Author Archives: ObbieZ

20 inches, with more to come

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Looking at the picture in the previous post, taken early Saturday afternoon, I’m amazed at how little snow there is in the picture, relative to what it looks like now. By Sunday morning, the white canyon you see was filled back up with snow, and the guy with the snowblower only had enough endurance to make one pass down the block, clearing less than half the width of the sidewalk.

By the time I finished clearing the walk, there was nearly an inch of new snow on the spot where I’d started.

And they’re predicting that we get to go thru the same drill Wednesday and Thursday. Sigh.

A Saint Lives in Our Neighborhood

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sidewalk shoveled on our streetNone of this snow was there Friday afternoon. This is what our block looked like early Saturday afternoon.

The saint is the guy on the block with a well-running snowblower. We heard him go by at about 7 am. Most of the time, I get kinda cranky when someone is running noisy machinery that early on a Saturday morning. But I knew what he was up to, and went back to sleep with a feeling of intense gratitude.

This illustrates one of my favorite things about life in small-town Wisconsin: Neighbors look out for each other. Our lots are fairly narrow, so unless one lives on a corner, we are only responsible for about fifty feet of sidewalk. After a small storm, the first one out with the shovel usually clears the neighbor’s sidewalk as well as his/her own.

When the snow is a foot or deeper, clearing that fifty feet of sidewalk by hand is daunting. Mind you, it’s doable, but it’s not the trivial chore presented by lesser storms. But there always seems to be one person on every block with a well-run snowblower who finishes his fifty feet of sidewalk in about five minutes, and decides that it’s not that big of a deal for the well-oiled machine to do the entire block.

As it was, I spent about an hour re-establishing access to our back door, and carving a minimal path to the garage and the alley. So the saint down the street made sure nobody on the block would get fined by the city, but I was left with a lot of work to make our yard functional.

By the way, we woke up to about 12 inches. It let up long enough for the city to pile snowbanks four feet high between our houses and the street. As I write, the weather service has cancelled the Winter Storm Warning. Now we have a Blizzard Warning. By morning, that nice clean sidewalk should have another 10 inches, or the wind will replace everything we moved out of the way with snow drifts, or both.

So the most depressing thing is that tomorrow we get to repeat the shoveling we did today.

What it means so far

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Lightning. Thunder. And eight inches of snow in about five hours.

Never seen summer thunderstorm-type lightning in a snowstorm. Little rumbles, maybe, but not boom-booms like this.

The High Impact Winter Weather Event is far from over.

UPDATE: I was wrong about the eight inches in five hours. I went out with a ruler and measured it, and it was more like ten inches.

A High Impact Winter Weather Event

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That’s what the National Weather Service is predicting for our little neck of the woods.

In a few days, we’ll let you know what that means. Sometimes it’s interesting to read the words that the weather geeks come up with to describe a shitload of wet, blowing snow.

It makes us glad to be car-free.

A Prediction

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In the next several weeks of nooze chatter, we won’t hear about the war, the Libby trial, the dismal state of the economy, the emergency of global warming, or any of the other urgent issues that cry for public attention.

Instead, we’ll incessantly hear about the new soap opera where an astronaut drove 900 miles in diapers to steal the heart of another astronaut from yet another astronaut. If this story involved airline pilots, we’d hear nothing about it except for a little blurb in “weird news.”

This is the new distraction, folks. The infatuated astronaut will dominate the headlines for months to come. Don’t be distracted.

Keep your eye on the ball.

(or, as our dear old friend Molly used to say, “always watch the shell with the pea under it.”)

A Great Progressive Voice is Gone

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Molly Ivins left us today.

I’d write more of a tribute if I had more time tonight. The best tribute I can offer right now is to ask you to click on the link above and peruse some of her columns.

We always looked forward to a new column from Molly. She was fun to read, and she could be amusing, astute and accurate at the same time. She will be missed.

WOW

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That’s the advertising slogan for the new version of Windoze, called “Vista.” The word “Wow” was splashed all over teevee screens, newspapers and web ads on release day.

