The geese were really on the move yesterday, with squadron after squadron of Canadian geese flying overhead. Yesterday it was mostly snow geese (the kind that are all white except for black wing tips – as opposed to the snow geese that are “blue” with white heads), though there were plenty of “regular” ones flying about too. I took this to be a sure sign that spring has finally sprung.

And then I woke up to fresh snow on the ground this morning. Not a lot – maybe an inch or snow of actual accumulation, but it’s somewhat disheartening anyway. It may actually be snowing right now, even. It’s too dark to tell if it’s snow mist or fog.

They claim it’ll hit 60 on Tuesday, but I’ll believe it when I see it. These things tend to get revised down as time goes on.

I don’t usually bother with the Sunday Boobleheads anymore, but I happened to notice that the Press the Meat roundtable will include Svante Myrick, who was the youngest person ever to be elected Mayor of Ithaca, NY in 2011 at the age of 24. Ithaca, if you don’t know, is not only a gorgeous area (seriously, there are lots of gorges), but it’s a liberal bastion and home to Cornell, Ithaca College, Tompkins County Community College, and the Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, which is the North American seat of the Dalai Lama (I don’t really know what that means, but it sounds good).

Myrick was first elected to public office at the tender age of 20, when he was elected Alderperson (no, not Alderman – this is Ithaca we’re talking about here).

So it’ll be interesting to see what he has to say and if they actually let him talk. Not interesting enough for me to watch, though.

Ah, it’s brightening up out there and, yes, it looks like it’s very foggy out there. I can’t see the corn field next door (it’s been soybeans for the past couple of years, so I’m anticipating corn this year), so it looks pretty thick. Hopefully it’ll all burn off before I have to do my weekly shopping over in Pixley. I blew it off last week, and I need food for the week (and gas, too).

I’m looking less forward to work this week than I normally am. Not only do I have the “support” duty this week (our users appear to have suffered a collective 30-point drop in IQ over the past six months or so – and they were barely above double-digits to start with), but it’s also stupid monthly meeting week on Wednesday, and it’s been cancelled so many times that if we actually have one this week, it’s gonna be even more uncomfortable than usual.

Plus there’s this whole not being able to walk thing. Kinda sucks.

It wasn’t exactly a picture-perfect day yesterday, but we’ll take it. For one thing, it was warm. I don’t know how warm officially, but it got into the 50s and fifties are better than twenties (temperature-wise – not so much when it comes to age), and it didn’t rain as much as they said it would, though it started raining late again late in the day. So the sump pumps will be humping pretty good by the end of the weekend, I reckon. And, hey, looks like there may be another storm or two before we’re done with the snow. Stay tuned.

I was looking over there at the “top commenters” and I can’t help but be amazed by the late, great, Fred. I went in search of his final comment, which appears to have been the first one on May 15, 2008. Nearly six years ago – and he managed to compile darn near 11,000 comments in only two and a half years with us. At that rate, if he was still around today he’d be up to around 30,000 comments.

It’s a shame he was never able to say goodbye. Makes me think I should schedule a “death” post that I can schedule to be published a week into the future and then go in weekly or daily or something and push the date back again – something like, “if you’re reading this, it must mean I’m dead. Either that, or I forgot to change the publish date.” It all depends on how I croak, I guess.

If I buy it in a car accident on the way to work or something (please let it be on the way in, and not the way home!), hopefully the wife will put something up, like “Free at Last!” If I’m diagnosed with cancer or something, then of course I’ll “live blog” it every step of the way until I succumb.

But odds are it’ll be a stroke that’ll either kill me outright or turn me into a veggie burger that can’t do much more than crap the bed and pray to a god I don’t believe in for a merciful death (though by then I might have had my “come to Jesus” moment, so you never know).

Well, I guess I better have another cuppa joe.

So, you maybe already know this and I assume it works for everybody but if you buy shit at Amazon (and, really, who doesn’t?), you should get there by going to smile.amazon.com. They’ll then offer to set you up with a charity (or you can pick your own – I went with the CNY SPCA, ‘cuz it’s a no-kill shelter) and some rather small portion of your purchase goes to the charity (hey, it’s better than nothing). So do that.

