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News :: |
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"Use the Subway and Your Sense of Humor" (english) |
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by Isaac Taylor
Email: laughingboy (nospam) fastmail.fm |
18 Feb 2003
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It's a good thing I like to shovel snow. The Big Storm of Ought Three dropped more than two feet of the white stuff here yesterday. But this "Big Storm of Ought Three" was no blizzard, regardless of whether it met the technical criteria of three hours of 35 mile per hour winds and 1/4-mile visibility. I don't care that it snowed for 18 hours, never mind three: this wasn't a blizzard. |
 It's a good thing I like to shovel snow. The Big Storm of Ought Three dropped more than two feet of the white stuff here yesterday. But this "Big Storm of Ought Three" was no blizzard, regardless of whether it met the technical criteria of three hours of 35 mile per hour winds and 1/4-mile visibility. I don't care that it snowed for 18 hours, never mind three: this wasn't a blizzard. |
It's a good thing I like to shovel snow. The Big Storm of Ought Three dropped more than two feet of the white stuff here yesterday. But this "Big Storm of Ought Three" was no blizzard, regardless of whether it met the technical criteria of three hours of 35 mile per hour winds and 1/4-mile visibility. I don't care that it snowed for 18 hours, never mind three: this wasn't a blizzard.
Had the snow done the decent thing last night, and fallen straight down and accumulated evenly, it would barely have covered the Hakkapeliittas on my trusty Volkswagen. I should be so lucky. Finnish snow tires or no, my car is utterly entutankamenned. Only the antenna breaks the pleasing curves, the non-uniform rational B-splines [>] of wind-blown and plow-flung powder atop my (im)mobile igloo. So it's a cuppa tea and a bowl of venison pie before I bundle up, and shovel, and shovel, and shovel to my heart's content.
And then more.
I could take Mayor Bloomberg's advice to the goodfolk of Gotham [>] to just "use the subway and your sense of humor" -- but this is New England, and somebody up there is a Calvinist. We choose to shovel not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
New Enlgand: where the coercive force of shame that regulated our colonial forefathers compels us to shovel harder, better, faster, stronger. (At least faster than the guy living next door.) New England: where Tituba was the only person in Salem with a sense of humor. (And look where that got her.) New England: where well-educated people drive shitbox cars. On purpose. New England: where we love only the most melodramatic of baseball teams.
No! A piddling two feet of fluffy delight shant have us tittering like a bunch of duct-taping skraelings [>] during an ashcroftian Crayola terror alert. Not in New England. Not since '78 anyway, when the snowdrifts swarmed and multiplied and real Yankees [>] had to climb out of their second-floor windows and tunnel back through to their front doors before the dogs and children succumbed to cabin fever and ate each other.
No, since '78 any storm that doesn't make Republicans up and move (their tax shelters) to Florida, and promptly, just isn't worthy of the name: Blizzard. |
See also:
http://haardvark.blogspot.com
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