I'm a Gonu, How Do You Do?

So I broke two promises. Sue me. A really quick note just to say that there wasn't a drop of rain overnight or today so far, no black clouds and certainly no thunderstorms.

Which means that all weathermen are complete fools and should be incarcerated before they do damage to someone. But then I think we all knew that anyway...

Gonu With The Wind

OK. Last crap joke, last weather post.

The bad weather is starting to creep along the West Coast of the Emirates now, with high winds starting to get up in Sharjah. We're expecting thunderstorms on the back of Cyclone Gonu: although they won't be a patch on what hit Oman and the East Coast, they'll be a welcome change of weather after a couple of unusually hot, dusty months.


Meanwhile, another storm is brewing in the UK where the new Olympic logo (above) has caused something of a stir. Having joined the Facebook group for people who don't think very much of the logo, I've been amused to note that the petition protesting it has closed with no less than 48,000 petitioners and a new petition has just opened and is already gaining major traction.

The Thrill is Gonu

By the way, in case you were interested in finding out more about Cyclone Gonu (which is named after the Maldivian word for a small palm-frond bag, for instance) then, as usual, the place to go is of course Wikipedia.

I sometimes worry about the Wikipeople. Nobody in their right minds would file that much detail about a storm.

Would they?

Here Today, Gonu Tomorrow

I suppose blogging about the weather is the lowest you can go, but Cyclone Gonu has certainly been a change from the usual round of blue sky, sun sea and sand: most of the sand right now is up in the air, suspended in a fine soupy suspension. Neat alliteration, I know.

The easiest job in Dubai must be weatherman. 363 days of the year it's a case of waking up and just hitting the 'sunny tomorrow' button. The other two days it's the 'light showers possible' button. Doddle. Given that the last major tropical cyclone to hit the peninsula was in 1890 (killing 700 in Oman, apparently), they don't get to play with weather like this very often.

But try and predict what's going to happen over the weekend and you can see just how random weathermen can be. A quick skip around the world's weather sites has weather.com predicting storms Thursday and big black nastiness Friday. Meanwhile the BBC thinks that Thursday in Dubai will be sunny and visibility will be good (not from where I'm sitting, pal: it's grey, murky and disgusting) and pressure will be 1000mb (my car says 992 and my car's smarter than you).

Typical of a Brit weatherman to get it quite so wrong.

CNN is hard to read: there are so many dolt-friendly icons and so much big friendly text around that you don't actually get any useful information, but it would appear that we can expect a sort of spiky egg yolk with some cotton wool, with more cotton wool tomorrow than today. At least you can get CNN Weather online without having to put up with that mad dwarf that keeps leaping in front of the map, gibbering and barking like a peyote-crazed shaman and then disappearing as suddenly as she materialised.

So it's back to Dubai, then, and an apology for those masters of the millibar, the Dubai Met Office. I take it back. They're the best of the whole bad lot. Here is how our weekend's going to look according to the home team:

RATHER HOT IN GENERAL & HAZY/DUSTY WITH FRESH WINDS MAY REACH GALE AT TIMES, & LOW/ TOWERING CLOUDS OVER EASTERN & NORTHERN AREAS MAY BE THUNDERY/RAINY. MODERATE - FRESH NE - SE_LY WIND WITH MODERATE - ROUGH SEA IN ARABIAN GULF 3 - 5/6 FT OFFSHORE, AND ROUGH - VERY ROUGH IN OMAN GULF 8 - 10 FT OFFSHORE.

Lovely!