Marmalade Daydreams

I've been showing my classes An Inconvenient Truth this past week to teach about global warming (I know, I know, some of the kids find sections of it incredibly boring -- I'm basically skipping around, showing them the razzle-dazzle version, plus lots of graphs [data analysis is important, if not razzle-dazzle]), and I've been stressing the difference between changes in weather (very frequent, short-term) and changes in climate (gradual, long-term), but this is one of those weekends when you're feel like it's summer already, and then you realize that we've still got two more months of school and not all my classrooms have a/c, and the fear grows, and I'm glad I'm getting out of New York again before the city completes its annual transformation into a tropical megalopolis with fewer ladies selling sliced mango.

By the way, having watched Al Gore's images and statistics over and over again for a week, I realized that a major criticism of the film (presented in a front-page article in the Science Times) is actually a "straw man" argument -- critics say that sea level will not rise as quickly as he claimed -- instead of 20 feet by 2050, climate scientists are predicting 20 inches -- yet Gore set no date for the striking images of Florida, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Lower Manhattan disappearing beneath the onslaught of Poseidon's armies. He simply claimed that "this is what will happen if Greenland melts, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica melt", and while I haven't done the math, that is a good deal of water sliding off the continental shelf. I hope the seven preserved frogs in my closet at school are doing okay -- should they be refrigerated? I'm planning on dissecting them with my after school club this week, and it would be a major bummer if they were rotten...

But anyway, it's beautiful for now -- the warm temperatures and the trees' brilliant blossoms forced my hand yesterday, and I attended approximately three hours of my eight-hour Saturday class. While my irksomely ill-prepared professor struggled to make the sound work on the Scooby-Doo cartoon that he was trying to show us (I can't make this stuff up -- this is supposed to be a graduate-level earth science class), I walked out, pedalled furiously up Ocean Avenue, and missed the free entrance to the Botanic Gardens by ninety seconds. Oh well, it was beautiful anyway -- the magnolia blossoms and daffodils had begun to wither in the heat, but their magnificent tulips are opening, and the cherry trees in the Japanese garden are perfectly in bloom right now -- colonies of tiny pink blossoms hang from twisted black boughs like we are walking through a woodcut. Pefection in a garden, indeed. When I got back to class a couple of hours hence, nothing had happened, and I left again to get some ice cream shortly thereafter.

Well, my alcoholic neighbor Leo (he of the stubby grey dreads and the glassy red eyes) has been cranking out the reggae pop all morning (he seems to have gotten a new CD, as I am well familiar with his normal song selection -- from Country Roads to Candle In The Wind), and he seems very excited about this song that just came on. He's yelling along with it like he's at Arlene's Grocery. And yes, he's dancing on the sidewalk. What a glorious day...