About

Welcome to “Weather or Not,” the personal blog for atmospheric scientist, severe storm enthusiast, outdoor photographer, football fan, and family man Roger Edwards. For factual trivia about me, see my root website or curriculum vitae, on separate pages. My evolving digital e-book of weather and water photos and stories is online at skypix.photography. A weekly photo BLOG featuring favorite photography from my entire portfolio appears at “Image of the Week“.

This blog will contain musings on a variety of topics. I may be a meteorologist and storm connoisseur, but I am also a human being and concerned citizen, who absolutely will not “stick to weather”! My interests lie in all manner of subjects; hence, Weather or Not. I am well-traveled, well-read and well-versed in a variety of sociopolitical, scientific, photographic, and recreational topics outside my career. I approach issues from a nondenominational Christian, politically libertarian, socially conservative, federalist, strict Constitutional constructionist worldview.

These musings arise from understandings gained along a modern-day Horatio Alger life story: childhood inner-city poverty as majority-minority “trash”, to graduate student, to formally published storm forecaster/researcher, now living in the country and moving deeper into Gen-X middle age. In short: been there, done that, seen it. A fiercely independent thinker, I am quite secure in my own skin. I deliberately eschew both cultural fads and the herd mentality, and don’t depend on anybody else’s affirmations for personal satisfaction or well-being.

Open, frank, intelligent and well-written discourse and dialogue, whether or not you agree with me, is the reason for this blog. My writing style can be quite entertaining at times, or so I am told: sometimes humorous, sometimes pleonastic, but also, blunt, direct and polemic, which may offend some people. Such is life. Being offended is a choice you make. Remember:

Attacking the idea is absolutely, positively not the same as attacking the person. Period. If you are not mature enough to understand the difference, please go elsewhere.

Nobody forced you to read my blog. You are doing so entirely of your own free will, and by doing so, you accept without blame any resultant impacts. Have a thick skin; you’ll need it at times!

To mitigate SPAM, and to save time and hassle as a referee, I have restricted comments to those who take the effort to log in with WordPress credentials. I do reserve the right to remove any of the following, and block the login of anyone who tries these:

SPAM (this includes commercial advertising of any sort, for any reason, without my prior approval) or links thereto.

Smut or links to smut sites

Hate (including racism, personal flames, etc.) or links to hate sites

Threats to anyone, for any reason (I come from inner city East Dallas…my default response to any threat to me is: bring it.)

Comments riddled with errors of grammar, spelling, punctuation, or usage, or horribly organized nonsense. I will not subject readers of this blog to time wasted trying to decipher such garbage.

Comments sent under bogus names or e-mail addresses. This is the no-coward zone!

You never know what to expect on any given entry, except for one thing: unrestrained honesty. I loathe ambiguity. All manner of corruptions, perversions, deceits, and hypocrisies lurk in gray areas. Instead, you’ll leave this BLOG crystal-clear on where I stand!

To view older, full-length editorials composed before the mid-2000s, which may or may not reflect any changes I’ve made since, see Roger’s Rants.

DISCLAIMER: All views I express here are mine. They do not reflect the views of my unnamed employer, its parent agency or anyone else in particular. If you have problems with my message, have the guts to address them directly to me, not to my co-workers, supervisors, friends, relatives or neighbors…none of whom can or do have any control over what I write on my own time and equipment (re: First Amendment).

Now that the disclaimers and warnings are out of the way, let’s rock and roll!