The Blue Sturgeon Moon

With so much to talk about today, let's start by acknowledging that on this date in 1989, Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton was murdered in Oakland by Tyrone Robinson of the rival Black Guerrilla Family. I stayed up and watched the movie Judas and the Black Messiah last night, so now I'm an expert on the Black Power movement of the 1960s and '70s (grin), so if you have any questions, DM me.

Meanwhile, behold the moon - it's full tonight, the August Blue Sturgeon Moon.  It's not named for a blue-color fish or a depressed sturgeon. The title is an amalgam for the Full Moon of August, a Blue Moon, and the Sturgeon Moon. While the term "Blue Moon" is commonly reserved for the second full moon of a calendar month, August's Full Moon is considered a Blue Moon based on an older definition of the term, which represents the third full moon that occurs in a single season — in this case, summer. According to the Farmers' Almanac, August's Full Moon, whether Blue or not, is traditionally called the Sturgeon Moon, after the giant sturgeon of the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain, which were most readily caught at this time of the summer.  The August Full Moon was called the Flying Up Moon by Ontario Cree as August was the time of the year when young birds are finally ready to learn to fly. Other names include the Corn Moon, the Harvest Moon, the Ricing Moon, and the Black Cherries Moon, each of which represents various seasonal changes, or maturing crops, and originate from different cultures. 

Today is Carl Yastrzemski's birthday! Yaz turns 82 today, but Red Sox Nation won't be able to see the Blue Sturgeon Moon tonight because of Tropical Storm Henri (it was only a hurricane for less than a day).  Tropical Storm Henri made landfall today on western Rhode Island, missing Manhattan Island and most of Long Island except for the easternmost tip, and is now taking its leisurely stroll across New England. Today's Red Sox-Rangers game at Fenway was postponed due to weather.

Henri is the first hurricane to make landfall in New England in nearly 30 years.  According to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, not only will the percentage of high-intensity hurricanes become higher as the planet warms, but they will track further north more often and have slower translation speeds. So New England can expect more storms like Henri, or at least more than one every 30 years.

As I write, Rhode Island is seeing wide-spread power outages, and the storm has already cut power to some 115,000 residents from New Jersey to Maine and forced cancellations at New York airports. A record 4.45 inches of rain fell in Central Park yesterday, including 1.94 inches of rain between 10 and 11 pm alone, the most rain in a single hour at that location “since record keeping began” in the 19th century, according to the National Weather Service.  

Meanwhile, in McEwen, Tennessee, 17 inches of rain fell on Saturday in rainstorms totally unrelated to Henri.  The National Weather Service acknowledged that the rain would set a record for the most rainfall in a 24-hour span in Tennessee if preliminary estimates were confirmed. The previous record, set in Milan, Tennessee in 1982, was 13.6 inches.  Tragically, at least 22 died and 50 were injured in the flash floods that followed. Among those killed were several children, including twin 7-month-old infants. At least 4,200 people across the state had lost power, according to the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. 

I lost power this afternoon, but that wasn't related to Tropical Storm Henri or the Tennessee (or any other) thunderstorms.  Everything was normal - I was eating a sandwich on a hot, humid Georgia afternoon, when the power suddenly shut off. This happened Thursday night, with a distant but audible pop of a power transformer, but the power almost immediately came right back on.  I didn't hear a transformer blow this time (or a tree fall), but I finished my sandwich to see if the power would come back on.  When it didn't, I ventured outside to investigate.

The power lines leading to my house were still up, so that wasn't it.  I didn't see any neighbors out of doors, but walking through the neighborhood, I didn't see any lights on or other indications that they had power.  No trees were down.  I got in my car to investigate further.

Almost immediately, I came across the problem:

According to the contractors, a car hit the power pole sometime earlier today or possibly last night, and they had to turn off the power to replace the pole and restring the lines.  My guess is that it was a drunk driver either late last night or early this morning - it wouldn't be the first time. The curves on Collier Road have a way of surprising inebriated motorists speeding down the road at night. During the day, stop-and-go traffic from Piedmont Hospital slows things down to a crawl, so people have no way of anticipating the centrifugal forces along the curves when driving at 60 mph on the empty nighttime streets.

The takeaway here is I lose power during the increasingly frequent thunderstorms, tropical storms, and hurricanes passing through Atlanta, when trees randomly fall across power lines, even when there aren't any storms, and when drunk drivers miscalculate their chances of dodging power poles.