Crap, it’s cold out again. Like 1° at the moment, and it’s not supposed to get a whole helluva lot warmer today, either. That, and there’s more snow coming. Like, “double digits” coming tomorrow and especially Wednesday. Oh boy. Not that I’m one to complain, of course. Well, not so much about the snow. In fact, we might as well go ahead and set a record this year. No point in wasting the 115 inches we’ve had so far, and for a measly 85 more, we can hit the 200 mark for the first time ever. I’m not too crazy about the cold, though. You know how us old folks get. Everything seems to hurt when it gets below about 15° or so, and as I was out tidying up the driveway late yesterday afternoon, it was cold and windy. Sucks.

So, apparently there’s something or other going on over in Egypt, which is one of them A-rab countries, but not one of the bad ones, ‘cuz they haven’t caused any trouble in quite a while (if you don’t count that Mohamed Atta guy). Not bad for us, anyway (which is all that counts), but not too great for the Egyptians, I guess, as they do not seem at all happy with their President.

This, of course, creates quite a dilemma for the US government. On the one hand, we supposedly espouse the virtues of democracy and all that. But that’s assuming they elect the people we want them to, and that their population consists of a small but wealthy class that makes for good consumers, and a vast underclass that exist to be a source of cheap labor. It’s OK for them to have elections, as long as they play ball the with our corporations, don’t allow any of this populist uprising horseshit, and – of course – don’t mess with Israel.

You may recall we weren’t terribly amused when democracy reared its ugly head in Palestine, and they elected Hamas (once Dubya realized that was a political party – or, as we call it, a terrorist organization – and not that paste they make out of chick peas).

Egypt hasn’t really hassled anybody since Nasser (except they won’t let us open up and explore the Hall of Records that Edgar Cayce said was under the Sphinx, and will answer all our questions about Atlantis – the bastids), and they’ve played nice with Israel.

Plus we do a fair amount of trading with them (we send them corn, and they send us natural gas and sand – a win-win). So we don’t want the people over there picking some government that isn’t gonna play ball with us, and is gonna stir up all sorts of trouble.

Especially since most of “the people” over there are poor and really can’t be trusted to do what’s best – for us.

This uprising by “the people” is also apparently a bit disconcerting for the “People’s” Republic of China, which has blocked anything related to ‘Egypt’ from its intertubes.

Of course, we’ve got more important things to worry about over here – bath salts. Yes, bath salts (and plant foods). Now Chuck Schumer has jumped on the salt wagon, and he’s looking to enact a federal ban on the synthetic substances Mephedrone and MDPV. Apparently you can get really wasted on this stuff, or something. And it can kill you. So they say, anyway. Having seen ‘Refer Madness’ a time or two, I’m not really ready to take “their” word for it (I mean, they’d have you believing LSD was bad for you, too) – though I’m not rushing out to sniff up (or whatever you do with it) a box of bath salts to test the theory, either. Not until I run out of carpet deodorant, anyway.

It’s amazing what people will do to catch a buzz (back in the porn theatre I mentioned the other day, one guy used to come in once a week, sit in the front row, and huff about six cans of K2R Spot Remover – now there’s a great way to spend your day off).

Of course, if they’d just make pot legal, people wouldn’t need to jump through all these hoops just to get high and forget the fact they have to go to work in the morning.

Speaking of which, where the hell did I put my tube of model glue?

You probably saw this the other day, but Tracy Morgan got himself into “hot water” after being goaded into saying that “Sarah Palin is good masturbation material.” Although I don’t share that opinion (hey, there’s a world wide web full of suitable inspiration for those purposes, and I think even a cursory Google search would provide you with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of better material. Still, to each his or her own, and I don’t really understand why poor Tracy (who, I hate to break the news to the professionally offended out there, is a comedian) is in trouble for his remarks. Palin is lucky that anybody thinks of her in that, ‘cuz that’s pretty much all she has going for her. Plus, her candidacy – if she actually runs for anything again, which I found doubtful – and, hell, the whole teabagger “movement” is really just an exercise in autoeroticism anyway.

One person who would definitely agree with Tracy Morgan is Jimmy McMillan, who you may remember as “The rent is Too Damn High” candidate for NYS Governor – whose candidacy was so successful (other than the part about actually winning) that he’s thrown is hat into ring for the 2012 presidential election.

