Signs

(You should have seen the size of the bag

she came home with last week)

(So if I've got this right, you can refuse someone accommodation on the basis of their age, height, weight and/or genetic information - whatever that may be)

(Wasn't that what they did the year Bush got in?)

Weather (contd.)

There are more freak weather conditions heading our way.

According to my iPhone, the forecast for tomorrow is for snow, a low of -5°C and a high of -6°C.

Could Do Better

Much as I love CNN, I'm afraid it repeatedly shot itself in the foot tonight.

In advertising run throughout the evening, CNN claimed its election coverage had attracted "the biggest audience than any other network".

It also ran an opinion poll about the Obamas' new dog. The results were as follows:

(That's 107% by my count - not to mention the missing "the")

Come on, CNN: you can do better than that!

Weather

Gravity isn't the only thing that works differently in the US. Weather doesn't follow the normal rules of numerical linearity.

When I got up this morning and checked today's weather forecast on my iPhone, it said we'd have lows of -1°C and highs of 1°C in our town. However, the actual temperature was given as -7°C (it's now up to -3°C)!

In case you don't believe me, look at this:

The Tonight Show

We first came across The Tonight Show - or more precisely Jay Leno - when we were in Berlin and had NBC piped through our cable. Needless to say, it quickly became the highlight of our evening's TV watching.

When we moved to France, we were robbed of this privilege, and subsequently spent the next 6 years pining for a Jay Leno fix, satisfied only with the occasional foray onto the show's online site (incidentally a great source of clips from current and previous shows).

Imagine our joy therefore when we learnt that we would be moving to Lenoland itself, and could watch the man himself live every weekday evening! 

Well, the joy was shortlived. The Tonight Show is recorded in Burbank, California, i.e. a completely different time zone, and primetime viewing on the West Coast is night-owl TV around here. That means we have to wait until 11.30pm to even get a glimpse of our comic hero, whose Monologues, Headlines and Jaywalking sections are televisual classics - not to mention his interviewing style.

Worse still, we found out about a month ago that NBC thinks Jay Leno is getting too old for TV (he's been hosting the show for about 20 years now), and was going to axe him next spring. Having waited so long for the pleasure of seeing him, this was truly a tragic blow.

Luckily for us, help is at hand: rumour has it that NBC has not only relented, but offered Leno a primetime EST show from May. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Now all we need is for Saturday Night Live to become Saturday Evening Live.

Gravity

Gravity works differently here in the States. Either that, or we live in an anti-gravity field (which would however explain my superhuman ability to deflect fat).

I always thought that gravitational forces make heavy things move from a higher point to a lower point.  I now know that's a quaint Old World misconception.

Our house is halfway up a slope, so applying Newtonian apple-on-head physics, you would expect rainwater to run down the hill and collect - and at sub-zero temperatures freeze - at the bottom. Wrong! Somehow, a thick sheet of (black) ice has built up on the slope outside our house, while the top and bottom of the hill have remained completely and frustratingly free of both ice and snow.

Stranger still, this gravitational anomaly only seems to apply to water (perhaps it isn't heavy water) and grass (which also seems to defy the gravitational pull and stays firmly rooted to the spot). Applying the ice example, you would expect passing cars to slide about in circles in front of our house, yet bizarrely enough they skid down to the foot of the hill instead.

Can anyone who got more than 14% in their last physics exam please explain this phenomenon to me?

Terms of Endearment

I've just discovered that I really like being addressed as hon' by strange women in supermarkets - even if they just want me to sell me something.

Somehow it just doesn't sound the same as when the kids at school back in England used to call me that.