LEAVE IT TO PEEVER

Let It Snow

— Bumper sticker of the week: Nice Hummer. Sorry about the gas prices.

— Quote of the week: “We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians, or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.” Howard Zinn

— Knee deep in the snow with no place to go:

• Crap, did we ever get the snow. Looks like about 10 1/2 inches. I can tell when the dog goes out to take a dump. His butt is about 10 inches above the ground. Makes for a pretty interesting sight.

• I’m not a big fan of the snow. I never have been. I think living in Wisconsin for four years traumatized me. I wouldn’t mind a balmy 78 degrees every day. To hell with the four seasons.

• The snow makes me think about having a heart attack six years ago. Not supposed to shovel snow. Ten and one-half inches of snow on the driveway, and all I can do is watch my wife shovel and snow-blow us out. That hurts.

• A local reporter wrote a story about her trip from Chicago that took ten hours instead of the usual three. I wouldn’t have admitted that.

• I took some really nice pictures to go with this week’s column, but they came out too white.

• I bet the snow–plowers were happy. They made them some extra Christmas money. It’s hard to put that much snow somewhere. It just don’t fit. I could tell them where to put it, but I don’t think that would be a good idea. It would all end up in front of my driveway.

• We got some piles of snow high enough to ski down, but then, that would look pretty stupid.

• I am making the best out of a bad situation. Turning lemons into lemonade. I’m making whiskey slush out of the snow. Southern Comfort, orange juice, lemonade, tea, sugar, and snow. Put it in the ice cream maker until it stops spinning. Start drinking, and pretty soon you forget about the snow. Revenge is sweet.

— Simplicity: Simplicity goes well with a lot of things. Wisdom and simplicity are closely related. Spirituality and simplicity go hand in hand. Simple living puts you right next to the mystery, the beauty. I guess that’s why it’s so hard. A simple thing, simplicity, yet so hard to accomplish. What can you do to simplify your life?

— Carmen Viana: A three part series on Carmen. I’m personally not that interested, but I thought the reporter did a fairly good job. She was a short-skirted, hot Latino who got the big boys drooling. We could have saved a lot of money by sending them to Big Al’s. I’d sooner see a three–part series on how the BNSF screws us, or how about one on how GREDA has been a massive failure. A three–part series on how we screwed Carmen Viana wouldn’t be real bad.

— Democrats reeling: Apparently we have some rather fickle Democrats on our roster. Norm needs to be weeding these guys out. Rule #1: Never, ever, vote against the party’s nomination for chairman. This is one partisan act that is written in stone. Anyway, the caucus picked a candidate, and that should be it. Basically, it doesn’t matter how, as long as five people thought it was fair. Hell, they don’t even need to agree that it was fair, just as long as five votes were counted for one candidate. It’s no one else’s business, particularly Don Cooper’s. He should stick to reporting about his own party’s caucus, where Allan Pickrel wrestled away the nomination from Wayne Saline. Again, it really doesn’t matter how, so long as he got four votes. As far as suing him over his reporting, or slander, it would be a serious waste of time and money. When you stand up to become a public servant, you open yourself up to anyone taking a cheap shot at you. Particularly the media. Court after court has given the press the benefit of the doubt, even in some instances when the reporting was blatantly slanderous and inaccurate. I think the Democrats’ time would be better spent trying to figure out who is actually a Democrat in the supposed Democratic majority on the board. It took the Republicans over 100 years before they had a defection, giving the Democrats the chairmanship of Knox County for the first time, ever. It took the Democrats two years to give it back.