The Weather Man

And just like that, another busy, busy week goes in the books. Large chunks of Wednesday and Thursday were spent working on the Rad Tran assignment. Who knew solid angles could be so aggravating and tedious? But we were all helping each other out so that we wouldn’t have to be in Walker working on it all night, because we all know that wouldn’t be any fun. Complicating matters, we also had class Thursday night for GFD, which will hopefully be the last of the extra sessions we need to make up for Dr Evans being gone all of December. Flow structures. Eww.
A couple hours after GFD finished up, a few of us (Daniel, Amber, Caren, Walter & I) went up to the theater to go see “The Weather Man,” as a nice break for our minds, which have been getting overworked here in weather school lately. I’d read a lot of reviews of the film, and they’d been mixed — people either liked it quite a bit or not at all. “The Weather Man” certainly isn’t a feel-good comedy, nothing of the sort. There are some funny parts (like when Nicholas Cage’s character recounts all the different food items that have been thrown at him by angry viewers in Chicago), but all in all it’s rather serious and depressing actually. That doesn’t prevent it from being a good film though, which I thought it was. I wouldn’t say it’s one of the top 5 films of the year or anything (although there haven’t really been many good films this year, so you never know…), but I’d still give it somewhere between two and a half to three stars out of four. The only meteorological blunder in the film was a reference to the “Canadian trade winds,” which gave us all a good laugh at a part that wasn’t intended to be that funny. 🙂 One caveat is that the film had quite a bit of profanity (I thought it was a bit excessive). I just hope that if I ever become a TV weather man that I don’t get Frosties, soft tacos, falafel or other food/drink items thrown at me. Although maybe that’d be a sign that I was well-known, which could be good. 🙂 Interestingly enough, I think this was the first film (cinema, DVD, video, TV, anything) I’d seen since I saw “War of the Worlds” in the theater in the Mall of America back in August. Busy schedules kinda suck.
Yesterday was good, being a Friday and all. And since it was Friday evening, that meant another session of team trivia, with our team name this time being “Third Place Every Week.” Oddly enough, we didn’t continue our multi-week trend of finishing in 3rd, as we pulled into 2nd this time around. We’re movin’ up in the world! But I couldn’t just take the rest of the evening off unfortunately, I have too much that I need to accomplish by Tuesday morning, so I did a bit of grading for Rad Tran, correcting people’s corrections from the assignment I’d originally graded back over a month ago. I think there’s probably been only one Friday night in the last six or seven weeks at least that I haven’t been sitting in my apartment doing grading or homework. Sigh. Only another month left of that this semester (!), maybe next semester will be slightly more humane.
This morning I woke up reasonably early and polished off the rest of the Rad Tran grading over in Walker, so that I wouldn’t be distracted by the usual Saturday morning stuff (ESPN College GameDay), and then this afternoon I’ve been grading some Meteo 3 labs while watching some football. A relaxing day overall. Tonight I went over to Rob & Vic’s place in Houserville along with Daniel to watch the Auburn-Georgia game. It was a very entertaining game, with Auburn getting the game-winning field goal with 6 seconds left, stunning the Bulldogs 31-30 in Athens. I was starting to get worried I was a bad-luck charm when I watched Auburn games with Daniel, since the last one I watched with him, Auburn lost to LSU in OT 20-17 on a botched field goal. Before Auburn got the winning field goal tonight Daniel said that he probably shouldn’t watch any more games with me, as those games were bad for his heart, hehe. War eagle!
Oh oh oh, and then tomorrow night a bunch of us are going over to Kerrie’s place to catch the second half of “Category 7” on CBS. It’ll be so bad you won’t wanna miss it! Seriously, I doubt that you need any meteorological training to spot the glaring and ridiculous scientific errors that will certainly be present, hehe.
I should probably get to bed, I’m going to the 9am church service tomorrow with Daniel, and then I can look forward to a full day of work on 501 ahead of me before taking a break for “Category 7.” Somehow I think I’ll pass on watching the Vikings-Giants game tomorrow, even though it’ll be the first Vikings game on TV here in Pennsylvania this season. I fear another game similar to the 41-0 blowout in the 2000 NFC Championship Game.
I’ll leave you all with a rather humorous (to start out with) and insightful article by Jonah Goldberg about the recent and ongoing riots in France entitled “Trouble in Gaulistan.” Jonah Goldberg rocks.