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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

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Accountability, motherfuckers.

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The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

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Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: Ch-ch-changes

Open Thread: Ch-ch-changes

by Anne Laurie|  February 9, 20159:46 pm| 78 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology

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76.5 inches of snow have fallen this season in Boston, including 71.8 inches in past 30 days http://t.co/8WgHh06I8m pic.twitter.com/ko8L4wrHmL

— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) February 10, 2015

Farkin’ global climate change. When we chose to move to New England (from Michigan), we knew there’d be snow, but we didn’t expect to get a season’s worth all at once.
***********
On a more pleasant topic, there’s a plan to put a statue of Sally Ride in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. That would be kewl, and it would be even cooler if her statue, as proposed, replaces that of Fr. Junipero Serra.

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Previous Post: « Long Read: “The Death of the Three-Time Candidate”
Next Post: Our “Friends” in the Saudi Monarchy »

Reader Interactions

78Comments

  1. 1.

    Pogonip

    February 9, 2015 at 9:47 pm

    What have you got against Junipero Serra?

  2. 2.

    srv

    February 9, 2015 at 9:49 pm

    Looks like Obama’s debt chart.

    Doesn’t matter if there is global warming, we could never afford to fix it with these debts.

  3. 3.

    Anne Laurie

    February 9, 2015 at 9:51 pm

    @Pogonip: Read the linked article.

  4. 4.

    srv

    February 9, 2015 at 9:52 pm

    @Pogonip: Imagine where all those drunk natives would be WITHOUT Christianity.

    Some people, always questioning God’s Will.

  5. 5.

    Pogonip

    February 9, 2015 at 9:53 pm

    @Anne Laurie: I couldn’t, I’m maxed out on NY Times articles until 1March, sorry. All I remember about him is he was a missionary in California.

  6. 6.

    Baud

    February 9, 2015 at 9:53 pm

    @Pogonip:

    No news for you!

  7. 7.

    JPL

    February 9, 2015 at 9:55 pm

    @Pogonip: He preached religion and the Europeans introduced measles.
    It’s definitely cool about Sally Ride though.

  8. 8.

    RobertDSC-iPad Mini

    February 9, 2015 at 9:57 pm

    Good on Dr. Ride, may she RIP.

  9. 9.

    dmsilev

    February 9, 2015 at 10:00 pm

    @efgoldman: Sadly, they closed that loophole a while back.

  10. 10.

    catclub

    February 9, 2015 at 10:03 pm

    @JPL: smallpox

  11. 11.

    catclub

    February 9, 2015 at 10:04 pm

    @dmsilev: How about going via a google search. That works for WSJ.

  12. 12.

    Violet

    February 9, 2015 at 10:04 pm

    @Pogonip: @efgoldman: Can’t you also use a different browser? Or a different device?

  13. 13.

    danielx

    February 9, 2015 at 10:05 pm

    As I recall, he had some role in the extermination (more or less) of the various California Indian tribes. Or California Native American tribes, take your pick.

    Sidebar – the two descendants of original native inhabitants I’ve known thought the whole debate over Indian vs Native American was hilarious at best and demeaning at worst, with a dollop of hypocrisy thrown in. (As in, more or less, “my people got treated like shit no matter what white men called us, what difference does it make?”)

  14. 14.

    Redshift

    February 9, 2015 at 10:05 pm

    @dmsilev: I’ve got an extra browser on my phone for when I run out of Krugman.

  15. 15.

    Amir Khalid

    February 9, 2015 at 10:07 pm

    The Big Thing happening in Malaysia right now is the judgement on opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s appeal against his conviction on sodomy — i.e. gay seks — charges. He was acquitted at the original trial. The prosecution won an appeal against the acquittal. This is Anwar’s appeal against the prosecution’s appeal. (He served time for a previous charge of sodomy, after going through the same rigmarole. As before, no one takes seriously the notion that he is gay; the charges against him are widely believed to be politically motivated.)

  16. 16.

