Well we got our first real snow out of that last batch.  Even if I hadn’t seen it I could have told you from the roar of the snow blowers and the scrape of the plow.

While I was growing up we had a very difficult driveway to shovel.  It was made of gravel stuck together with asphalt and the gravel made it impossible slide your shovel along so it was always a pain in the ass.

Still I considered it a good snowfall if the twin piles at the end of the driveway were high enough to make good forts out of.

We’d do the whole snowman thing too, but it wasn’t like we ever had the kind of winters that you could put it up in November and say goodbye in March.

Usually you don’t get really permanent cover until mid January and by the end of February it was warming up again, at least to the extent you’d get a couple of good rains that would turn everything kind of crusty and grey as all those asphalt covered pieces of gravel that you’d scraped out of the driveway and thrown in the snow piles peeked out again.

Used to love the first mow in the spring too.  Don’t stand in front of the grass exhaust unless you want to get stung with chunks of gravel.

One tradition of the south I really like is Waffle House.  If you’re not acquainted with them they’re basically grill joints that only serve breakfast food 24/7.  Waffle House is always open.

They’re also pretty cheap.  For a couple of bucks you can stuff yourself full of greasy goodness.

When I travel it’s not that I don’t eat fast food, it’s that I want to eat something different from the ubiquitous McKing crap.

So Bojangles and Sonic, if you know where to look even here in the Northeast you can track down an A & W stand.

When I travel to places I go to a lot, I’ve got an agenda that revolves around cheap gas stations and food.  I like Sbarro’s pizza OK and fortunately it’s the kind of thing that’s easily found and quick to purchase.  I hate to spend longer than 10 minutes from Highway to Highway because that really shows up in your elapsed time more than the speed you drive because you’re basically standing still.

Driving is relaxing too.  I’m an AM guy and a summer’s drive with the Mets on the radio can be quite enjoyable.  Not much into music for some reason, perhaps because I’ve DJed a lot and I don’t much like today’s plastic celebrity artists.

I’d rather take what the road gives me though than hook up an cassette, cd, or ipod.  If I’ve heard it before I’ve heard it.  My Aunt on the other hand swears by books on tape and I’ve ridden with her and not been bored- it was new to me.  One thing I do wish I could listen to again is my copy of Alice In Wonderland as read by Cyril Ritchard.  Unfortunately it’s on vinyl.

Well I won’t pretend I’m not sitting here watching new episodes of Shin Chan instead of Olbermann, but I’ve already seen that once and the last half is so so.

Anyway it reminded me of some of the earliest Pony Parties where I used a Shin Chan YouTube to set the right mood.  I’ve seen them again recently when I was looking at some other older stuff.

Finding old stuff is kind of hard unless we label it correctly.  Then we can use tags to find them and bookmark them.

RiaD has a spot on idea that we should make all the series diaries here a little easier to find, one or 2 buttons away.  If you’re an author of one or participate in one I’d like you to please take some time and go through your back catalog and see that everything is tagged to your satisfaction.

I don’t want to initiate any tag warfare here.  For the most part it’s impossible.  The only people who can change your tags are the same ones who can edit your essays- you and all the Board Members.

What I would like you to do is regularly check back and make sure your work is properly cataloged in the library here.

I’ll start by saying I find USAToday an example of everything bad and wrong about today’s print media.  Well maybe not everything, WaPo is worse because they’re also dishonest.  But USAToday is deliberately designed (and has been since it’s inception) to be the McEyewitness News of Newspapers, a pile of print for you to step in on the way out of your room at the Marriott in the morning.  Reading it takes no longer than a cup of coffee and a danish.

But lots of people do because it’s free and a step up from a local ‘shopper’ newsprint magazine, so I occasionally check their opinion section to get the pulse of what’s supposed to be mainstream.