Rumor has it it’s gonna warm up today (after a potential record low – it’s 15° out there right now, and we need to get below 13 to set a record). Of course, if you’re in New England or Atlantic Canada, things kinda suck for you with blizzard conditions and 100+ mph wind. Sorry to hear about that, but better you than me.

Then of course down in the south there’s some severe thunderstorm type stuff coming up, and I reckon it’ll be tornado season pretty soon. Not to mention the flooding and mudslides. And drought. Always something to look forward to.

Here, it appears we’re going to lose the Golden Snowglobe title to those evil denizens of Erie, PA who are currently 2″ ahead of us. It’s something we’ll just have to live with all summer – assuming we ever get summer.

Anyhow, they’re talking about some crazy temps like over 40° today, which would be most welcome (except I don’t know where I’ll get my foot snow from – already running low on the front porch). I know there have been worse winters, but, damn, this one seems like it’s been going on forever.

I caught something or other on the teevee the other day – don’t recall what it was – but there were several people who used a phrase that really irks me: “graduated high school.” As in, “I graduated high school in 1978.”

FROM. Graduated FROM high school. I dunno why, but that really bugs me. I hear it so often, I had to look it up ‘cuz I figured maybe it was me that was wrong. Nope. It’s “from.”

I mean, I’m no expert and make my fair share of mistakes (I prefer to think of them as “typos”) but Jesus Christ.

Sorry, just had to get that off my foot chest.

Monday at work, I got a new PC. This is a good thing, ‘cuz the old one was from 2009, was running the soon to be EOL’d Windows XP, had a crappy Core Duo CPU, and a measly 2GB of RAM. So now I’ve stepped up to an eight core CPU with 8 GB of RAM. It’s also a bad thing because I have to get everything I use restored and working again (a chore made more difficult by trying to find 64-bit equivalents for everything). I’m still struggling to get things working even today.

The other thing that was bad was having to repeatedly crawl under my desk to plug and unplug things. It must have stressed my foot a lot, because I woke up in horrible pain Monday night, and around midnight had to get up, go outside, and get a block of snow/ice to throw in my soaking bucket. I kept the sucker on ice for about a half hour, and between that and 800 mg of ibuprofen, I was able to hobble back to bed and if not sleep, and least not writhe around in pain. I think I did finally get an hour or so more of sleep after that.

Things seem a bit better this morning. I did wake up at about eleven last night and had to take a fistful of ibuprofen (I was prepared, though – I made sure to put water and my bottle of bills next to my bed so I wouldn’t have to walk far), and we’ll see how it goes today. If I could just stay at home and keep my foot on ice, it wouldn’t be so bad. But not only do I have to go sit at my crappy desk, it’s my late day, too.

Oh well, at least the big nor’easter that had everybody on the East Coast all worked up isn’t going to do much to us here, as they say it’ll stay well east of us. Instead, it’s merely only going to be “bitterly cold” with snow showers.

It was an emotional day (sort of) yesterday, as I bid adieu to my van, which I sold to my friend. It’s a 1998 Chevy Astro (AWD) that I bought in 1999 for the purpose of driving out to Minneapolis for my stepdaughter’s high school graduation. Mostly I got it so we could bring little Siggy (who was only six months old at the time, though not really all that little by then) with us.

We got back from that trip only to find that my mother was in the hospital – turned out she didn’t leave there alive, but at least I got to say goodbye. From there I went on to quit my job and take a similar one at SU so I could finish up my degree, and within about five months, I left my greasemonkey days behind and got a job as the Web Guy at the College of Law. And the rest, as they say is history. I went from being a young, healthy, active working man to a fat old cripple in what seems like a matter of days.

So, anyway, that van has a lot of sentimental value to me, but it mostly sat where it was because I hardly ever use it (in fact, I don’t think I’ve driven it since August or September). So now it will go to a good home and a good owner who will take better care of it than I ever did. Plus I can go visit it once in a while.

But today, it’s out in the cold and off to work.