    BruceFromOhio

    February 9, 2015 at 10:10 pm

    @Pogonip: @danielx:

    Born in 1713, Father Serra joined the Franciscan order in ’30. He became an eminent theological professor before [going to] evangelize in the Americas. From 1769 to 1835, 90,000 Indians were baptized along the West Coast, from San Diego to San Francisco. Once baptized, they were not allowed to leave the missions, and those who did escape were rounded up by soldiers and returned.

    The Indians were forced to shed their languages, dress, religion, food and marriage customs. Thousands died from exposure to European diseases to which they had no immunity. Of the approximately 310,000 Indians in 1769 in what is now California, only one-sixth remained a hundred years later, according to a University of California historian.

    I’m thinking that, at the time, he was doing Dog’s Werk. Through modern eyes, he may as well have been chopping off heads. Tricky work, this sainthood business.

  17. 17.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    February 9, 2015 at 10:16 pm

    @danielx:

    “Extermination” in the sense that the Europeans brought diseases that American Indians had no immunity to. As far as I know, Serra did not participate in or permit massacres like the US government’s massacres of American Indians in other parts of the country.

    It’s not saying much that Serra didn’t realize that it was horrible for him to force local Indians to fit Spanish standards of “civilization,” but he wasn’t actively trying to wipe them out, which is more than you can say for the US government.

  18. 18.

    Amir Khalid

    February 9, 2015 at 10:18 pm

    He‘s not serious, is he?

  19. 19.

    lamh36

    February 9, 2015 at 10:19 pm

    What are history lessons like in UK I wonder?

    @TheRoot

    Selma star David Oyelowo is petitioning to make Black History mandatory in British schools http://buff.ly/1zBW4YZ

  20. 20.

    Punchy

    February 9, 2015 at 10:20 pm

    What the hell are the (non-existent) units of the y-axis? Inches? Cms? Angstroms? Sloppy sloppy sloppy.

  21. 21.

    BruceFromOhio

    February 9, 2015 at 10:26 pm

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone): Does it matter which set of beliefs killed them? They were dead just the same. It’s just a variation on danielx comment – these people were fucked no matter what. Sure, government evil, religious man religious, and which should we induct into the Saints HOF? Hmm, tough choice.

    Better Sally Ride than all of the above.

  22. 22.

    catclub

    February 9, 2015 at 10:28 pm

    @Punchy: Inches. Note the box with a label. “41.20in”

  23. 23.

    SatanicPanic

    February 9, 2015 at 10:35 pm

    @Pogonip:

    What have you got against Junipero Serra?

    I for one was never pleased with his performance with the Padres

  24. 24.

    jl

    February 9, 2015 at 10:35 pm

    @BruceFromOhio: What I am about to say is politically loaded at the moment, and Fox News might accuse me of fear mongering for secret liberal population control reasons, but,… measles… killed a whole lot of the Californian Natives who were at the Spanish missions. Killed them real quick as soon as some infected Spaniards happened by.

    So, Father Serra didn’t intend to get them all killed. I don’t know enough about him to debate other things he may or may not have done.

    I wonder if enslavement is another issue. I’ve read that the Spanish were not very honest about the deal they offered. Sure, Californians were welcome to come on down to the mission, but maybe they were not so welcome to leave if it turned out it did not suit them. I am not sure about that, though.

  25. 25.

    Tree With Water

    February 9, 2015 at 10:39 pm

    @BruceFromOhio: A massive statue ridiculing Serra has stood on the San Francisco peninsula since circa 1970. Unintentionally ridiculous, to be sure, but ridiculous nonetheless. Everyone agreed as much at its unveiling, and the person is yet unborn who will ever claim otherwise.

    I can’t provide a link, but google: Junipero Serra, statue, 280 freeway, San Francisco peninsula, and check out the various angles on that monstrosity.

  26. 26.

    danielx

    February 9, 2015 at 10:39 pm

    @Amir Khalid:

    It’s Fox News. Any relationship between true, recorded, historic fact and what Fox actually reports as fact to its viewers/listeners is tenuous at best. Unless it concerns a natural disaster, in which case there will be someone to say it’s Obama’s fault and said disaster has nothing to do with climate change because climate change doesn’t exist .Also too, or alternatively, it’s god’s will because he’s all mad about those godless people who have the audacity to enjoy life, or the victims of the disaster are brown people and godless heathens who deserve whatever happens to them, and…

    Y’ know, I could have just stopped after “It’s Fox News”.