Today one of their opinions was No torture, no need to destroy videotapes.  Whoever wrote this has no doubt that the tapes would make us look bad-

Had the tapes ever gotten out, they might have made the Abu Ghraib prison photos look tame. Imagine the propaganda value Osama bin Laden could reap from video of Arabs struggling in pain as Americans subjected them to waterboarding or other torture. The fact that the prisoner might have been a murderous thug would be lost in the revulsion and condemnation of the United States for barbarism.

Then again the prisoner might not have been a murderous thug, just a low level wacko, but I digress.

Like all things USAToday it’s a very quick read and I encourage you to do so.  The author mostly gets it right.  “The original sin was the torture itself, not the tapes or their destruction.  Spy agencies don’t get to write their own laws.”

What I think the author misses though is how much seeing these tapes would inflame not only Arabs, but Americans.

Who among us, a society that buys its meat shrink wrapped in plastic at best, in microwavable breaded nuggets more often, really wants to see sausage made?

I’ll tell you who.  The 30%.  Dogfighting, executions, we’re Romans and we deserve the best circuses to display the power and wealth of our empire!

It puts me in mind of later empires too, where dictators and their sycophants giggle and eat popcorn while flickering images of state traitors dance at the end of piano wire nooses like obscene puppets.

Do you suppose W watched these tapes?  How many times?  Special bonus question- how many times for Saddam’s execution?

I must admit I’m pretty tense and nervous this time of year.  There are incredible numbers of deadlines, much more than usual and an impossible amount of work to be done.

The fact that there is so little daylight to go buzzing around in contributes to the sense of urgency as do the cars and crowds everywhere at every time of day.  I find it almost claustrophobic.

I have a whole crowd of places to be and people to see too.  Folks want me to hang out with them for some reason, so the mail is full of invitations most of which I have politely declined.  I’ve done the 4 parties in 3 days Thanksgiving to New Years about as much as I really need to satisfy myself.

Family is of course not easily put off and this year as usual the Gilmores will visit my sister and her kids for a few days right on the 25th.  It may not be so easy for me to get internet access right from the 23rd to the  26th.  After that I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to spend some time with my Aunty Mame (who really likes this blog much better than the orange one, says it’s more relaxing) in the frozen north.

She has good ‘net, I’ve used it before, the problem is that the TV is across the hall in the other room and if I turn it up too loud it disturbs everyone else.

And of course I watch TV all.  the.  time.

That’s why it grieves me so much to bring you the following discouraging news from Reuters on the Writer’s strike-

Prolonged writers strike a nightmare for TV biz

By Paul J. Gough, Reuters

1 hour, 12 minutes ago

Interestingly enough (to me) this will be my 155th essay on DocuDharma.

It’s kind of a little unfair to pfiore to really talk about baseball (which she had suggested as a topic when she asked me to do witr), but that sent me digging and really wishing for a good index search.  Maybe next revision which may come sooner or later depending on how pacified’s open source project is going.

Anyway pfiore remembered an essay where I talked about baseball and the one I think she is after is the one I wrote just before one of our Openings (there were about 6 or 7, as budhy got settled in his new digs).

So Today’s The Big Day!

When I think about blogging as art I see it as halfway between a Magazine and a TV Channel.  You have an audience for the Gilmore Girls and when they tune in they expect to see it.

But also a Community blog is a team effort, the kind of artistry you see on a Baseball Diamond between 9 people who love the game they play.  Sort of a dance, but competitive.

First day of the season.  Home opener.  Score is nothing nothing and anything can happen.

That said I expect we’ll get our asses kicked and be cleaning up the mess for weeks, but I love this game.

It’s a long season, 162 games at least.  I’m not disappointed in the talent, but we’ve never played together before and you can only expect miscommunication and errors.

It’s all good.

As we learn together we will get stronger as a team.  Pretty soon we’ll be turning those double plays and figure out where the bumps in the field are.  We have the pitching to succeed and the bullpen to close.

Now we just have to start scratching out the runs.