Love her. Constitution. American citizen. Exercising the right to privacy. Free speech. Haters — those who don’t like Sarah Palin. That’s what they are. Sarah Palin: I love you because America gives you the constitutional right to do whatever you want to do as a woman. And people don’t think you can do because you’re a woman. They try to make a mockery out of you. But you stand up for your rights and stand strong for your rights. And don’t let anyone try to cut you down. Not only are they talking about Sarah Palin. They’re talking about me.

So, perhaps all you folks out there who think that Sister Sarah’s appeal only extends to old white guy, you’d better think again.

Of course, I think Jimmy may play for both teams, with his eye on President Obama.

McMillan urged Obama to call him up on the phone and…he called [the President] “a good-looking young guy” that he admired.

“I’m coming after his black ass,” he said of Obama.

Oh well, I slept in late this morning, and have a lot of work to do. Plus, this freakin’ MacBook is being a pain in the ass (not unusual – I really don’t see how people say these things are any better, but well, I don’t wanna start anything; they all have their quirks), so I guess it’s time to get this Sunday started.

I hate the thought of going to work tomorrow.

Have a good one.

Is there anything more annoying than people who put random quotes in their e-mails (typically as e-mail ‘sigs’) that they think are really fucking clever, and they imagine all their recipients will nod knowingly as they read them, blurting audibly, “that’s so true” – and we’re so impressed by your having included it at the end of your “LOL, this is really funny, make sure you have your sound turned on” e-mail that you forwarded to me and 200 of your closest friends without even bothering to put us in the BCC field)? Yes, of course there is. But I’ll bitch about ’em anyway.

One that was passed along recently as, presumably, “inspirational” was a quote attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (so right off the bat you know it’s gonna be bullshit):

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Yeah. Good luck gettin’ off the island with that boat, Professor. Out here in the real world, you want a boat, you better frickin’ get some people that know how to design one, and then some goddamn worker bees that can actually get the material and put the goddamn thing together.

If you’re not familiar with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (and, really, why would you be?), you might figure that he’s a sailor or ship builder or something. No, he’s a dead French author and aviator, known for writing about, well, flying. And he flew reconnaissance flights for the French Air Force in WWII (the big one), during one of which, his plane disappeared in the Mediterranean. They even put him on a 50 franc note (which would be worth about ten bucks, if they still had francs).

As far as what he knew about ships, I don’t really know. But I think it’s telling that he came to live in (and love) the desert. Probably after he couldn’t find a fucking boat.

Anyhow, Antoine failed to support Charles de Gaulle’s free french forces at first, which led Chuck to intimate that Antoine was in cahoots with the Nazis, which led to Antoine getting really depressed and hitting the bottle a lot, and there’s speculation that he committed suicide by ditching his plane into the Mediterranean Sea.

Whether it was suicide, an accident, or he got shot down, it’s probably safe to assume that, as he hit the water, he was filled with a sense of the endless immensity of the sea.

Too bad he didn’t have a fucking boat.

It was 25 years ago today that the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up seventy-something seconds (if memory serves) after liftoff. This was one of those “you’ll always remember where you were” moments for those of us who were around at the time, and we were treated to the replay ad nauseam for weeks, so that even if you weren’t watching the launch live (launches having become rather passe at that point), you felt as if you had been.

Like most people, I was running porn movies at the time. OK, maybe there aren’t actually a whole lot of people who can say that. Back 25 years ago, perverts had to pay $5 to go sit in a dark, musky-smelling movie theatre to watch porn back (though the porn home video market was on the rise, so to speak), and this is where a budding young projectionist such as myself got his or her (yes, we had a “her,” who I eventually took under my, um wing for a while, but the less I say about her the better, ‘cuz you never know when somebody you’re married to will read this stuff) start in show biz.

So, anyhow, I was up in the booth, doing my thing, which was typically reading, because – contrary to what most people think – you didn’t actually have to stand there watching the movie the whole time (good thing, as I used to work from 9:00AM – 10:30PM Mon-Fri and 10:00-4:30 on Sat, and I’d have gone insane in about a week). Though – as this was back in the days of film reels – you did tend to get know the changeover parts pretty well. But, whatever else I was doing, I had the radio on in the background, and thought I heard something to the effect of “…space shuttle exploded.”

