The big story today: it’s *(&#$’n cold out there. Right now, my thermometer is giving me a -5, the Weather Underground page is reporting -14.4, and the local news station is reporting -9, and the windchill is -24.

These extreme temperatures just make everything a lot harder, seems like. Of course, my complaints come as a person with all kinds of modern conveniences. I have a fire going, the furnace going, quality clothing, ample blankets, a decently stocked pantry and refrigerator etc. etc. etc. I can’t imagine what these sorts of conditions were like for our predecessors with ramshackle housing, animal skins for clothes, only fire to keep warm, and having to kill and grow what they ate for themselves. Thank you modern conveniences!

Speaking of fire — and I’m really just rambling now — last night I was prompted to tell my five year old boy the story of Prometheus giving fire to the people. He really enjoyed the bit where Hercules came along to bust Prometheus out of his chains. It’s a good story, but I am also laying some foundations here. At some level the fight between Prometheus and the other gods about whether to let people in on the secret of fire was really about whether people were going to think for themselves and advance themselves through technology on the one hand or whether they were going to slavishly maintain the status quo commanded by the gods on the other. I would really like him to embrace the notion that our fate is self-determined and that people can improve themselves through ingenuity. On another level, I am inoculating him with god stories. If he ultimately embraces a religion, I’ll love him all the same. But, if he does so, hopefully it will be after he comes up with good reasons for assuming that the god of that particular religion is real while Zeus and Odin and Ra and all the other gods worshiped faithfully by other cultures were mere stories.

This started as a post about weather. That, my friends, is some good digression.