Cursed Tongue: Cloudy, with a Chance of Apocalypse

Posted by CursedTongue on January 6, 2007

I demand an apology from Al Gore for wearing a sandwich board that says, “The End is Near,” and mumbling incoherently in front of a PowerPoint presentation. After the record high summer, I was honestly worried about my relatives on the coasts. But now the gates of Hell have slammed shut and frozen over.

Arizona is bitter cold and people are more freaked out about frozen pipes than the threat of doom by tropical temperatures.

When the five-day forecast is foggier than the logic of the Bush administration, I have a hard time believing that a climatologist can be any more accurate than a Psychic Friend. And until the record low temperatures deflated my rampant agave, I was buying the Armageddon spiel.

I’m not suggesting that we all barbeque with lighter fluid, stop buying recycled greeting cards and run our cars in the driveway until pigeons start dropping from the sky. But only saying that we are at the mercy of inscrutable Mother Nature more than anyone would like to admit.

On Monday, I woke up to a lawn of grasscicles, because I stopped watching the local news since we got TIVO, and didn’t turn off the sprinklers. Some people move to Arizona to get away from bad weather and frosty vegetation.

During the odd rain that drizzles in the Phoenix Valley for the entire day, I’m likely to hear at least two people whining about it. Vitamin D withdrawal is no laughing matter. I once lived in Germany, where we didn’t see the sun for such lengthy periods of time that people needed either antidepressants, or huge projects, like invading France. So as the weather in Arizona degenerates, so do the minds of an already marginally sane populace.

Arizonians can barely handle driving safely with our notoriously dry and sunny weather. I’m afraid for my life on the roads now that ice is part of the equation. On Monday, the city of Scottsdale actually shut down Scottsdale Road because sprinklers had gone on overnight and water had drifted onto the street and frozen. As the name might suggest, Scottsdale Road is a major thoroughfare in Scottsdale. Morning commuters were forced on detours until the street thawed. Where are the salt trucks? In Wisconsin, where they belong!

Walk down the residential Arizona streets this week and visitors would be surprised to see that trees, bushes and other flora are covered with everything from tea towels to Spongebob bed sheets. But it’s been so cold that even old linens haven’t been able to keep the frost off the pumpkin.

Plumbers have more calls than they can handle with pipes bursting all over the Valley of the Sun. Hardware stores are going through pipe insulation like Martha Stewart through craft glue. The phenomena is so unusual that burst pipes have supplanted the usual fires on the local news. (Which I decided to TIVO, after I realized I could make frozen Grassgaritas.)

In the meantime, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock to five minutes before Nuclear Midnight. The Atomic Scientists maintain the clock in hopes of creating awareness about the possibility of nuclear war.

At the moment Iran and North Korea are the frontrunners for potential use of Weapons of Mass Destruction. (Sorry, President Bush, you lose this round of “Know Your Demented Dictator.”) The irradiated lining on that mushroom cloud is that Global Warming would be a moot point. I’m betting that Kim Jong-il will snap first, which would prove my theory that professionals should medicate all world leaders. But nuclear winter would be very bad for my Rhododendrons.

The tragic thing about the cold snap in the Southwest is not the horrific car wrecks, burst pipes or the space heater fires. It’s the ruination of entire crops of avocados, citrus fruit and my all-time favorite: strawberries. Of course, it’s California strawberries that were affected, which don’t tend to be as good as Michigan strawberries, but still, I’m devastated – and freezing.

- Sarah Letnes

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Tags: humor, politics, weather

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