On a Hot Day
Clare Briggs
Clare Briggs is a famous cartoonist who lived from 1875 to 1930. Poems by Wilbur Nesbitt.
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on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Yet another review on Snow White. She has serious spoilers for the plot. Probably the biggest tell w…
on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Above, you give a fairly insightful statement: " All he needed to do was to do nothing substantively…
on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25It's just... he just... like... it's such a blizzard of bull that I'm hesitating on where to even st…
on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25Ok, so I am not an administration apologist... Narrator: He is an administration apologist
on About Last Night: Voting Fun in Wisconsin and FloridaThe Dems ran a gun control activist for the House in Florida? They probably weren’t going to win any…
Comics
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April 3, 2025
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A Would-Be Buyer at an Automobile Show
April 2, 2025
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April 1, 2025
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The Greatest Strike in History
March 30, 2025
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on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25
on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25
on When a Maiden Needs a Friend
on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25
I’ve forgotten the rules. Are the Briggs posts no-politics?Report
I think post-bowdlerization, we’re okay so long as we’re not trying to say stuff like “I can’t believe that people from different cultures had different moral intuitions than I have!”Report
Don’t know if this falls in that category or not…
Texas is having an early season heat wave. My friend who lives outside Austin sent me a copy of the local forecast: 100 °F or higher for the next ten days. CNN reports that wind and solar are keeping the grid up. The ERCOT area set an all-time record for instantaneous demand at 74.8 GW earlier this week. At that point in time, 37% of total demand was being met by wind and commercial solar. It would have been a couple of percentage points higher except lack of transmission capacity meant about half of the solar output couldn’t reach consumers.
So far as I can tell, the official talking point of Texas Republicans is that wind and solar are too inconsistent to depend on. Despite the state already depending on them. July and August, when the big high-pressure system usually sets up over the southern Great Plains, typically see reduced output from the Texas wind farms. Could be interesting.Report
That is really going to suck.
The technical debt is coming due. You can only refinance so many times.Report
Why would you build a solar farm without an outlet for the power?Report
I don’t know what the current law is in Texas. At one point, at least for the wind farms, under some circumstances the operators got paid for the power they could have sold and delivered if sufficient transmission capacity were available.Report
Fascinating. They’re forecasting a 100 degree day here in Minnesota next week which strikes me as bananas for mid June. I’m going to go outside and kiss my central air compressor now.Report
100 at Midway here in Chicago yesterday. Pretty freaky for mid-June for sure!Report
Fort Collins hit 100 last Saturday, the earliest day for triple digits ever (records go back to 1893). Of course, we’re at 5,000 feet and the humidity was 6%, so it was unpleasant but not like 100 degrees in the Midwest where there’s air and humidity.
(As I always do, I point out that the US record for wet-bulb temperature — the one that kills you — occurred in Wisconsin during the Chicago heat wave in 1995.)Report
Yeah it’s been wild humid. *shudders*Report
Central Ohio is reaching high 90s with the power intentionally shut off yesterday around noon, expected not to return until Friday or Saturday. In the MISO power grid, running from Lafeyette Louisiana to Manitoba Canada, rolling blackouts have been announced for the Summer. Seems like everyone is going to need a backup generator if they can afford it.Report
As someone who lives in Austin, yup. Yup.
We’ve been planning as though the grid could go at any moment. We were 3 days without power in February ’21.Report
My friend recently moved into an apartment complex for those aged 55+. She says that under some odd set of laws/regulations, they fall into the same priority for service continuity as hospitals.Report