Photo by Vinnie Cammarano
Key Points
Charles de Gaulle once famously complained, “how can you govern a country that has 246 different kinds of cheese?”
He may have had a point, though his bigger issue might have been France’s 3,000 or so commercial wines. It is not my drink of choice, but from what I’ve witnessed there’s a whole new personality hidden in every bottle, complete with strong opinions that cannot be altered by reason.
Wine is also a rich source of expertise and temporary explanations of things that cannot otherwise be understood. Old Charlie might have been looking down the neck of an empty bottle when he concluded that his country’s problems could be blamed on cheese.
France isn’t the only place where people are prone to fall for the unlikely, despite reason and evidence to the contrary.
Floridians, for example, continue to believe weather forecasters. Meteorology is, at best, the science of guessing.
They point at high-pressure areas, troughs, fronts and gradients, cite the mesoscale European model, crank up their Dopplers and assure everybody within a certain cone of impact that Armageddon will be coming to breakfast at precisely 7:26 a.m.
It might happen. Their guess is as good as anybody’s. Then again, you don’t necessarily need to cancel your tee time.
One year a memorably big freeze was predicted for Central Florida. The citrus and fern crops would be destroyed, the homeless were in peril, stray pets would die, pipes would burst, heating systems would be overwhelmed, we’d all be lucky to see another sunrise.
I was working as the late editor for a newspaper and we had a separate front-page story on each of those impending disasters. Across the top of the page was a big headline we will get to in a minute.
At 10 p.m., it was balmy outside but meteorologists were still predicting a hard freeze. At 11:30, fresh freeze warnings were coming in over the wire: “It’s coming. Dig in. Run away. Save yourselves!”
Sometime between midnight and 1 a.m., with those presses cranking out newspapers by the tens of thousands I gathered up my stuff to head home, when there was a “ping” from the wire room, indicating a bulletin.
To my horror, it read: COLD FRONT STALLS
The next day was a beauty. People were out walking or riding bikes and soaking up sunshine as they passed newspaper boxes showing the headline WE’RE FREEZING.
Well, the talk of the town since Sunday is how cold it is going to be today – assuming you are reading this on Friday. “Gonna be in the 40s this weekend…maybe even the 30s. I heard there might be frost.”
It might happen. But I’m going to hold off on my headline.
If it doesn’t and you are disappointed or shocked or inconvenienced, do yourself a favor and don’t ask meteorologists why. Go down to your local wine bar – if the patrons don’t already have the answer, they will soon enough.
And if that doesn’t suit you, just blame it on the cheese.