubiquitous poolside Blackberries. They say that something like the Carrington Super Flare only happens, on average, every five hundred years. That is still getting awfully close to personal, rather geologic time.

If it stays cool, of course, it will get thick. And it is curious that no one is talking about it because it is an inconvenient inconsistency with a new belief system that took so much effort to create.

I will stipulate, for the record, that it is entirely possible that both the Warmers and Coolers could be right simultaneously. They also could be equally wrong, or right in an asymmetric manner that could produce either equanimity or disaster.

In any event, that is why I am supporting General Pickens, though I wish there was more support for new technology pebble reactors. I am happy to go along with the carbon cap-and-trade until we see how the thickness of the polar ice may get over the next few years, and for goodness sakes, let’s seriously begin to wean ourselves off the cheap oil.

The propane grill is a start, and it comes with a moveable feast. Cha and Jeremy have brought an entirely new social style to the pool, and like the Pickens Plan, it comes with a side benefit. The parties are fantastic. Charlie’s Angel was there last night, and Sister B, and Diana Ross and her daughter, The Banana. Not to mention Death Junior.

The big news is that Chad had an interview with the owner of the House of D, and is going to investigate a career in the business of death, which is a growth industry and quite independent of personal choice.

Great times in the summer, and a rising tide of mirth and laughter that appears to be irritating some of the residents of the sixth floor, who shouted down to “Close the pool!” when the gate stayed open after nine the other night.

Imagine. They must go to bed early, or are unused to being able to have the windows open this deep into the usually sweltering summer.

Normally we would be sealed in the air-conditioned isolation of our units. But even if this summer is unseasonably cool, the grill was hot.

There is widespread support for use of the grill, since if the residents don’t use it, the people trooping across the property to the feeding program will continue to occupy out benches and picnic tables as public accommodations while they wait for their free meals.

Of course this is not a problem in the winter. No one wants to hang around outside, and no one, to my knowledge, lives in the bushes next to Rt 50 after October or so.

At least a review of the satellite imagery as of 2007 suggests it. Maybe something has changed since they last updated the picture.

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