Blog Love Omega Glee: Everybody Complains About The Weather, But Nobody Does Anything About It (8 February 2012)

Charles Dudley Warner, allegedly the source of the quotation, "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it" might be astonished at how things have changed. According to Francine's research, there's a long history of people attempting to control the weather. The most recently publicized were the 2008 efforts by the Chinese to control rain for the Summer Olympics in Beijing. Employing airplanes, artillery guns, and rocket launchers, the Chinese Cloud Commissars seeded clouds with silver iodide to make clouds rain early outside the city before they disrupted Olympic events, and induced rain over the city when attendees needed a refreshing shower for a break from the pollution. The Russians also like to control the weather, especially to make sure holidays have sunny weather, but occasionally their attempts to preempt rain result in dropping a sack of cement powder through someone's house instead of spreading it through a cloud. Francine thinks, "If I had a sack of cement plunge through the roof, then I think I'd prefer to just get out my umbrella and deal with the rain on a holiday."

But the United States also has a long history of trying to replace Mother Nature with a scientific stepmother. In Project Skyfire, we tried to lessen lightning strikes and subsequent forest fires by cloud seeding. Project Stormfury attempted to do the same thing with hurricanes, following up on an earlier experiment, Project Cirrus. Results were mixed, but these and other cloud seeding experiments eventually contributed to a whole industry of weather modification useful for dispersing fog at airports, ending droughts, making sure ski resorts have enough snow, and suppressing hail, among other uses. Of course, the U.S. government wasn't going to spend millions of dollars just to make some skiers happy, so a military application was sought, resulting in Operation Popeye during Vietnam, an attempt to use cloud seeding technology to grow spinach in clouds and drop it on U.S. soldiers in the fields who would become super-strong upon eating it and clear the rice patties of Viet Cong. The operation wasn't a success in creating super-soldiers, but it did succeed in extending the monsoon season in Vietnam, resulting in a bumper crop of mud, and later rice. The U.N. treaty in the seventies banning military use of environmental modification slowed research into weather control, but Francine suspects it continued secretly. How else to explain the mysterious weather combination of snow and lightning that disrupted the presidential primary elections of several states? Francine knows in her gut that the president is somehow involved. The polls didn't look good for him, so perhaps this buys Dick some time. Apparently with the move back to paper ballots in some states and the increased scrutiny of the electoral process, stealing an election is more difficult than in the past. According to conspiracy theorists, there's been some weather modification-related work done following up on Nikola Tesla's lost inventions. Something about earthquakes, energy beams, electromagnetic pulses, supercharging of the ionosphere, chemtrails, scalar technology, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (which should be shortened to HFAARP, the sound of a fart, but is instead known by the acronym HAARP, perhaps so as not to remind taxpayers that they are paying for a project whose real acronym sounds like a fart), directed-energy weapons, Project Prime Argus, and more things that make Francine's head reach a mental dewpoint and take a break. Weapons that can cause airflows and aches, blizzards and bafflement, clouds and chaos, droughts and depression, earthquakes and evil, floods and famines, global warming and gas shortages . . . all too much to process on a nice Wednesday in February when the sun is shining and Francine needs a smoke.

Outside, no sooner has she lit up when some clouds roll in and it starts to rain. Almost instinctively, Francine looks for a plane.

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel, which is available in print and as an ebook.