The title of today's post is my prediction, 16 hours in advance, of the headline of either the New York Post or the Boston Herald, the two perennial contenders for the title of America's Worst Newspaper.
We hunkered down in our respective cities. Nora and Mom took all of the books off the window shelves in New York, and I took the window air conditioner out and parked the car away from trees here in Medford. And it turns out to have been no big deal for either of us. The Weather Channel is desperately looking for footage of weather-related problems in the Northeast, but mainly they have their poor field reporters standing around looking miserable in the driving rain.
Hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.
Predictions are always fraught. Every time I listen to Marketplace on NPR, I hear some variant of the phrase "exceeded analysts' expectations" or "surprisingly low numbers." If we've got a team of people making six figures who only have to predict the performance of a few companies over the course of 30 days, and THEY can't get it right, then the whole project of prognostication is sort of a fool's errand.
But every action we take is, to some extent, a prediction of the future. I'm writing this in the expectation that it will be read, but of course I don't know that. I took the air conditioner out of the window because I expected that high winds would make that unstable, and it looks like our high winds will be in the 30s rather than the 70s. We look at the past, make our best guesses, and then act as though we know. As the philosopher Stephen Pepper once pointed out, although we may have a 60% chance of rain, we can't carry 60% of an umbrella. We go in all or nothing.
The larger metaphors here are obvious, they write themselves.
Well, that prediction was wrong as well.
ReplyDeleteToday's Post: Ride On! A reference to the resumption of transit service.
Today's Herald: Tree Decker. A reference to the three-family house common in working-class Boston area neighborhoods, the "three-decker."