Notes From All Over -- The New England Edition -- December 30, 2021

Tesla: huge recall. Links everywhere.

Lake Tahoe: record snow hits Lake Tahoe. Following a year of both extreme heat and drought, Lake Tahoe has seen a record-breaking amount of snow this December, according to the U.C. Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab. Link here. 

The Tahoe area has seen 210 inches of snow since the beginning of the month, the lab, based in Soda Springs, California, reported Wednesday. That makes this month the third snowiest on record and the snowiest December ever, per tracking from the lab that started in 1970.

If weather modeling holds up, it's possible December could also overtake the current No. 2 record holder, February 2019, which saw a whopping 221 inches of snow.

Typically about 110 inches of snow will have fallen by Jan. 1 in a given water year, which begins on Oct. 1. But, so far, 2021 has already seen 264 inches of snowfall, putting the region at 258% of its average for this point in the year and breaking the 51-year-old October through December snowfall record of 260 inches set in 1970.

Cape Cod: and so it goes. We have fond memories of Cape Cod. We spent four years in the Boston area not so long ago. Learned to love Cape Cod.

Best summary ever: New England is an energy crisis waiting to happen. Link here.

While the US has become the largest producer of natural gas and an ever-larger exporter of LNG, the country does not produce LNG carriers. Since there are no US LNG carriers, New England cannot benefit from the build-out of LNG export facilities along the Gulf of Mexico, despite having significant LNG import facilities like the one in Everett, Massachusetts.  That means New England is in the same bidding pool as Europe and Asia. Amazingly, most LNG imports to the Everett terminal have come from Trinidad and Tobago! Instead of simply building pipelines to its land neighbors, New England pays for boats to sail more than 2,000 miles – burning fossil fuels and polluting the oceans as they do so – and pays a substantially higher price for the privilege. 

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John Madden

Link here.

He was a football savant—named head coach of the Oakland Raiders at age 32, he won a Super Bowl in the 1976 season, and didn’t have a losing year in a full decade on the sideline. On TV, he never talked down to his audience. Football is a complex sport, often described through stiff wartime lingo, but Madden cut through the bombast and made it sound like backyard fun, using newfangled Telestrator technology to diagram schemes as if he was sketching them in the sand. 

He was always gently selling—the playmaking, the atmospherics, the coaches, the stars, and especially the lesser-known fellows on the line, because he’d been one of those. Madden loved hirsute centers, rumply ends and roly-poly nose tackles, and on any given Sunday, he’d make household names out of them, too. He began selecting an All-Madden Team, full of his kind of guys, tough men who played with broken thumbs and ate bolt screws for breakfast. 

He was both a critical phenomenon and a relentless populist. Madden on TV spoke like he was sitting next to you in an airport bar, except if you knew anything about Madden, you knew he’d never be in the airport. He always took the train, then a customized bus—a choice owing to claustrophobia and a bad episode on a flight while with the Raiders.

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LXIII

I quit watching the Clemson - Iowa game early on; same with the Oregon - Oklahoma game. 

Really, really disappointing.

But then I caught a replay of the #1 NFL game of all time, called by John Madden. 

Now I understand why some consider Roethlisberger a demi-god. 

Wiki entry.

The NBC television network broadcast attracted an average U.S. audience of 98.7 million viewers, making it the most watched Super Bowl in history at that time.

This game was ranked #4 on NFL Top 10 on NFL Network for Top 10 Greatest Games of All Time and ranked #1 for Top 10 Super Bowls.