Huh?

Clearly, I hadn’t heard that correctly. You have to understand, this was NASA and the space shuttle, and things just didn’t explode. Not since Apollo I – which, coincidentally, happened 44 years ago yesterday, which I doubt anybody bothered to even make note of, and which didn’t actually explode, but caught on fire, killing Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee, and, anyhow, they fixed that. So when I heard that, I did something I tried never to do – I left the booth and went downstairs.

I tried never to go downstairs because it gave me the creeps down there and, while I’m sure it was purely psychosomatic, my flesh used to feel as though there were little tiny bugs crawling all over it. And that was just in the lobby – no way in hell I’d ever have sat in one of the seats.

Anyhow, I went down to talk to Jimmy (nice enough guy, but talk about creepy; he had one of these eyes that used to kind of drift over and look at some point behind you and over your shoulder, so that you always got the feeling that somebody was sneaking up on you) who had the honor of selling tickets, and who also had a teevee in his cage (I would occasionally come down and watch the ticket booth for him while he used the rest room; those of us who worked there would of course use the ladies room, because there’s no way you wanted to be in the mens room with one of our customers, and, well, we didn’t get a lot of ladies in our establishment – except for the working kind), and I found out that, yes, the shuttle had indeed exploded. Nobody knew the fate of the crew, but watching the launch video replay, it seemed pretty apparent that nobody could have lived through that (of course, much later, we learned that they actually were alive – if not conscious – until they hit the water at over 200 MPH).

Most people probably remember Challenger because it was the fist time a non-Astronaut – 37-yr old NH schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe – was supposed to go up into orbit. I remember it for Judy Resnick, who was kinda cute and had a shitload of thick dark hair that looked really cool floating around in zero gravity.

And of course we all became experts in ‘O’ rings in the weeks and months to come following the accident (much as we’d become foam tank insulation experts in 2003 after Columbia disintegrated upon reentry – the eight anniversary of that coming next Tuesday).

So, anyhow, not that anybody asked (or cares), but that’s where I was half my life ago when the shuttle blew up.

So, like, it aint Friday, but it’s Thursday, which I suppose is the next best thing. Just got done spending some more money at Amazon, this time buying a new low flow shower head that was fairly cheap with a decent rating (1.5 GPM down from my current 2.5, and it promised better velocity, so we’ll see), and a couple of water saving lever thingies to attach to my bathroom faucets (that are low flow themselves). I’m on a mission to prevent water from going down the drain. When (if) warmer weather ever arrives, I plan on installing a graywater system so that my bathroom sinks, showers, and tubs (plus the laundry) will bypass the septic tank and drain into their own separate leach field. I thought about setting something up to reuse the water, but, as we don’t really live where there’s a lack of precipitation and I don’t water the lawn, it’s really not worth the expense of installing a tank and a pump and all that. We can get more than enough plant-watering water from the rain barrels. I’m also looking at buying a urinal. I figure I can mount it in the kitchen next to the frig, and kill two birds with one stone. Or at least on one trip.

I also have plans (I lack a lot of things – money, skills, brains, and ambition to name just a few – but one of the two things I’m full of is plans) to create a homemade solar water heater for domestic hot water at a minimum, and to supplement the heating hot water if I can figure out a place to build and install a big enough storage tank. My domestic hot water is heated by the heating hot water, and not only is it killing me moneywise right now, the thought of having to run the heat in the summer is pretty repugnant to me. I looked at buying a tankless heater, but that would be a hassle logistically, and I think I can build my solar system for about the same price, give or take.

Snow today. Not much here, but flights to or through NYC, Newark, Boston, etc., are all delayed or cancelled this morning. If it’ll help, I’m willing to stay home today.

Today, Janet Napolitano will announce today the end of an era – no more color-coded terror alert system. Apparently we’re moving to a point system. How will I dress myself in the morning w/o knowing what terror color we’re at? I wonder at what point level we’re advised to stay home and sit in the basement waiting for the end times?

Oh well, time to see what it costs to rent a mini-excavator, and then get ready for work. Glad to hear Mister is back home, Kat. Tell him we all say hey (and next time, how about a postcard from Siberia?).

