January 2003 Archives

Cats

My wife and I own two cats. Or rather, there are two cats in our apartment who permit us to use the place on a somewhat regular basis in exchange for doing chores around the house. Now, when I was growing up, I was never much of a cat person because most of the felines I knew were, well, typical cats - aloof, not all that interested in affection, and rather destructive of the world around them. But suffice it to say that things have turned around. I know many pet owners say the same thing: "My cat/dog/turtle/wildebeest is different from the others", but it seems to me that for the most part, our two cats are completely unaware that they're supposed to be aloof, unaffectionate and destructive.

For some reason, each of the cats prefers the lap of the opposite-sex human in our household - Bogus (our older, female cat) always finds my lap wherever it happens to be, even if it doesn't exist at the time; it's like she's a lap dowser, walking around with a Y-shaped rod in search of potential lap areas. And Nacho, our younger, male cat, is always following my wife around and eventually settling next to her. A lot of people will tell you that if you want unconditional love from an animal, get a dog. Not necessarily. While I wouldn't go the wildebeest route (at least, not until we move into a bigger place), our cats have provided plenty of affection. Case in point - last night, I'm getting ready for bed and slathering on this stuff that's supposed to keep my skin from looking like the Atacama Desert (I have freakishly dry skin. I could jump into a full pool and it'd be empty by the time I reached the bottom, such is my capacity for absorbing moisture). Standing in front of the mirror in this weird position, trying to make sure I get every last square inch I can reach on my shoulder. There's absolutely no lap in sight, and I'm sure this cream smells absolutely horrible to the cats because it smells good to humans (ever notice that animals and humans have completely opposite senses of smell? We could drop packets of our cat food on our enemies and they'd surrender before long). Yet there's Bogus, circling my legs and bonking her head against me like I'm made of tuna and she hasn't eaten in a month.

Cats also seem to exhibit the "Hey, this is a toy!" syndrome most commonly seen in one year olds. You've seen this behavior before - some kid celebrating his first Christmas has more fun with the wrapping paper and packaging than the actual present enclosed therein (or, if you were at our after-wedding present-opening, I played with the wrapping paper while my wife festooned herself with various bows and ribbons. It was one crazy event, I tell you.) But this morning, after watching Nacho bat yet another strange object around the floor, I hereby present a list of "toys we haven't bought for our cats":
- Ping pong balls. These are always fun because one swat sends them rolling, and they're just big enough that they can't get their mouths around them.
- The small floor brush attachment to our vacuum cleaner. The cats are (understandably) petrified of the vacuum cleaner itself, so apparently they avail themselves of the opportunity to beat up on its attachments.
- Discarded water bottles. The cats seem to prefer Poland Springs. It is, after all, what it means to be from Maine.
- The screw-top nut that go on spindles of CDs. I've picked the same one up a dozen times and taken it back to my office, yet it always ends up in their water bowl.
- A windscreen for one of my microphones. You've seen them on TV interviewers' microphones - they make the mics look like they have Afros. They must remind our cats of some odd creature.
- Crumpled-up paper bags. Every Sunday morning we get donuts and coffee, and without fail, we always end up crumpling the bag up, which brings the cats running. Not sure how safe it is with the remnants of chocolate frosting clinging to the inside, but no side effects yet...
- Pens, nail clippers and other small objects resting at the edge of our coffee table. We'll be watching TV, and we'll see a pair of ears stick up over the edge of the table, followed by a paw, and they'll knock it to the ground, then whack it around until they're convinced it's dead. Always fun to step on in the middle of the night.

Dumperrific


Some confessions of a not-so-dangerous mind...



My brother Matt is now officially a substitute teacher, and I am officially old. He had been doing some temp work around town after finally graduating from college (he was on a somewhat leisurely plan) when my parents threw a New Year's Day open house and invited the neighborhood. Apparently word got out that his latest temp job was about to end, and he was swarmed with suggestions from the local populace. One couple was particularly helpful - the husband is a recently-retired police officer while the other has deep ties in the local school system. I'm not sure if Matt is pursuing the officer slant but he wrote me an email today to say that he subbed at my old high school last week. Apparently there are only eight teachers left over from my days at Cape Elizabeth High School, which for some reason shocked me no end. Apparently the only remaining vestiges are a few English teachers, the Spanish department, a health teacher and a history teacher. Combine that with the fact that it dawned on me last week that now that it's 2003, my ten-year high school reunion is this year, and that equals the beginning of me officially feeling old. Hopefully it won't be quite as eventful as John Cusack's in Grosse Pointe Blank - the publishing business just isn't as, um, risky as the hitman business. More on my emerging liver spots as this story develops.



