Coming in comfortably under the radar of Dorseyland’s Nuts on the Net category is that of the Cloud Appreciation Society.

It’s safe from outright ridicule because, frankly, we like clouds too! Setting up a whole non-scientific website about clumps of mist does seem a little over-the-top (pun not completely intended), but (a) the young-ish webmaster, Briton Gavin Pretor-Pinney, comes across as a decent sort despite his name; (b) there’s a bit of quasi-scientific talk among the odes to sky puffs (say “altocumulus” – it’s a treat); (c) the site’s pretty busy as far as esoteric Net presences go; and (d) they’ve got 1,400 photos of clouds, some of them not too shabby.

There’s talk of Pretor-Pinney writing a book called “The Cloudspotter’s Guide”, so that pretty much absolves anyone’s sniggering about his hobby being “something like trainspotting”. His website is bound to attract less grounded characters, of course, and among them is a Joycean Bostonian from Taiwan named David Bloom, who had his own a go at be-clouding the web with his Blogspot blog I Wish I Was a Cloud in January 2005 but evidently hasn’t been back there since.

Bloom’s purpose was to promote International Cloud Lovers Day on April 7 that year and every year hence. The annual celebration was his idea, and he spoke in the society website’s forum about gaining “official recognition”, though he didn’t say from whom. Senator Kennedy perhaps.
On April 8 he posted this account: “I think millions of people around the world participated in ICLD in their own way, maybe even without even knowing they were participating, because the day is just a day to look up and gaze at clouds. I am sure millions did it. Hurray! We don’t need media confirmation for it to succeeed, it is a success already just by the day existing now as an annual event. Next year, more!”
Mark it down.

Before any strangers start chortling over the website shop, with its crap Cloudspotter T-shirts and cufflinks, or the members’ art and poems (clouds being “hungry, passionate, full of pizazz and verve”, that sort of thing), the society gets stern with a “manifesto”:
WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them. We think that they are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them. We pledge to fight “blue-sky thinking” wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day … And so we say to all who’ll listen: Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!

Then there’s the “Cloud News”, which is actually more newsy than you’d imagine. Like Christie’s auctioning off JMW Turner’s “Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and SanaGiorgio” (shown here), for example. And construction commencing on the Italian government’s Congress Centre in Rome, which will apparently boast an enormous, suspended teflon cloud that glows from within and contains a huge auditorium.

That’s interesting, but then the webchief has to daub this relative bit of sanity in rainbow hues: “we feel it necessary to warn the local government that there will be chaos when every five-year-old in Rome turns up and wants to go inside to finally see what it’s like to stand inside a cloud.”
Urk.
It doesn’t help either when the society awards 18th-century culture vulture John Ruskin “a posthumous Honorary Membership” for his appreciated paean to cloud appreciation, even though he in fact encouraged people to look at the sky more, not necessarily what’s in it.

About the photos shown here, all from the website: That’s Alberto Visocchi’s weird shot at the top, taken in Macellinara, Italy, followed by Michael Poole’s “face of Bob Marley” from Scotland (I definitely see Hitler, sorry) and Angelo Storari’s terrific heart cloud, taken in Ancona, Italy.

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Dr John A Day, left, is a rare species: a webmaster over 90 years of age. But more importantly, he is “the Cloudman”, and in my books does a much better job than the Appreciation Society of encouraging average blokes like me to spend more time looking skyward.
Day spent four decades teaching meteorology at Linfield College in the US northwest and just can’t seem to pack it in. His website helps people “Discover the ‘Greatest FREE Show Above the Earth’” with photos, charts, articles and yes, thankfully, a whole heap o’ science. Among the essay topics are London fog, the oriental view of the weather, El Nino and what clouds look like from prison (no, it wasn’t John in the slammer).

There’s some stuff for sale, but the terrific pictures he put in his $20 screensaver, like this one, are all available free for individual downloading, so you can make your own.
There are a slew of links – mostly to academia, with a couple of not-particularly-inspiring artists – but strangely not the Cloud Appreciation Society, even though that’s where I came across word of John Day. One of his main linkages is to Jack Borden’s educational programme for kids, “For Spacious Skies”, but that one’s very American and thus too tedious for me.

Day grew up in Colorado and spent 10 years forecasting the weather for PanAm Airways in Hawaii, Australia and Japan, so he’s seen lots of clouds. He wrote “The Book of Clouds” in 2002, a decade after co-authoring “Peterson’s First Guide to Clouds and Weather”, but basically, he just gets a massive kick out of misty musing. “The act of seeing nourishes my soul,” he says.
His “top 10 reasons for watching clouds” require a bit of stretching, but I wouldn’t mind spending an afternoon with him under the big sky.

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At CloudHarp.org, the old-time astronomer Johannes Kepler’s “Music of the Spheres” comes to (almost) literal life with a jumbo fantasy invention called the Cloud Harp, or Keplerian Harp. Its inventors, in 2001, were evidently design students at the University of Quebec, and the single sample of music produced by their instrument that’s available at the website is quite good. Etheric, but good.

Apparently this stack of crates works something like a CD player, but instead of a lens directing a laser beam onto the holes on the disc, a telescope channels an infrared beam onto clouds as high up as 25,000 feet. The melodies are determined by the distance, cloud density and luminosity and the weather. “It sings 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, [but] When the sky is blue it remains silent.”
Huh.

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Finally, every kid who’s able to look up in the sky and tell the difference between your stratus and your nimbus has a godfather who was actually into drugs in a big way.

Luke Howard is “the Godfather of Clouds”, so-called because back in the early 19th century he originated the names cumulus, stratus, nimbus and cirrus. He also wrote the first textbook on weather, “Seven Lectures in Meteorology”, but his career was in pharmaceuticals. Howard and Sons Ltd made medicine.
You have to wonder whether there was a connection.