No, I didn’t watch the SOTU address last night. No reason to, really, as I’ll be forced to endure endless recaps any time I get near the news. I gather it went “well,” which means it was filled with typically meaningless bullshit, and the only thing that has a prayer of actually happening is a “compromise” – and by that, I mean cuts to both social programs and taxes for rich people. Perhaps I missed it, but I didn’t catch anything about cutting the military or not engaging in war and “nation building” or whatever it is we’re up to these days.

To give you an idea of where we’re headed, you only need look at Republican Rex Paul Ryan’s “rebuttal.”

Basically, increase the national debt to upwards of 190% of GDP while raising taxes on 90% of taxpayers in order lo lower taxes for the top 10% (especially the top 1%, whose taxes will decrease by over 15%). Oh, and of course repeal even the crappy health care reform so that there are even more uninsured Americans (‘cuz, hey, if these slackers could somehow manage to afford a luxury like health insurance before, that 12% tax increase on people making an average of $13,000 a year should put an end to it).

Bootstraps, folks. Bootstraps.

Hey, it’s good to be rich. You knew that.

The only people who don’t know how good it is to be rich are the poor, downtrodden, persecuted rich people. Thank goodness they have the Republicans and the President of Wall St. to look out for them.

On the bright side, at least you’re not this guy, who found his car more or less a frozen block of ice, due, apparently to the combination of the cold and big ass pothole filled with water.

Speaking of the cold rain and snow, another winter storm is headed this way, and, once again, it looks like it’ll miss us and hit NYC with another 6″ or so of snow. Which is a bummer for them, but now that Mayor Bloomers seems to understand that when it snows you need to plow the streets, everything should be OK.

Crap, it’s a meeting day. Has it been two weeks already?

Ah, remember the days when the SOTU address was exciting, and we’d all huddle around the chat room and talk about what an idiot Bush was? Now, I couldn’t even tell you what time it’s on, though I do know that all the straight Republican guys (both of them) are falling all over each other to get to sit next to our Kirsten Gillibrand in this new age of civility. I mean, she’s no Olympia Snowe, but at least she presumably doesn’t growl and drool like that Bachmann chick. Of course, if you’re into that sort of thing, Michele will be giving the teabagger response to the address (hopefully while wearing a spiked dog collar). As for me, I’ll just be putting out the garbage and then going to bed, I think.

Breaking news this morning. It seems that yesterday’s airport bombing in Russia is being called an “act of terrorism.” Gee, ya think? And here I thought maybe it was a gas leak or something.

Today is yet another dental day. Now that all my old fillings have been drilled out and refilled, it’s time to move on to more exciting work. In this case, scaling and root planing. That’s probably just about as bad as it sounds. Seems that, if you blow off the dentist long enough (and, presumably if you’re predisposed to this sort of thing), you get plaque built up below the gum line, causing bone irreversible bone loss. So down they need to go to scrape the shit off. In looking at the photos on the Internet, I must say that my teeth look nowhere as bad as what’s out there, but I suppose this is necessary to keep them from getting worse. Plus, there’s that whole boat payment thing. Anyhow, my guess is that this will really suck, and I can only hope he numbs the shit out of my mouth and then gives me some drugs for later on.

Well, it’s not as cold out there this morning, but I reckon I better go see if it snowed enough to plow the driveway.

As promised, it’s cold out this morning. Like, -11° and dropping. But, since our friends up in Saranac Lake are at -34°, I won’t complain. They are, of course, making a big deal of it on the news, and about how the poor children have to wait for the bus out in the cold. Oh boo frickin’ hoo. Are these kids, or a bunch of old f*cking ladies? I don’t remember them caring about us being cold when I was a kid. Hell, we had to walk to school, and if we didn’t all bring a pocket full of coal, we didn’t have heat. OK, I may not be remembering that coal thing exactly right. But I also don’t remember feeling – let alone caring about – the cold when I was a kid. They used to have to forcibly drag me back in the house, no matter what the weather. You can bet I feel it now, though. Not just cold, either. Shit hurts.

Jack LaLanne finally croaked. And only 96, too. I always knew that whole exercise and eat right thing was just a scam. Give me the 110 year old lady who smokes cigars and does a few shots of booze every day.

