The human body fascinates me.  It’s cold as hell outside again, right?  Eleven degrees, wind chill of -4.  -4 is, by any remotely reasonable estimation, cold.  Append an “as fuck” as needed.  I just got home from work and cleared yesterday and the day before’s snow off of the driveway and finished re-digging my mailbox back out from the glacier the snowplow deposited in front of it.

I did not bother zipping my coat until I was almost done.  Why?  I wasn’t cold.  We are at the point where if it were to leap up to 30 degrees tomorrow I would be entirely unsurprised were I to see someone wearing shorts outside.  And don’t get me wrong; it’s not like I’m claiming superpowers here– it’s happening to everybody.  Tomorrow morning’s supposed to be crazy cold again, although the predicted temperature has been creeping skyward all morning.  A week ago– and I mean that literally, last week– the news that temps would be below zero between six and seven would have everyone scrambling to predict that we’d be out.  You can see me doing it if you look at last Thursday’s post.  Tomorrow morning?  Everyone’s looking at the exact same temperatures and going “ah, fuck it.”  There is, at this moment, not so much as a single two-hour delay for tomorrow announced.  Last Thursday there were a dozen districts that had already announced delays by now.  I think we figure anyone who hasn’t died from the cold already can probably handle waiting for the buses for a few minutes.  Now all we need are buses that can actually get our kids to school on time; that’s been a huge mess lately.

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Complete change of subject: anyone know how to find out if an image is public domain or not?  I know that a lot of stuff NASA puts out is basically free to use for anyone for any reason (IANAL) but what if you can’t confirm where an image comes from?  For example, this rather striking image looks like a lot of planetary nebulae, but I can’t find this specific image anywhere helpful and I wouldn’t be completely surprised to discover it was a Photoshop job.  I’ve done a reverse Google Image Search on it to no real avail, although I probably need to suck it up and just check every use of the image until I find somebody linking it as their work on DeviantArt or something.  But if I don’t find that… I still can’t assume, right?  Argh.

Anyway, here’s the picture I’m referring to: