The Greet Simoon of 1859
Courtesy of Doc Searls, who despite his odd persistence in remaining within the Dave Winer Reality-Distortion Field, and his failure to appreciate the degree of duplicity evidenced by Aaron Broussard’s second Meet the Press appearance, is still a pretty cool guy, and is a neighbor, anyway, comes word of this: Google Answers: Weather; freak heat wave in Santa Barbara, CA, around the year 1900.
Doc (and I) were noticing how hot it got around here yesterday with the Santa Ana winds we were experiencing. But it turns out yesterday’s 101 (or whatever it got up to) was nothing; in a freak “simoon” condition that took place on June 17, 1859, Santa Barbara experienced temperatures of 133 degrees fahrenheit (!) for several hours, before the sea breeze kicked in and the temperature dropped back to the 70s.
“Birds,” we are told, “plummeted dead from the sky.” Wild.