Whether you wanted to or not, you’ve probably heard there’s a basketball tournament going on (unless you’re my wife, who I’m pretty sure has no idea). You might also have heard that during a game between Oklahoma State and Gonzaga last night, CBS announcer Andrew Catalon (an SU grad, I’m sorry to say) referred to OK St.’s strategy of fouling Gonzaga’s Przemek Karnowski (who’s a crappy free throw shooter) toward the end of the game as the “Hack-a-Polack” defense. Even better, Catalon’s broadcast partner for the game was Mike Gminiski. As a fan of alliteration, I’d have probably gone with “Poke-a-Polack.”

Despite the fact that this is how guys tend to talk to each other in private (being perpetually childish, we tend to give each other shit – I think this is part of the reason why women can have a tough time in historically male-dominated professions. They expect us to act like professionals, and we act like adolescents. Of course, it’s all part of our charm) Andrew really should have known better. I assume Catalon comes from “Catalonia” so I wonder how Andy would like the “Smack-a-Spic” defense?

That would probably have gotten him in even more trouble – as would “Whack-a-Wop”, “Deck-a-Dago”, “Grab a Guniea”, “Clobber-a-Kraut”, “Mangle-a-Mick”, Jab-a-Jew”, or “Nail-a-N….” Well, that last one would get him thrown off the air permanently, I bet.

This all reminds me of the 1968 (I think – maybe ’72) summer Olympics. One of the basketball announcers on ABC (have no idea what his name was – I mean, shit, that was like 45 years ago after all) went on and on one night about the “Polack team.” I mean, he said it like 20 times at least. I can remember my dad and me laughing more and more every time he said it.

The the next night he offered a heartfelt on-air apology that went something like “I had no idea that wasn’t what you called them people.” :rofl2:

It was right up there with “as God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

And then it was all over and everybody forgot about it. Of course that was before the Internet and YouTube (hell, it was even before regular people had VCRs – which you younger folks will have to ask your grandparents about) so you could do something stupid in public and not have to suffer eternally for it.

You also didn’t have the huge number of perpetually outraged people out there looking for something to be outraged at (the bible thumpers are currently pissed at Neil deGrasse Tyson for not giving creationism “equal time” on the new Cosmos series – when they find out Seth MacFarlane in one of the Executive Producers, their collective heads will implode I say “implode” because that’s what happens when you poke a hole in a substance that contains a vacuum).

Plus I bet 43% of American households were going, “hell, that’s what I thought you called them people, too” – my wife will tell you how when she and her first husband moved to Poplar Bluff Missouri people wanted to meet her husband because they’d “never seen a Jew before.”

Oh well, let’s hope those other fellas from Syracuse have a better night tonight than Andrew had yesterday. It’s still not very warm around here (though not only are we in the lead for the Golden Snowball, we have now overcome what was once more than a one-foot deficit and are tied with Erie PA for the Golden Snowglobe award – and there’s more snow a-comin’), and winning definitely takes the edge off the cold.

I get e-mails every morning from YouTube. Not sure why – I don’t recall signing up for them – but maybe they send them to everybody. Anyhow, they make suggestions about what videos you might want to check out, and this morning one of the ones they suggested was Jonathan Winters and Dean Martin. From there I went to Jonathan Winters on Johnny Carson. Then Jonathan Winters and Robin Williams on Johnny Carson, then Robin Williams on Johnny Carson. I basically spent 35 minutes or so laughing. Then it was time to go to work.

Well, now here I am, and I aint laughing anymore. Plus I’m stuck in this shithole until 5:00 tonight. Sucks.

Speaking of things that suck: Bill Donohue. You perhaps heard that Guinness, Sam Adams, and Heineken decided to boycott this year’s St. Patrick’s Day parade in NYC because they (the parade people) don’t allow LGBTQMO people to march. Or at least not under their own banner. Or something.

Well now, self-appointed Head Prick of the American Catholic Church – Bill “Don’t Call Me Phil” Donohue has decided to counter that boycott with his own boycott, and is telling anybody that will listen to boycott those beers.

So if you’re a good little American Catholic, you better start chasing your Jameson (pronounced “gem-son”) with a pint of Smithwick’s (pronounced “smiddicks”).

Oh well, back to work, I guess.