Speaking of the publishing business, I just got back from a few days in Texas. The visit was fairly successful - I went down to Austin with a co-worker to kick off a project and apparently they want to give us even more work based on the impression they got from us. Always a good thing. I also managed to see a show while I was down there - Tony Furtado opened for Derek Trucks Band at Antone's. Not a great place to see a show (weirdly laid out; it reminded me of Lupo's in Providence) but in my humble opinion, Tony Furtado put on a better show than DTB did. I'd never seen either before but the opener just had a much better energy while the main act was a little too laid-back and spacy for my tastes. But the weirdo highlight of my visit was eating at this Tex-Mex place (Güero's - highly recommended, by the way) and seeing Paul Mitchell walk in, he of Paul Mitchell Hair products fame (who looks like he wouldn't be out of place in a Jordan's Furniture commercial, come to think of it). Just another in my strange list of celebrity sightings, which include but are not limited to:
- Enrique Iglesias eating at the next table over from us at a Japanese-French place in New York
- Passing Willem Dafoe in a crosswalk, also in New York
- Seeing Jared Fogel (the Subway guy) in the corner of a Dunkin' Donuts with a half-finished box of crullers



Ok, I made that last one up just because my strange list of celebrity sightings isn't really a list without a third entry (which I now have thanks to Mr. Paul Mitchell).



Speaking of, um, things related to eating, I just have to ask: other than on the set of Emeril Live!, where else does dropping things garner such enthusiastic applause? I was watching the show the other day (not voluntarily, I submit) and I made some offhand comment about how I wish my life were like some aspects of the show - all he had to do was add some garlic to a dish, and suddenly a studio full of otherwise normal-looking people break into hoots and hollers. A minute or so goes by and he adds this and that to some colorful-looking mix of ingredients in a boiling crockpot. And then, with my wife as my witness, just then he drops not one, not even four, but TWELVE cloves of garlic into the pot...and the crowd erupts as if he'd just announced that everyone in the building would be taking home a new Lexus. If I got that kind of applause for throwing stuff around, my kitchen would look like a Jackson Pollock painting.



Finally, some random recommendations:
- Book: The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton. An oldie but a goodie; thanks to my Mom for getting me re-hooked on reading for Christmas. A fact-based retelling (based on court testimony) of a 19th-century train robbery, meticulously planned and carried out. It's really a captivating story.
- Movie: Sneakers. One of my favorite movies that Ted Turner has somehow managed not to attempt to ruin by showing it repeatedly. It's about a bunch of guys who do business - both legitimately and not - by doing some pretty cool breaking and entering. It walks a fine line of being high-tech but not incomprehensible, twisty but not convoluted, and fun. Worth the price of admission for Dan Aykroyd's character alone, a conspiracy theory-addled computer expert nicknamed "Mother".
- Music: Gotta say Tony Furtado's American Gypsy, which I'll be picking up soon. The man plays a mean slide guitar and banjo and really, really impressed me Wednesday night. Check him out if he comes to your town.

Those of you who know me know that I'm a pretty big music fan and collector. And now those of you who DON'T know me also know that I'm a pretty big music fan and collector. As I sit here in my office (or, as my wife calls it, "Manville") typing this blog, I'm surrounded by around 700 CDs worth of live material, roughly as many cassettes, and maybe 500 DATs. About 60% of that material is Blues Traveler (my favorite band; I do some informal archiving for them), maybe 30% is Guster (my wife's favorite band, I do informal archiving for her...heh) and 10% other stuff. So while we're talking about percentages, I'd venture to say that it's a fair estimation that I have more live music than, oh, 90% of the general population. I am, however, put to complete and utter shame by what I just saw the other day.



