Where's you Kwanzaa spirit?

You say you've had enough Solstice Blessings, Yule Tidings, and Feliz Navidads? Happy New Year still ringing in your ears? Well hike up your suspenders, Bunkie, it's not over yet. We've been away for the holidays, trying to keep our grumpy mothers happy, well fed, and generously gifted. ((My intimate web correspondents call this type of disappearance, "pulling a Helen.")) So I've got a lot of griping to catch up on, and these freaking Moonbats won't let up for a minute.



Merry Perihelion

Now pay attention because a lot of this is going to come up again when we get into the deep eco-fraudulence of Global Warming.

Tomorrow morning, we are all going to be moving as quickly ever--Earth is at perihelion, which is the fastest part of its orbit. Of course you recall that Kepler first described our planetary motion as an ellipse. That means we have a near point to the Sun and a far point every year. Oddly enough for those of us up to our butts in slush and freezing our bits off, we are now 3 million miles closer to the Sun than in July. Just to make it crazy, sunlight falling on Earth is 7% more intense now than in Summer. The Sun even looks noticeably bigger, but just trust me on that.

Why doesn't this matter? Proximity is nothing, tilt is everything. Up here at the 45^th parallel, the Sun is about as warm now as a compact fluorescent light bulb. To matters worse, land masses heat and cool much quicker than the oceans. Guess where most of the land is. When the Sun is pointed toward the southern hemisphere, it doesn't heat much land. So we get to scrape methane frost off our windshields, and my prayers for Global Warming go unanswered.