The Perverse Pleasure of Breaking Records

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Credit first to Gary Mason of the Globe and Mail, who in a Vancouver weather story onย Jan. 10, 2006 offered this โ€œoldย joke.โ€

A newcomer to Vancouver arrives and it’s raining. He gets up the next day and it’s still raining. It rains the day after that and the day after that. He goes for lunch five days later and it’s still pouring. He sees a young boy walking down the street, and he says, โ€œDoes it every stop rainingย here?โ€

And the kid says, โ€œHow do I know. I’m onlyย six.โ€

This is โ€œfunnyโ€ in Vancouver these days because it has rained here for each of the past 25ย days.

In three more days, we’ll break the record for the most consecutive rainy days, and while the town is not quite abuzz with anticipation, there is a sense, as one CBCย radio commentator said this morning, that โ€œwe’ve gone this far, we might as well have theย record.โ€

What is itย that makes people hankerย for their little entry in Mr.ย Guinness’s Great Big Book? Whatever it is, it seems vaguelyย cavalier – at a time when the climate is setting new records every year and in every category – to be shouting: โ€œBring itย on.โ€

The study of history (and science) is intended to help us avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Somebody should tell ExxonMobile (and G.W. Bush) that it’s time we stopped taking joy in making the same old mistakes – onlyย bigger.

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