  27. 27.

    Southern Beale

    February 9, 2015 at 10:42 pm

    Wonder how pro-lifers would respond to this:

    Baby girl born ‘pregnant’ with twins

    HONG KONG — A phenomenon that caused a developing fetus to absorb two other fertilized eggs made it appear the baby girl was born pregnant with twins.

    But what appeared to be two fetuses were actually tumors that developed from the absorbed eggs.

    Both of the absorbed eggs had started growing limbs, ribs, intestines and skin, as well as an umbilical cord and placenta, after 8 to 10 weeks of gestation.

    Would pro-lifers be OK with her having an “abortion” of her tumor-fetuses?

  28. 28.

    dr. luba

    February 9, 2015 at 10:42 pm

    @Violet: You get 10 articles per browser, per device. So with Safari, Chrome and Firefox, that’s 30 each on laptop and desktop.

    I rarely read anywhere near that much of the NYT, but I sometimes need to use a second browser towards the end of the month.

  29. 29.

    elis

    February 9, 2015 at 10:42 pm

    @Pogonip: Delete the nytimes.com cookies from your cache.

  30. 30.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    February 9, 2015 at 10:45 pm

    @BruceFromOhio:

    To me, there’s a big moral difference between people in the 18th century who don’t know germ theory spreading diseases through ignorance and people who round up women and children and shoot them in the head. YMMV, of course, but intent matters to me.

    @jl:

    There was a really interesting Serra exhibit at the Huntington a couple if years ago and the slavery question is … complicated. On the one hand, it was very difficult for Mission Indians to come and go as they pleased — once you decided to live at the mission, you couldn’t change your mind. On the other hand, when the local Spanish soldiers wanted to use the Mission Indians for labor and not pay them, Serra refused and forced them to pay. So, complicated.

  31. 31.

    muddy

    February 9, 2015 at 10:48 pm

    @Pogonip: Google “nytimes” and include a couple of keywords from the headline after it. It works on all their stuff, columnists and all.

  32. 32.

    jl

    February 9, 2015 at 10:52 pm

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone): It is complicated. I remember reading that the Catholic Church had a debate on whether the native peoples of America had souls or not, most of the Catholic missionaries took the ‘yes they are humans and have souls’, versus the money suits of the day who were… well, open to scientific doubt about that, and thought probably ‘no, use them and lose them’ was the safest bet.

    I read that the Catholic Church decided that yes they did have souls and should be treated as humans with some rights. I don’t even want to think about how worse it could have been if the Catholic Church had decided the other way.

    I don’t know if Serra was involved in that debate, which may have occurred before his time. Faint praise from our viewpoint, but they were not complete monsters (though some of the Conquistadors were monsters, or at least apeshit deranged maniacs).

  33. 33.

    Violet

    February 9, 2015 at 10:58 pm

    @dr. luba: I have pretty much the same experience. Sometimes I click on something and don’t realize it’s NYT before I do so that uses up one view. Annoying.

    @elis: I wondered about that but wasn’t sure if it worked. Have you had success with it?

    @muddy: That used to work but I’ve had it not work recently. Don’t know if they’ve taken away the bonus views if you come from Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

  34. 34.

    Comrade Luke

    February 9, 2015 at 10:59 pm

    Well, the Pacific Northwest is having the opposite problem:

    It’s a bad snow year in the NW; possibly record-setting bad

  35. 35.

    FlyingToaster

    February 9, 2015 at 11:05 pm

    Egads, that graph is horrifying.

    I just identified the date when I got a ticket for “not clearing off my car”; it snowed more-or-less continuously from January 3rd to January 10th of ’96. They failed to ticket my sister’s car because they plowed her whole block under, and it took two days before we could even find the damn windshield.

