Random Fact: Nashville, Tennessee Got a Lot of Rain in May 2010

A somber footnote from my recent trip to New Orleans was that my brother, a last minute addition out of Nashville, Tennessee, spent a good portion of the trip nervously monitoring his iPhone for updates on the deteriorating situation with regards to the Cumberland River and record-setting flood stages back in his home city.

The weather that weekend in New Orleans was strange, frighteningly humid with an endless surge of low-lying  clouds flowing north off the Gulf at 20-25 mph. It was horror-movie, pre-apocalypse style cloud action and everyone just kept waiting for what felt like the inevitable, Biblical deluge. But it didn't come.

With this boatload of moisture coming in from the sea, New Orleans only reported 1.55 inches of rain during those first two days of May while Nashville received 13.56 inches. I'm an amateur meteorologist in aspiration-only, but my feeling is we saw that moisture in New Orleans en route to Nashville.

*Data for this post was provided by Weather.com, which is an excellent website with a lot of delightful drill-down ability for the weather and/or data junkie. Check out the Monthly view for precipitation and temperature recordings, extremes and averages.

Random Fact: Boy Choy Makes Your Pee Stink

The phenomenon of smelly pee is well known as relates to the consumption of asparagus. But the other day, I noticed I was producing some strong-smelling stuff and hadn't had any asparagus. The night before, however, I had some delicious stir-fry that heavily featured the chinese cabbage known as bok choy.

As a member of the cruciferous or brassicaceae family of vegetables, it is kin to asparagus, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and others that have the ability to by-produce odoriferous urine. It was strong, pungent, and distinctly different than asparagus pee, but bok choy was the culprit. It wore off after about a day.

There's not much authoritative stuff out there on the Interwebs on this topic, so I thought I'd weigh in just in case you haven't eaten asparagus and are producing smelly pee. If you haven't eaten bok choy either, one other culprit is sexually-transmitted disease (STD), in which case you should probably get your junk checked out by someone who went to medical school.