Wow, as in, “Wow, look how much this software costs!”

“Wow, look how much more memory I’m gonna need!”

“Wow, look how much slower my computer runs with this hog!”

I could continue to write a long series of equally obvious “wow” lines.

I’m sure that’s not what Micro$oft had in mind when their marketing geniasses came up with that slogan.

Hillary, Billary, NOT!

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There are a lot of reasons that Hillary Clinton must not be elected president of the United States. Someone that we read a lot, Bob Harris, presented a laundry list of problems with Hillary, but he missed the most important one: she’s a corporatist.

She’s puts up a progressive facade, but ever since she got elected as a senator from New York, she’s been a whore for Wall Street. Corporate control of our society accellerated during the reign of her husband.

If we end up with another President Clinton, things will not get better for ordinary people. They’ll just get worse a little more slowly.

The Urge to Surge

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First off, don’t get me started on how the Bush regime always tries to find a cute little euphemism to replace a distasteful (but more accurate) word like “escalation.”

The emperor recently announced that he is sending another 21,500 soldiers into Iraq. It invokes images of a primitive warlord… the kind you’d see in some of those Hope/Crosby movies from the 40’s. Things are not going the warlord’s way, so he orders that more virgins be thrown into the volcano. I could say that warlord Bush’s actions were equally stupid, but I would be wrong.

Our hypothetical warlord can be forgiven for his ignorance… that he didn’t know any better. This emperor does not have that excuse. Every thinking person in the world (outside of the oil business) is screaming that this is a Very Bad Idea.

So where is he going to find an extra 21,500 soldiers?

During World War II, President Roosevelt’s sons fought on the front lines. If this Iraq fiasco is such a “noble cause,” Emperor Bush should send his two children of military age who are fit for duty. I don’t think any of us should sacrifice our lives or that of our loved ones unless the people asking us to make that sacrifice are willing to make that sacrifice themselves.

iPhone, therefore iAm

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Watching the furious pace of gadget invention during the past decade or so, we’ve been looking forward to a Grand Convergence, where we only need to carry one gadget instead of two or three. The “iPhone” comes close.

It has everything we like about current pocket organizers: an address book, calendar, and notes, along with a means of typing information into the thing. It has everything we like about the iPod: music, pictures and videos. It can connect to the Internet, we like that. It seems to be a complete hand-held computer, with a beautiful display.

A co-worker told me that he would rather have it without the phone. I tend to agree (putting aside my distaste for mobile phones). A mobile phone is a power-intensive device, and would drain juice from the rest of this gadget’s useful functions. It might be better for the phone to be a seperate device that can communicate both ways with the expanded iPod.
I would trade the phone for a fat hard drive, and I would give it a USB port that can be a master or a slave, enabling the connection of cameras, keyboards, disk drives, and other useful stuff. I’ve read that you can’t access the battery, which means you can’t swap it for a fresh one when it burns out. The next generation of this thing needs a reliable swappable battery.

And there will be more generations. It’s exciting to imagine what this device will do five years from now. I mean, compare the current crop of iPods with the first ones that came out.

Regarding the stink over the “iPhone” name. It was all over the press that Linksys came out with something called the “iPhone” a few weeks ago, so I was a bit puzzled when Steve Jobs trotted out his own device with the same name. But then, he also trotted out the “Apple TV,” which was previewed last fall as the “iTV” (another name already attached to someone else’s product). So given that this new phone won’t be in people’s hands and pockets until June, it may end up being the “Apple phone.” (Like the TV, it’d be branded with the Apple logo with the word ‘phone’ next to it.) Maybe it was all deliberate, that Apple is letting Cisco generate more buzz for the product by suing them.

As it stands right now, this is not a compelling product for our needs, but it may be for a lot of other people. After this product evolves for a few years it may work for us, especially if we can get it without the phone.

Disclosure: we own a tiny tiny piece of Apple.