Joseph P Farrell – Normally I don’t do stories about the weather at all on this website, except when it’s so bizarrely strange that it’s unavoidable or, as in the case of my 2012 weather report, when the memes running around the alternative community were so hysterically…er… hysterical that they could only have been dealt with by a bit of hysteria of my own (See New Site Feature: Weekly Gizadeathstar Weather). But for anyone living in California and the severe persisting draught there, things aren’t so funny.

Indeed, last year when I spoke at the San Mateo Secret Space Program Conference, two friends of mine and I had the opportunity to drive from southern California to the Silicon Valley area, by way of California’s rich agricultural belt in the San Jaquin Valley.

What we saw stunned all of us, particularly my one friend who is a native Californian, and me. In my case, I have to explain with a bit of personal anecdotal information. When I was a boy, my mother had family in Pomona, one of those meaningless lines on the map in the urban sprawl that is the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. Of course, I can understand the mentality: Pomonans are from Pomona, and Pasadenans are from Pasadena. It would be like confusing Soho for Kensington, if one were a Londoner, or Queens with (perish the thought) the Bronx if one were a New Yorker. But for a Midwesterner like me, cities, towns, villages, etc, are always to be separated from other cities, towns, villages, by intervening rural areas – farms, ranches, woods, forests, hills, and so on. This makes things much easier to keep straight in one’s head. Sooner or later, Californians, Londoners, and New Yorkers recognize the Genius of Midwestern Organization. (I won’t even begin to attempt to describe my being lost on the London tube. I’d still be there, had it not been for a kindly British lady who held my hand, and helped me negotiate my way to where I needed to go.) Continue reading →