Ugh, sleet here. Yuck. Make up your mind. Be rain or snow. This in-between irks me.  Everyone here drives like pavement is dry, too, which is just insane. There's a curve on the nearby road and EVERY time it's slippy out?  Someone takes the curve too fast. WHAM. There goes that power pole. The power company even moved it three times. Nope. It needs a steel cage.

So, before my power goes out! 

fun facts: We don't lose bladder control so much as  we lose discernment of it as we age. Kegels allegedly hyelp. Women will still sneeze or laugh and have a "ew!" moment. That said, better the drops than the drunk-man-shart. That's pure booze.

Sleet is a fun word, probably related to Old Norse/Old English slydda --- a mix of rain and snow. How it acme to mean the unique pellety crap I don't know. It first appeared in writing in 1300, however, so obviously England's weather wasn't great if they finally wrote it down. 

Funner fact: The early years of the 1300s were marked by crazy weather and famine, which pre-disposed Europe to be a big fat target for th e mid-century Black Death (1347-50). Some idiot scholars still believe Poland was unaffected. In fact, Polish records were destroyed. It's in the lore, if one knows where to ask. Which I do. Seriously, everyone else died and Poland didn't? LOL no. 

By that time, incidentally, the Polish Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania (modern Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and IIRC Lithuania itself) hosued more Jews than anywhere in Europe due to expulsions from other nations. This would cost the region dearly later, under Russian rule (pogroms) and the rule of invaders (Germans, Austrians, Russians) as well. 

So what was going on in the 1300s? What wasn't! 

The century started off with serious  drought in Europe, then transitioned to serious wet --- so from five years of serious drought to nearly a decade of wetter-than-wet, causing several mibnor famines and one Great Famine of 1315-17. Twenty years later? You had a European  population that was born with lousy nutrition, and hungry rodents carrying fleas. 

Around 1300 is believed to kick off the Little Ice Age, a misnomer, but a period of weird regional low temps around the North Atlantic nonetheless. People have b,amed the sun, volcanoes, the ocean, but in reality, we only saw really cold temps around 1600-1850 on a global basis ---- an dagain, it trended to regional. Yet it was earlier than that we saw glaciers advance in the Northern Hemisphere. What was going on? Well, we don't know. Did our axis wobble? Did an unrecorded event mess up the northern Atlantic oceans currents? (If it was the sun, why, and how, and why a two-cenutry or more lage on the Southern Hemisphere having issues?!) Basically, we'll never know b/c they had no scientific measurements, and we're working off anecdotes and ice cores. So was it a "little ice age" or just the planet adapting to something? No idea.

That said, the temp spikes since 1850 aren't out of the historical record... if you go back before humans existed, and when dinosaurs roamed the earth, or even earlier. Our genus popped up right before the first big ice ages started again 2 million years ago,  and many other related hominids sorta... well, vanished. Draw from that what you will. Correlation isn't always causation. Human habitation of North America pre-dates the extinction of megafauna, but try getting anyone to agree that humans didn't somehow hunt huge-a** animals to extinction. A a single mammoth fed ten for three months by some estimates ---- and there was no storage. So you'd have to hope two tons of jerky didn't get mold (good luck) or kill right before winter (and dig freezer pits) or, wait for it, live on easier game like fish, fowl, and stuff that didn't run, swim, or fly (roots, berries, veg, greens). 

So, all in all, Earth's never really very stable, geologically speaking, and we're enjoying a nice blip in time, but our ancestors made it through ice ages. If we make it through the heat? Well, check back in, say in 200,000 years! 

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Btw, Today in history, Gillette patented its permanent handle but disposable double-bladed razor head razors in 1901 and men been using 'em ever since. (Also ladies, if we're honest.)

And in 1970, the Environmental Protections Agency (EPA) of the US began operations today!