Vacuum

Winter, slumbering in the open air, wears on its smiling face a dream... of spring. Ciao.

Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today! 

TV Tropes has a great breakdown of the classic elements of the movie Groundhog Day.

art on a shovel, some sources: metalworking

Getting ready for a February art on a shovel project ("shovel ready!"). Here's some sources of inspiration.

Masks from recycled shovel blades, John T. Unger.

Plasma cut steel shovels, Cal Lane.

Shovel art, Texas Lone Star, Iron Signs and Designs.

Each of these involve some serious metalworking, generally with round point dirt shovel as the starting point.

art on a shovel: looking forward to February

February is thirteen months long in Michigan. - A Primer, Bob Hicok, The New Yorker

Looking forward to February, a civic project: a Marcel Duchamp readymade project, a retrospective civic installation of his work Prelude to a Broken Arm (1915). See Shearer, 1997 for more.

The installation would provide a convenient hook for each of these readymade pieces. Care must be taken to ensure that the works of art be completely decorative and not functional.

More: Tout-Fait, the first interactive, multi-media journal focusing on the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp.

More: Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity, an introduction by Jeffrey Schnapp, Michael Shanks, Matthew Tiews in Modernism/Modernity, v11n1, 2004.

More: in An apprehensive aesthetic: the legacy of modernist culture By Andrew McNamara, p. 118.

Global Warming and Groundhog Day

From Penn State's Michael Mann writing in Real Climate, on the widespread warm temperatures all throughout the country and the early appearance of spring:

The widespread pattern of this warmth is what was so unusual. Usually when one part of the U.S., say the east coast, is experiencing unusually warm weather, other regions, say the Rocky Mountain states, are experiencing unusually cold weather. This has to do with the natural wiggles of the jet stream from one month to the next. However, the pattern we're seeing so far this year, where essentially the entire U.S. is anomalously warm, only occurs when the jet stream has retreated far north from its usual position. As we have noted before (see here and here), there is no way to ascribe any single anomalous weather event, or even an anomalous season, to global warming and climate change. But what we can say is that the temperature pattern we've seen this January is similar to the kind of pattern that models predict as being normal in just a few decades time given some anthropogenic forcing scenarios. Global warming is likely to "load the dice", making the kind of January temperatures that might seem remarkable by past experience increasingly probable, and hence increasingly more frequent.

"Groundhog Day (Special Edition)" (Sony Pictures)

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