Turns out, God hates Ozzy Osbourne. At least, according to the Westboro Baptist Church, whose opinions I value, and typically consult before leaving the house in morning. And they’re promising to protest him. Gosh, I didn’t even know he was gay (though he does look kinda deceased these days). I guess they’re just old school Sabbath fans who couldn’t accept Ozzy’s solo career.

If you ask me, they ought to spend their time more productively – like protesting Sammy Hagar or something.

Today is Mary Lou Retton’s birthday. I’m sure she’s a very nice person, but, for those of you old enough to actually remember who she is, haven’t you always just had the urge to smack her upside the head?

It’a also Neil Diamond’s birthday. He’s 70. And so is Aaron Neville. You ever get a look at Aaron Neville’s arms? They’re bigger around than my thighs. Yakov Smirnoff is 60, and Ernest Borgnine is 94. Now there’s a guy whose fitness routine I’m way more interested in following than Jack LaLanne’s (except for the being married to Ethel Merman part – even for a mere 32 days. You’re a tougher man than I am, Ernie. Though he did admit it was a wee lapse of judgement on his part: “Biggest mistake of my life. I thought I was marrying Rosemary Clooney”).

Oh, I know, Ernie has a bit of the old Archie Bunker in him (he wasn’t too crazy about Brokeback Mountain – “If John Wayne were alive, he’d be rolling over in his grave!” – and was a little less than kind towards the women’s rights movement: “Too many ugly broads telling me that they don’t want to sleep with me. Who wanted you anyway?”), but, well, sometimes you just have to cut people who were born during WWI a little bit of slack.

I mean, there’s a reason he’s been married 5 times (so far).

Oh well time to see about seeing about heading out into the cold.

Based on what happened to SU yesterday, it’s not looking good for the Jets in today’s AFC Championship game. It’s not unusual for the sports god to be in cahoots to make my weekend suck and send me back to work miserable and dejected (more so than a typical Monday). The East-West Shrine game was a bright spot (not that I could watch it, as we don’t get the NFL Network, and I was kinda busy anyway), as SU running back Delone Carter was named MVP. So, good for him.

Back during her campaign, our newly elected teabagger congresscritter eschewed the topic of abortion, merely stating that it “was not the issue that would define her, nor would it be a priority of her campaign.” Whoopsie! All that’s changed now as the Registered Nurse (and female, I might add, only because I so often hear that it’s the evil men of the world who want to keep women down by taking ownership of their bodies and whatnot) Anne Marie Buerkle is now a crusader.

–At 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, without prior notice, Buerkle delivered a passionate speech on the House floor about federal laws that should be changed to restrict abortions. It was among a series of speeches that evening, to a mostly empty chamber, organized by the bipartisan Pro-Life Caucus in Congress.
— On Thursday, Buerkle signed as a co-sponsor of H.R. 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.” The bill would permanently ban federal subsidies for abortion services, and also cut off federal subsidies and tax credits for any health insurance plans that include coverage of abortions. On the same day, she co-sponsored another bill that would rewrite President Barack Obama’s health care reform law to prohibit federal subsidies for abortion services.
— Buerkle plans to speak Monday to a crowd of 200,000 expected on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the March for Life rally. The annual event commemorates the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

This should, of course, come as no surprise to anybody, since Buerkle was an anti-abortion activist, and spokesbitch for Operation Rescue, whose activities in its devotion to the right to life have of course never included encouraging the murder of physicians like Bernard Slepian and George Tiller.

Well, don’t blame me. I didn’t vote for her.

I didn’t get a whole lot accomplished yesterday, but I did manage to spend a lot of money in preparation for accomplishing things. And I plowed so I could get in and out. We didn’t get a whole helluvalotta new snow, but the wind blew some pretty impressive drifts across the tundra that is my driveway, and I took the time to scrape it down and widen it out a bit (though it was a bit nippy, the wind wasn’t blowing, and the sun was shining, so it wasn’t too bad – not as bad as watching the SU game, anyway).

Today should be even colder (and really, really cold tonight), but I need to hitch up the wagon and take a trip into town for supplies at some point. And then of course there’s always laundry to do.

