NATTERING NABOBS OF NEGATIVISM … they say every cloud has a silver lining, but if you’re my friend CK, apparently every silver lining has a cloud inside … last week, in a brilliant, Pulitzer-quality piece praising the local winners of the $100,000 Christmas lighting contest, my column carried the headline “Jim and Kristy Powell — take a bow” … that would be “bow,” as in bend at the waist, not “bow” as in a bow on a Christmas present …

While CK had no problem with the copy, she did object to the headline … “Dear Bob,” she begins with proper respect for her elders, “I’m wondering why the headline in your column is “Jim and Kristy Powell” instead of “Kristy and Jim Powell.” … wondered the same thing myself, CK … “Kristy Powell was the only Powell family member’s name involved in the contest. But in the headline, Jim gets first position?” … hey, for 100,000 bucks, you can leave my name out entirely …

“Sorry, Bob, I know I’m being depressing, but you have daughters, and so do I, and for their sake, I feel we should be on the lookout for these things.” … well, to pass the buck on down the line, you should know that columnists are never trusted to write their own headlines … sometimes they aren’t even trusted to write their own columns … headline writing is a skill reserved for a select few …

I remember back in my sports writing days a headline over a basketball story said “Ho-hum win for Aggies.” … one athletic department member spent 15 minutes telling me that the 122-71 win was anything but “ho-hum” and that I should have come up with a different headline … he was wrong on two counts … first, I didn’t write the headline, and second, it was indeed a “ho-hum” game …

In the 42 years I’ve been writing a column for this newspaper, there has been three occasions when I felt the headline didn’t do justice to the column, and 9,997 occasions when I felt the headline was far more clever than anything I could have come up with … those are percentages I can comfortably live with …

WEATHER OR NOT … I never thought I’d hear a maximum temperature of 64 degrees in our area described as “warm,” but we’ve been treated to a steady diet of such statements during the past month or so of our about-to-end drought … one commentator even went so far as to suggest that this record-setting weather pattern was proof positive of man-made global warming …

Without entering into that contentious debate, the odd thing in this whole discussion is that while we have indeed, until very recently, had above-average maximum temperatures nearly every day in January, those have been matched, day for day, by below-average minimum temperatures nearly every single night in January … in fact, Tuesday morning’s low of 21 was record-setting all by itself …

Thus, we have record heat and record cold in the same month, sometimes nearly on the same day … all the attention, however, was focused on the warm, not the cold, even though the warmest day was only 15 degrees above average while the coldest night was 20 degrees below average … put simply, it’s hard to draw any conclusions from this month’s data …

Last year, some stations in the Sierra reported over 600 inches of snow, this year virtually none … the two-year average, however, works out to about “normal,” whatever that means … in fact, some folks are mistaking the word “normal” for “average” … while the “average” maximum for early January is 53 degrees, the “normal” high will range anywhere from 40 to 65, with rare exception … it’s actually unusual for a day’s high temperature to hit 53 degrees on the nose …still, if you want truly warm weather in early January, you’ll have to go back to Jan. 6 of 1911, when the high temperature was 71 degrees … in other words, as “warm” as it’s been this January, it was considerably warmer 101 years ago …

Given that they’ve been keeping records in Sacramento for only 150 years or so, and given that there are generally 365 days in a year (except this year), it’s a foregone conclusion that virtually every single year will have a few record-setting days, either for heat or cold or rainfall or wind velocity … in fact, it would be a record all by itself if an individual year did not produce at least one weather record …

But, without exception, the Fourth of July will be warmer than Christmas Day, and December will produce more rain than August … trust me on this …

— Reach Bob Dunning at [email protected]

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