Electric Josh

Phoenix
This space notes with delight that the excellent Boston Phoenix has finally removed its amazingly inappropriate link to the Daniel Pearl decapitation video---which this space, like the rest of you, neither needed to watch nor bothered to---and has thus been readded to the sidebar. Local media and all...
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"Traffic"
From K comes word that this cute baby's first real word (other than maa and daaaa) was traffic, uttered in response to her grandmother's traffic-related lament. (We are aware that this is a fluke. Let us have our fun.)
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Snow
Back when we lived in Oklahoma nobody knew how to drive in the snow. Despite being miserably hot all summer, it would inevitably get cold enough to snow once or twice most winters. Maybe it's obvious, but snow and driving mix badly, and the mix is worse the further south one goes. A quarter inch of snow would shut Norman down pretty much until it melted. We kids didn't see any benefit other than the day off from school. There were no snowball fights or snowmen because there wasn't enough snow to do anything but slip and fall down on.

Folks in Pennsylvania dealt better with the snow, although the occasional 18-inch storm did manage to shut things down for a few days rather than just one day; there were some snowplows, but not enough to cope with something on that scale. Everyone drove slowly enough not to be killed immediately upon crashing, but still fast enough that there were lots of nonfatal crashes. Carlisle was rural enough that my 20-minute commute only doubled in length, which wasn't too bad.

But New England is supposed to be above any such delays. It snows several feet every year. People occasionally emigrate at least seasonally to Florida, but for the most part we taunt the television when it starts shrieking about 12 inches of snow coming this week. Buy three weeks worth of groceries and get a gun, kids, we're all gonna die from this snowstorm! live from in front of a drift behind someone's house.

Yet today we were treated to a dusting of snow that ground traffic to a halt everywhere near Boston. People at work were talking about three and four hour commutes, one way. Bizarre. I worked from home, which has been kind of nice.
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