Normally I’d be bummed that it’s Monday, but I had the foresight to take today off (which is nice, ‘cuz it’s, like, 4° out there at the moment and it’s only supposed to get up to twenty, which is some twenty degrees below normal). I actually didn’t remember taking today off until last Thursday, when I was going through the calendar looking for days to take off in the coming year (I think I mentioned, I have to burn 19 vacation days and 4 comp days just to avoid losing anything), so that was a pleasant surprise.

As if the news that Donald Trump won’t be running for NY Guv wasn’t sad enough, now comes word that Fred Phelps is on the verge of death. Lucky for him hell is just some made up bullshit meant to scare children (and the intellectually infantile) into submission, or Satan would be whomping up a special place for him right now (an eternity of anal penetration with a hot poker no doubt in store for him).

Much as some part of me would love to protest his funeral carrying a “God Hates Phelps” sign, in the end he really isn’t worth it. May he rot in the ground, just like the rest of us. The sooner the better.

If you need to fly somewhere, well, good luck with that. First there’s that whole missing Malaysia flight (personally, I think it went to some island chop shop, and is currently being sold for parts – though I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually out there flying over the 1939 World’s Fair trying to find Idlewild), then in yet another scene straight out of the Twilight Zone, a gremlin ripped off part of the wing of a Delta 757 headed for Atlanta.

I think I’ll take the train (or better yet, just stay home).

So, it’s St. Patrick’s Day. A day that’s not really a big deal in Ireland, and where they don’t eat corned beef (cabbage, maybe). That’s ‘cuz the goddamn English exported all the beef and the other decent food, leaving nothing but turnips and potatoes. And as we know, when the potatoes turned to shit, a million Irish starved to death and another million emigrated. In fact, by the turn of the century, the population of Ireland was damn near cut in half.

So, anyway, today we celebrate St. Patrick, an Englishman whose great claim to fame was driving the snakes out of Ireland in the fifth century (which sounds like a neat trick, until you realize there weren’t actually any snakes in Ireland to begin with – not for thousands of years, anyway).

Still, Patrick was considered a great man and the Patron Saint of Ireland. Besides the snake thing, he was kidnapped as a kid and forced into slavery in Ireland, then escaped and went back to England and became a priest or whatever they called themselves back in the 400s and then actually came back to Ireland again – which kind of shows a certain lack of common sense in my book, but, hey, who am I to argue?

So, anyway, to all the Irish and Irish at heart, have a happy day. Everybody else, go Phelps yourself.

Seo sláinte an tséitéara, an ghadaí, an trodaí, agus an óltóra!
Má dhéanann tu séitéireacht, go ndéana tú séitéireacht ar an mbás,
Má ghoideann tú, go ngoide tú croí mná;
Má throideann tú, go dtroide tú i leith do bhráthar,
Agus má ólann tú, go n-óla tú liom féin.

In a huge disappointment to tens (if not hundreds) of New Yorkers, Donald Trump announced (via Twitter, natch) that he will not run for Governor.

While I won't be running for Governor of New York State, a race I would have won, I have much bigger plans in mind- stay tuned, will happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 14, 2014

I’m guessing his “much bigger plans” are to (once again) not run for President in 2016.

Yes, despite an NBC 4 New York/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll showing that Governor Snotball would trounce the Orange Orangutan (he would actually fare worse than Carl Paladino), Trump is pretty certain he could have turned this thing around (I’m guessing he just wanted to spend more time with his wives and children).

• Against Carl Paladino, Cuomo has the support of nearly seven in ten voters — 68%. This compares with 25% for Paladino. Eight percent are undecided. Last fall, 67% backed Cuomo while 24% were for Paladino. Nine percent, then, were undecided.
• Cuomo — 70% — trounces Donald Trump — 26% — by 44 percentage points. Five percent are undecided. In that previous survey, 70% supported Cuomo compared with 24% for Trump. Seven percent were undecided.

It seems that NYers have a rather poor opinion of Donnie.

68% of people in NYC have an unfavorable opinion of him, 59% of Upstate folks don’t like him, and 55% of those in the “Suburbs” think he’s a dick (I’m not sure what this poll considers the suburbs – apparently Upstate doesn’t have ‘burbs – just pigs, cows, goats, corn fields, and the occasional farmer).

The list of people who don’t like him is really rather impressive (makes you wonder why the douchebag has a teevee show and the media pays so goddamn much attention to him).

