[conspire] Beat the heat: Come to CABAL

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> On average, I think it's hard to find a better climate over the full
> year than the region near Menlo Park and Palo Alto.   

It's strange:  On a hot day in Silicon Valley, as I drive or bicycle
towards home, usually at some particular place in either north Palo Alto 
or -- even more spookily -- right at the county boundary (like Alpine
Road), I'll notice the temperature suddenly dropping at least several
degrees C and stay that way all the way home.  It's a heat 'cliff', and
it's interesting to speculate why it exists.  Could be the density of
trees, which is higher around here than most places in the Bay Area.

> Don't forget Redwood City: 

Don't forget Winona!  (I was listening to Route 66, this morning.  I had
to wonder, when exactly did Oklahoma City ever look 'oh so pretty'?)

> Not as hot as Concord in the summer, not as cold as Norway in the winter.

Norway's winters are far, far less bad than you might predict[1], on
account of the Gulf Stream passing the coast -- for now.  Of course,
humanity may currently be in the process of sabotaging what
oceanographers call the 'global conveyor belt' that brings warm water to
the north.  Stay tuned.

Anyway, for beastly winters, locally Finland is your candidate.


> Once I had a huge basil crop and made pesto.  It was good, but took a
> lot of work to separate leaves from stems.

The one time I tried to make pesto a few years back, I discovered that
two or three basil plants are not nearly enough.


[1] In fact, the winters are not infamous for cold as much as for
unremitting darkness, which is why brightly painted buildings
predominate more and more as you progress north.  Also, I'm convinced
that somebody long ago scored a huge batch of very cheap red paint.