Well, even if the Jets lose, at least Big Love is on tonight.

Well, shit. You go to bed one night with the world a certain way, and then you wake up the next morning (assuming you consider 3:45 AM the next morning, and not the same night), and everything’s changed. I have to admit, I haven’t actually been watching Olbermann these days, but it was always nice to know he was still out there, being a barnacle in the backside of wingnuts, Fux News, and, especially, Bill O’Reilly. Now, poof. All gone (or, as the NY Post puts it: “MSNBC pulls plug on gasbag Olbermann“). Replaced by Larry O’Donnell (a nice enough fella, but considered a “player” which to me means the sort of establishment Democrat – cough-O-cough, cough-bama – that got us shitty health care reform, shitty financial reform, shitty… well, just plain shitty shit). MSNBC, if you weren’t already dead to me, you’d be dead to me now. Now, let’s hope Keith gets an uncensored show on HBO.

I’ve always liked Tom Watson (except for when he was beating Jack Nicklaus), but who knew he’d go from winning British Open Championships to winning a seat in the British Parliament? And here’s what Labor MP Watson (West Bromwich East) had to say about Rupert Murdoch and Glenn Beck:

“Glenn Beck, you are a bigot. You bring shame to your country, not because you lack balance, but because you are an unthinking buffoon. Rupert Murdoch tolerates you because you are his useful idiot. He uses you to get a foothold in the doors of the powerful. Like his phone-hacking journalists and his pugnacious leader-writers in Australia, you are expendable. Let us hope he disposes of your nasty brand of intolerance sooner rather than later.”

“It is Rupert and James Murdoch who should answer for bigots such as Glenn Beck and phone hackers such as Clive Goodman and Glen Mulcaire. They employ them. They promote them. They are responsible for them. It is time for thinking citizens in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia to unite against the Murdochs’ vicious brand of politics that masquerades as publishing.”

Eagle for Watson, I’d say.

Otherwise, it’s frickin’ cold and windy here – with even colder weather yet to come. It’s supposed to be down to -15° by the end of the weekend, and depending on where you live around here, the cold and wind are supposed to be accompanied by a foot or two of snow (not that you’ll see anybody making a big huge deal out of it, of course – we’re just thrilled to be adding on to our 37″ lead over Rochester in the Golden Snowball contest – not to mention our lead in the national Golden Snow Globe contest). In other words, it’s gonna be a bit nippy in the old tractor saddle.

There’s much I’d like to do this weekend, all of which starts with a trip to buy a shitload of plywood, lumber, and other stuff. This is most likely not going to happen. I do, however, have a dual flush adapter to install on my big monster water-guzzling toilet. The other two are water-efficient, but this one’s old-school.

It shouldn’t be a big deal (have to take the tank off), but I’ve been reluctant to start it, because, from past experience, I know that whenever you start with the happy homeowner plumbing, everything tends to turn to shit (so to speak).

But, seeing as I have the parts on hand, that project may actually get done.

There are of course a lot of other important things going on (besides tracking the official snowfall and windchill numbers). First, at noon, we’ll see if the SU-Villanova hoops game sets the NCAA on-campus record for attendance (34,616 – which was set at last year’s SU-Villanova game, which, as I recall, broke the record from the 2006 SU-Villanova game of 33,633).

This, as you might expect, is big news around here. Or, as my wife put it, “oh, is there a home game tomorrow?” 🙄

On the bright side, she’s learned the phrase “home game,” and I believe she knows that basketball is the one with the round ball, so the past 15 or so years haven’t been a total waste.

After the round ball, we move on to the pointy ball, with the East-West Shrine Game at 4:00. Normally I wouldn’t care, but we actually have 3 SU players in the game this year – a testament to the resurgence of the program, and of course our mighty win in the all-important inaugural Pinstripe Bowl.

More pointy balls (which sounds painful, depending on which way they point) tomorrow, as the Jets (whose coach, Rex Ryan, and his wife really put the “foot” in football) take on the Steelers to see who represents the AFC in the Super Bowl. As a long-suffering Jets fan, I’m not allowing my hopes to get too high here.

Oh well, time to get another cup of coffee and fire off a useless e-mail to MSNBC, and maybe sign a useless online petition.

Stay warm out there.