    My big problem now (I finished shoveling out the driveway, the plow cap on the uphill end was 4 feet high) is that WarriorGirl and I are supposed to fly down to my mom’s on Sunday. I’m looking at the long range forecast and thinking, “Well, I’m glad I bought travel insurance, because I think we’ll be going down in April instead.”

    It would be really nice to dodge even one bullet, here.

  36. 36.

    Tommy

    February 9, 2015 at 11:09 pm

    Just to the point of your post. That is a lot of snow.

  37. 37.

    jl

    February 9, 2015 at 11:10 pm

    @FlyingToaster:

    ‘ a ticket for “not clearing off my car” ‘

    What does that mean? I’ve never lived in an urban snow area.

  38. 38.

    danielx

    February 9, 2015 at 11:21 pm

    @jl:

    Off the top of my head, I’d say it means a pissed off cop who needed to meet a quota.

  39. 39.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    February 9, 2015 at 11:29 pm

    @jl: the snow from your hood can blow into your windshield and block your vision, or the stuff on your roof and slide down and really fuck it up

  40. 40.

    trollhattan

    February 9, 2015 at 11:32 pm

    Took the kid to the Carmel Mission before she hit 4th grade and the mission model project most vaccinated California kids have to do that year. Pretty sure JooNiPerraSerra is interred there.

    Nice digs. Clint probably wanted to turn it into a bar at some point.

  41. 41.

    opiejeanne

    February 9, 2015 at 11:33 pm

    @Comrade Luke: yes. We have had a few days of temps in the 20s where I live but my garden is beginning to think it’s spring because it has been relatively warm since December. We have gotten rain, but it has been like a giant bucket dump most of the time. I don’t know if we are wetter than usual but we are certainly getting a lot of flood warnings this year. We are on a hill so our potential problem would be if the Sammamish jumped its banks and flooded the valley, and that would take an incredible amount of rain.

  42. 42.

    jl

    February 9, 2015 at 11:33 pm

    @danielx: @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    If FlyingToaster drove the car without clearing off the snow, I can see it. But seems like the car was parked when it got the ticket.
    Or FlyingToaster was so drunk s/he did not remember driving it when s/he got the ticket.

    I’m going with ‘pissed off cop with quota’ for now.

  43. 43.

    jl

    February 9, 2015 at 11:37 pm

    @trollhattan: I think it is still an active parish. But, if not, what the heck. If Carmel is going to be a high toned tourist trap, why not go all the way?

    Edit: Oldsters in my family tell me it was once an actual town with some normal town stuff.

  44. 44.

    Mnemosyne

    February 9, 2015 at 11:39 pm

    @jl:

    I’m mostly going by what I read at the museum exhibit, but the short version is that in 1730s California when Serra was here, the missionaries and the Spanish soldiers were often at odds over how to treat the local population. In some ways, choosing to live at the mission was a completely rational decision for the Indians, because they were granted protection from the soldiers, who basically wanted to straight-up enslave them. In retrospect, it was a terrible decision because it exposed the Indians to diseases they didn’t have any immunity to and they ended up dying in large numbers, but it was the best decision they could make based on everyone’s knowledge base at the time.

  45. 45.

    Mary G

    February 9, 2015 at 11:40 pm

    I was checking on going to pick up Ginger from Cole until I read the weather forecast of high 16, low 9. Not happening. I don’t even own a coat. You all have my deepest sympathy.

  46. 46.

    opiejeanne

    February 9, 2015 at 11:40 pm

    @trollhattan: we took middle child to visit San Miguel Arcangel near Camp Roberts, on 101. A Brother was quite taken with my husband and gave him a personal tour, and we females were allowed to tag along. The Brother sounded very much like Elmer Fudd. The original decorations by the local Native Americans were still visible; a lot of the missions lost them to Victorian modernization.

  47. 47.

    Mnemosyne

    February 9, 2015 at 11:41 pm

    @jl:

    My cousin had her wedding at the Carmel mission — you can do that if you’re a local resident. Like all of the surviving missions, it is still an operating Roman Catholic church.

  48. 48.

    Tree With Water

    February 9, 2015 at 11:42 pm

    @trollhattan: If you get a chance to peruse General Sherman’s autobiography, check out his descriptions of California as he moved inland from Monterey towards his new post at Yerba Buena. It is as close a description of a paradise on earth as you’re ever apt to read.

