We recently bought a home in Fairhaven, MA about a half a mile away from the town’s two wind turbines. There are homes that are closer to the Fairhaven turbines than ours and some of them have legitimate concerns. But “wind turbine syndrome” creator Nina Pierpont claimed symptoms from people who live more than twice as far away as I do, and many members of the anti-wind group “WindWise” live even further away than that.
Here’s my list of Things That Are Louder Than Our Nearby Wind Turbines:
- Bugs. There’s a conservation area next door and in warm weather the bugs are pretty loud from sunset until well into the night.
- Birds. They start up around sunrise.
- Planes. Lots of small ones heading to New Bedford Regional Airport, occasional big ones going overhead to Logan or TF Green, and the rare military plane out of bases on Cape Cod.
- Vehicles. Even though we’re on a small side street, we can still hear the distant-but-steady hum of traffic from a nearby main road for 18 hours a day.
- Air conditioners. In the summer there’s a steady hum of central units from neighboring homes.
- Recess. There’s an elementary school about a thousand feet away.
- A foghorn. The foghorn on the New Bedford hurricane barrier can be heard faintly but clearly from
- The wind itself. If it blows more than 10 miles an hour, it’s hard to hear anything else over the rustling trees & leaves.
But there was one night this summer … when the wind was blowing just the right way … when the bugs had quieted down … I woke up in the middle of the night, and went over to the window and leaned in, and thought in the distance I heard a faint noise … then suddenly I heard a much louder one. “What the hell are you doing?” my fiancee said. “Come back to bed, weirdo.”
I’m not trying to mock those with legitimate concerns – turbines should be sited using the best available science, like the American Wind Energy Association’s Wind Energy Siting Handbook.
I’m trying to mock our elected officials in places like the State House, Plymouth and Fairhaven who tie themselves into pretzels trying to please every anti-wind activist – no matter how many miles those activists live from an actual turbine – even though Massachusetts voters know that in this life, there are some noises up with which you must put.
Cross-posted from The Green Miles
Excess purity of syntax is surely the very early sign of incipient Wince Urbane Syndrome… Get out! Get out while you can!
N/T
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I don’t have the cite, but I recall reading that he used the same construction to mock the no prepositions at the end of a sentence rule.
“This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
As an English teacher, I don’t teach the rule. Nine times out of ten, however, I won’t end a sentence with a preposition.
The reason it was considered poor usage dates back to the 1600s when some English writers, namely John Dryden, thought that Latin was the model language and that English should imitate it. You can’t end a sentence with a preposition in Latin. See http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2580
Our own Noah Webster caused similar problems by creating American spelling for words such as “colour” and “parlour.”
http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/spelling-reform.htm
…and Latin could often make the point by using just the object in the right case without a preposition at all. Oxford a few years ago ruled that the convention was not always enforcible and some prepositions at ends of sentences are more properly designated adverbs anyway.