Can I give you a letter about the weather? I love this one. It comes in response to this column. Everyone is always talking about how unusual the weather is — or how different the weather is from before. One of the most demagogic things Al Gore ever did in a speech was say, “We’ve been having some pretty weird weather lately, huh?”

Anyway, our reader writes,

Dear Jay,
You’ve reminded me of a dear old history professor friend of mine. Whenever someone made a comment about how unusually warm or unusually cold or unusually dry or whatever the weather was, he would tell the story of a farmer friend of his who once said to him, “John, I’ve been farming for 30 years. Only one of them was normal.”

Perfect. The most scientific thing I’ve heard, about the climate, in months.