  49. 49.

    FlyingToaster

    February 9, 2015 at 11:44 pm

    @jl: Somerville wants your car shoveled out and cleared off 48 hours after the storm ends. Ditto with your sidewalk.

    I’d driven the Bus on the 5th, and then parked it two doors down the street. I helped my landlord shovel the sidewalk each day after, and used the T to get into town; I cleared off my windows but due to the plowing didn’t try to shovel out or clear off my roof until the snow stopped.

    A cop needing a quota decided to ticket me on the 9th (and it had been snowing with short breaks since the 6th), despite the fact that I was not parked on the street he said I was and it was still snowing. I took a polaroid of the car with ticket showing the house number behind (11 ≠ 57), then took one from the corner behind with the street name showing. Won the appeal.

  50. 50.

    opiejeanne

    February 9, 2015 at 11:44 pm

    @Mnemosyne: yeah, well, the Native Americans at Acoma tell a story that the priests sold a bunch of the children to a place in Mexico, in order to raise the money for a bell for the church nearby.

  51. 51.

    FlyingToaster

    February 9, 2015 at 11:48 pm

    @danielx: And/or lost. The neighborhood was a bunch of one-way streets with a two-way street linking them at the other end. A cop with a quota and no clue which street he was on pretty much fits the scenario.

    They ended up dismissing all of the tickets for those days, because it didn’t stop snowing. And they failed to ticket the cars on my sister’s block at the top of the hill, because the plow covered them. Couldn’t find the windshields, let alone the plates.

  52. 52.

    opiejeanne

    February 9, 2015 at 11:49 pm

    @Mnemosyne: I think the mission at Soledad was abandoned pretty early. Disease wiped out everyone more than once, IIRC. From the website it looks like it’s open again. I think that’s the one that was abandoned.

  53. 53.

    trollhattan

    February 9, 2015 at 11:52 pm

    @Tree With Water:
    Funny you bring that up–I’ve been reading it in little chunks and he’s presently puttering around Mexico and Texas, so I’ll look forward to his California adventures. Interesting fellow, this Grant, and very readable compared to the era’s typical florid prose.

    ETA, you wrote Sherman and I read Grant. I’ll queue up Sherman next.

  54. 54.

    FlyingToaster

    February 9, 2015 at 11:53 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Or compacted snow will slide off onto the cars behind you in traffic and cause a wreck.

    I spent a significant amount of time today shoving a foot of snow off of my minivan and HerrDoktor’s sedan (and then shoveling it onto one of our snowmountains). There’s probably going to be an inch or so on top from tonight that blows off, but that won’t cause a wreck.

    The other reason Somerville wants things cleared is so their snow removal crews can push the shoveled stuff down to the corner and load it into dump trucks.

    I miss Somerville. They have a snow farm. All Watertown has is “Watertown Strong”. And a 7 foot high plow mountain on my corner.

  55. 55.

    eric nny

    February 9, 2015 at 11:57 pm

    @jl: The original Hotel California? Such a lovely place…

  56. 56.

    Anne Laurie

    February 9, 2015 at 11:59 pm

    @Amir Khalid: Serious as the smallpox, I’m afraid. It’s the No True Christian dodge — all those American terrorists, doctor-murderers, random mosque & temple killers, they weren’t real Christians, just lone wolves suffering under a misapprehension.

    Incidentally, Erik Erickson also went on the record as saying that President Obama isn’t a real Christian, because real Christians know that Christianity is the Only True Religion(tm), so all that “different faiths, same belief” stuff is no better than heresy. Only difference between Erickson and the ISIL thugs is that Erickson has a nice soft life he can’t be bothered giving up to defend his Only True Religion. (And the Jesus-with-a-sword that these True Christians claim to be upholding didn’t have much use for those who wanted to be disciples but didn’t want to give up their soft, prosperous lives, EE!)

  57. 57.