Black people don’t like him, white people don’t like him, Latino people don’t like him, non-white people don’t like him, men don’t like him, and women don’t like him. Young people don’t like him, old people don’t like him, middle aged people don’t like him, rich people don’t like him, and poor people don’t like him. People who were contacted on landlines don’t like him, and people on cell phones don’t like him either.

Basically, people really don’t like him, and we’re not talking about any 51/49 splits here – I mean, people making over $100,000 a year hate him even more than people making less than $50,000 a year (63-37 vs. 58-38).

The only groups where his favorables are greater than his unfavorables are Republicans (60-37) and Conservatives (63-43). These are not the voting groups that are gonna get you elected to statewide office here in NY (I think he’d have a good shot at running for mayor of Branson, Missouri, though).

Without the threat of Trump on the ballot, I’m officially announcing that I, too, will suspend my campaign for Governor (a race, I might add, that I would have won – or at least gotten more votes than Trump).

Unless Carl Paladino decides to run again – then I might have to reconsider.

I spent a lot of time earlier this morning writing some stuff but then I read it and realized it was really long and dumb, so I ditched it (not that what’s coming next isn’t dumb – just not quite as long). It did lead me to look up the difference between a nautical mile and a regular mile, though, and I’ve been meaning to do that for years now (something I really should have already known, but I guess that one slipped through the cracks). I still haven’t found which came first (though I suspect it was regular miles, or nautical miles would be called miles and the other kind would be called “land miles” or something.

In case you’re curious, a nautical mile is the distance you’d travel if you went one minute of one degree around the Earth at the equator (which is about 1.15 miles). Why it was necessary to come up with this measure (and then call it a “mile”) I have no idea. Seems like they should have just stuck with what a regular mile was and be done with it.

Of course the English had to go and fuck with the mile to make it a messy measurement, too. The Romans kept it simple at 5,000 feet (though they apparently had slightly smaller feet back then). But then the English decided that a mile should be eight furlongs (a furlong being a rather imprecise measure of how far a horse could pull a plow before having to take a break – actually, I think they just turned around and went the other way at that point).

Somebody eventually nailed that down to being 40 rods. Ah, rods. Well, a rod is 16 ½ feet. Why 16.5 and not 16 or 17 (or maybe even 20), you ask? Because a rod is equal to 11 cubits (not 10, not 12, but 11). I mean, duh, right? It’s also the same length as a perch and a pole (whether on purpose or by happenstance, I’m not sure). And a chain is four rods. But I digress.

So, anyway, 16.5 x 40 x 8 = 5,280. Quite obvious, really.

So I guess I’m ready for Jeopardy now.

Not sure how much snow we got yesterday (never mind over night), but what we did get was very wet and heavy. The ride home wasn’t all that bad, thanks mostly to the fact that the companies around here that give a shit about their employees allowed people to leave work early, so traffic wasn’t bad. The roads were pretty shitty, though, so the going was slow.

I managed to blast my way into the driveway and get to the garage (but it wasn’t easy), and then got on my tractor and plowed. At this point the wind had really kicked up, so I was frozen stiff by the time I was done (in the case of my knees, quite literally. It was all I could do to walk back out and grab the garbage can). With the snow so deep and heavy, it took me over an hour out in the driving horizontal snow to plow, and I was caked with ice from hat to boot.

I must be getting old, ‘cuz I was literally shivering and had to sit under a couple of blankets (one of them electric) for about an hour just to get back to feeling normal.

This morning it’s about eight degrees out there, and the wind is still pretty fierce. I think the snow is close to done, though, and I’ll need to get out there and plow a path to the road so I can make my merry way to work later on.

This certainly wasn’t the biggest snow storm we’ve ever had, and if it was December or January, it would have been no big deal. Something about having to put up with this shit in March, though, that makes it really annoying.

There were a couple of warm spots yesterday, though. First, Notre Dame lost its first-ever ACC tournament game. It’s always nice to see ND lose, and the fact that this most likely officially relegates them to the NIT is just icing on the cake. Likewise, Georgetown lost to lowly DePaul. No NCAAs for you, Hoyas!

Oh well, time to get out there and plow, I guess.

Think spring!