Otterblog

If there’s any one area where newspapers look with longing at electronic media, it’s the weather. It’s hard to stay ahead of it. We can say what happened. We can say what might happen, but it’s the rare storm in these parts that allows us to write that it is indeed happening as it happens (That’s because most of our winter storms have the annoying habit of starting in the early morning.).

But we talk about the weather and we still write about the weather and figure out ways to explain the weather in ways that make sense.

Which brings us to today’s post. At our afternoon budget meeting the other day, one of our page designers, Steve Mann, was talking about how a bad storm was coming in. When we asked him how he knew, he said that his pot-bellied pig was making a deep nest in her barn near Stokesdale. Like many animals, she is much more accutely attuned to the weather than us humans. Miss Piggy is apparently incredibly accurate in predicting the weather, much better than the aches in my joints. Not sure if she will become the Journal weather icon, but we’ll see what we can do.

On another pig-related note, some of you may remember me writing many months ago about a BBQ joint called Allen & Sons near Hillsborough. They were written up in the LA Times today. Good piece. Good BBQ.