    FlyingToaster

    February 10, 2015 at 12:00 am

    @jl: No, I cleared it off and drove it on the 5th. If it had snowed the 6th and 7th and stopped, I’d have cleared it off but probably not driven it, because I was commuting via Ⓣ into town and there was nowhere to park anyway. I was much poorer in those days, so alcohol was a luxury I couldn’t often justify. Driving drunk is an experience I can forgo, thanks.

  58. 58.

    BruceFromOhio

    February 10, 2015 at 12:00 am

    midnight
    pick me up
    no headlights

  59. 59.

    jl

    February 10, 2015 at 12:01 am

    @Mnemosyne:

    Are you sure all of them are still active parishes? I think Sonoma’s mission church is a state park now

    Mission San Francisco Solano (California)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_San_Francisco_Solano_(California)

    San Francisco Solano is a mouthful. I always thought it was called Sonoma Mission.
    Anyone in the area might be interested in visiting. They have interesting historical activities there. Run the old mission stoves and try to cook food in them, I would not call it gourmet.

    Sonoma State Historic Park
    http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=479

  60. 60.

    jl

    February 10, 2015 at 12:04 am

    @FlyingToaster:

    ” Somerville wants your car shoveled out and cleared off 48 hours after the storm ends.”

    thanks for info about they joys urban snow life. I will remember that.

  61. 61.

    Tree With Water

    February 10, 2015 at 12:04 am

    @trollhattan: You will not be disappointed. He was an excellent writer.

  62. 62.

    jl

    February 10, 2015 at 12:06 am

    76 inches of snow on the ground
    76 inches of snow!

    Shovel it ’round and pack it down,
    84 inches of snow on the ground!

    I suppose that song could get finished by end of March?

  63. 63.

    Anne Laurie

    February 10, 2015 at 12:12 am

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone):

    On the other hand, when the local Spanish soldiers wanted to use the Mission Indians for labor and not pay them, Serra refused and forced them to pay.

    Way I heard it — in parochial school, so, forty years ago — was that Fr. Serra ‘forced’ the soldiers to pay the mission for the Indians’ labor. Of course, the mission was generously housing and feeding those Indians, but even in the 1960s, there was this impression that his missionary efforts were influenced by his desire to bring “profit”, both in spiritual headcount and in negotiable funds, to Mother Church. His brothers needed to keep “saving” more & more far-flung tribes, in order to keep the profit curve on the Christian Souls board bending in the right direction, and every new band of ragged pagans forced into the mission network meant new headcount to be monetized. The new ‘converts’ couldn’t leave the mission buildings until they’d paid back the cost of their conversion & keep… and, of course, since the fathers were keeping the books, somehow the Indians could never quite work hard enough to pay back those debts.

    An early, unheralded pioneer of today’s prison-industrial complex, in other words. Or, to use a metaphor you might prefer, the first known example of Hollywood studio accounting…

  64. 64.

    BruceFromOhio

    February 10, 2015 at 12:14 am

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone): I know, I get it. Both of these powers were dissatisfied with the status quo and just leaving the hell alone. Both of these powers had (and still have) a track record of irrevocably fucking people over in the pursuit of “better.” My point is, intent is irrelevant to the dead, whether by bullets, disease, or simply the power of belief in what was “right.” At the risk of channeling the mclarens, bip’s and socrates of the blog, we’re still fucking people over with the very same Gaia-damned intentions centuries later. Less overt perhaps, in the intentions of the good Friar, perhaps more so in the intentions of the government.

    Still, Sally Ride over all of the above.

  65. 65.

    Amir Khalid

    February 10, 2015 at 12:14 am

    Anwar Ibrahim’s second (trumped-up, many believe) sodomy conviction has been upheld. He has no further appeals left, and now awaits sentencing. He served five years last time. Then he came back to form the Keadilan party and Pakatan Rakyat coalition — the first opposition group with enough support to challenge the Barisan Nasional coalition which has ruled Malaya and then Malaysia since independence. If I were Barisan, I would not assume I had won this time.

  66. 66.

    BruceFromOhio

    February 10, 2015 at 12:20 am

    @trollhattan: LOL, setting standards here, man. Could get ugly.

