Skip to main content

Why Haboobs Happen

Photo by Perth Weather Live

Photo from blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com
Those are haboobs: dust storms caused by strong winds.  

The term, "haboob" is Arabic, and I don't know how it came to be used in the west, but I will guess that its use is one of the by-products of war, and veterans returning.  

When I first went to Alaska, as a kid, to go halibut fishing, I was struck with the names along the Northwest Coast and beyond:  The Strait of Juan de Fuca, or Cordova (Puerto de Cordova), for instance.  And there were Russian names, and English names.  All of the explorers left names familiar to them on our maps.  Veterans returning from the Spanish-American War brought Spanish names to baptize small towns in Iowa.  There is even a Norway, Iowa.  And now we have haboobs.

Climate change--which is not real, you know:  perfectly respectable politicians say so--has produced fierce dust storms in Australia, too, and one of their storms blew out to sea.  Can you imagine how beautiful it would have been had there really been global warming?  

Haboob.  Haboob!  Say it a time or two.  But not too often! You don't want to catch a Semitic religion, unless it is Judaism, or Christianity.  

It is the principle of the Camel's nose under the edge of the tent.  If he gets his nose there, pretty soon you have a whole camel in your tent.  It is also known as The Wedge Principle.  You know:  "If we allow something to happen once, pretty soon everybody will be doing it!"  

Haboobs are real.  Real wind.  Real dust.  Wedge Principle arguments are like religion:  you have to be a believer, and if you are a believer, you can say just about anything you want, however magical; that climate change is not real, for instance, and that haboobs are God's punishment for a shortage of prayers for rain, or for removing God from the schoolroom, right next to the Glock in the teacher's desk.  

 We will get through this, by affirming it.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more