  67. 67.

    RSR

    February 10, 2015 at 12:22 am

    Been there a couple times when the snow found me (be happy–ice is so much worse, and I’m lucky to have missed it) at ~30″ in WNY then a couple years later for all time 30″ in Philly in ’96. Just five years ago we had 2 major events (~20″? at least one was) in just a couple days.

    The ice storms are what really crush power and access. OTOH, we’re lucky to have had everything we needed during these storms.

  68. 68.

    BruceFromOhio

    February 10, 2015 at 12:27 am

    @Anne Laurie:

    Only difference between Erickson and the ISIL thugs is that Erickson has a nice soft life he can’t be bothered giving up to defend his Only True Religion.

    On the day that changes, this all ends. Swap The Faithful for The Infected in the zombie scenario of your choice, and it’s roll credits. Even my stupid dog-bothering in-laws are packing heat these days, ready to rumble when The Word Is Given.

  69. 69.

    FlyingToaster

    February 10, 2015 at 12:33 am

    @jl: Each town will vary slightly, especially on timeframes. Towns that require off-street parking won’t have a timeframe for clearing your car, just “before it leaves your driveway”. Towns with on-street parking will be stricter, if only for safety’s sake.

  70. 70.

    mainmati

    February 10, 2015 at 12:38 am

    I have a lot of relatives in the Commonwealth. Not to mention having lived in the Worcester-Springfield snow belt as a young child. I love snow. Most of my upbringing was in Pittsburgh where there was lots more snow. Endless trukking over snow-ice landscapes to school where sidewalks and even small streets were impassible for a long time.

  71. 71.

    Anne Laurie

    February 10, 2015 at 12:46 am

    @Pogonip: I thought you could still get to the articles if they were linked from another site, like Balloon Juice?

    Also, they don’t seem to monitor articles from the NYTimes tweet stream, and you don’t have to join Twitter to read it…

  72. 72.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    February 10, 2015 at 12:50 am

    @Anne Laurie:

    So be fed and clothed by the mission, incurring a debt that always hovers out of reach, or be worked and starved to death by the soldiers — which do you choose? Once the Spanish show up nearby, your only other choice is to flee and hope they don’t get any closer.

    It’s not “mission life was awesome!” It’s that mission life was usually preferable to the other available option. Having the Spanish go away and not bother anyone was not an actual option.

  73. 73.

    Anne Laurie

    February 10, 2015 at 1:07 am

    @Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):

    Having the Spanish go away and not bother anyone was not an actual option.

    Nope. But that doesn’t mean we need to pretend Fr. Serra was a modern role model, either. His Church will canonize him, he wouldn’t (shouldn’t) care about secular plaudits.

  74. 74.

    Cervantes

    February 10, 2015 at 2:25 am

    @Amir Khalid:

    A disgrace.

  75. 75.

    opiejeanne

    February 10, 2015 at 2:43 am

    @jl: I did not know that Solano Mission was in Sonoma. I figured it would be near the town of Solano; they’re about 40 miles apart.

  76. 76.

    opiejeanne

    February 10, 2015 at 2:47 am

    @BruceFromOhio: Sally Ride. Amen.

    I got to meet her just before her first mission; she gave a speech to a relatively small group of people, about 400 of us. My husband got tickets, somehow, and afterwards she came into the crowd and talked to people. She was wonderful.

  77. 77.

    Debbie(aussie)

    February 10, 2015 at 6:23 am

    @srv: That’s what Tony rAbbot and his cadre keep telling us here in Aus. No body who’s talking it’s still BS.

  78. 78.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    February 10, 2015 at 11:20 am

    @Anne Laurie:

    One of the most interesting parts of that museum exhibition also comes up in the NY Times article — what drives California tribes up the wall is that the way the history of the missions is presented often seems to imply that the native population was wiped out by disease and that they don’t exist anymore, which is absolutely not true. They were decimated, but they outlasted the Spanish, and the Mexicans, and some truly awful American policies, and they’re still around. So I guess I’m in the group that says there should be a balanced view of the missions, not the “missions were awesome!” lessons that most of the kids get.

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