A little bit of background: the vast majority of music that I own is legally recorded by fans like me. A growing number of bands are allowing their fans to record live performances and trade them around, with the stipulation that no money be made off the exchanges. The practice has been around for decades but really proliferated in the 60's and 70's with the popularity of the Grateful Dead, and these days, Phish and the Dave Matthews Band lead the way in terms of sheer volume traded around. I've taped some fairly well-known bands as well as some more obscure acts, and it's immensely rewarding to go home and be able to relive a show you were just at.



Anyway - like I said, I do some informal archiving for Blues Traveler, and they sent me about 50 shows from their 2001 tour to convert and distribute among their fans. For some reason, two of them wouldn't play in my DAT player, so I put out a post on a Boston-area tapers' mailing list that I'm on, in search of someone with a certain kind of deck that would play it back correctly. This guy wrote back and said he had one, and wondered how many tapes I had in the batch, because he wanted to get copies of them for himself. I told him, and he invited me over to his place, thinking we could work out some sort of trade.



The house is innocent enough when I get there...and then we descend into the basement. And if my office is "Manville" this place could best be described as Man-opolis. Shelves and shelves of CDs, cassettes, DATs...he has 14 DAT *decks* racked up in his basement (I own two), along with probably a half-dozen cassette decks and CD players. I'm not exaggerating in the least when I say he probably has more music in his basement than several smaller radio stations (as a sidebar, your humble bloghost did work at good old WRMC-FM in his college days - I did two years of news and one year of a jazz show. If you're ever in the greater Middlebury area, tune in to 91.1 on your FM dial. Actually, if you're in the SMALLER Middlebury area; I think the transmitter is powered by two gerbils running on their wheels. But I digress.)



Essentially, it was a ridiculously large amount of music. I'd estimate I have around 300 DATs of Blues Traveler material...that's a lot. He's got 300 DATs worth of several bands. Allman Brothers, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Widespread Panic - and those are just the taper-friendly bands. There are plenty of other unauthorized recordings as well - he let me sit there and root through stuff while he cranked up a James Brown show from the 60's that really smoked. It made me wish I had more time to LISTEN to my music collection instead of working on archiving it all (it's hard to listen to one show while you're concentrating on dividing another show into tracks). He even went so far as to construct custom cabinets to hold everything; they're floor-to-ceiling units; the top half is open shelving for CDs, and I'd say they're about 8 feet long. Three or four shelves of CDs, then below that is one row of drawers that hold maybe 100 DATs each - all sorts of random stuff, but all in quantities of less than 10 per band. Once he gets 10, he puts them in a box and stores them underneath, in the cabinet. The cabinets hold three rows deep of DAT boxes stacked five high, and again, are 8 feet long. At ten DATs per box, that's 50 in each stack, 150 in each row - and DATs are just over 3 inches wide. Take eight feet of that, and even giving four inches a box, that's 450 DATs per foot, or 3600 DATs. Oh yeah - there's two shelves' worth of these, and two cabinets (the other two are for his regular cassettes). Everything's organized in a database that he runs on a computer down there, and he needs it. Just for fun I entered a random date of a show I was looking for - July 11th, 1992. He's got four shows by four bands in four different places on that ONE day over ten years ago. Is your mind fully boggled yet?



The good thing about this is, it makes my wife realize that maybe I'm not quite as obsessive about this stuff as I could be. I like that.

I miss the Comedy Channel


You may not guess it from my current viewing habits, but much of my high-school TV viewing time was taken up by what used to be known as the Comedy Channel. Back then, it actually featured (gasp) stand-up comedy and some rather cheesy original shows. Some of you might remember the old (and not all that good) "other comedy channel" called HA! - the two merged around 1992 into Comedy Central and it just hasn't been the same since then.



I was reminded of this last month when my brother came to visit me and we went to see Brian Regan at the Comedy Connection in Boston. He's probably best described as a cross between Jerry Seinfeld (in that he does observational comedy) and Jim Carrey (in that he takes the observations to the extreme). He's completely clean (no racist jokes, no sexist jokes, no swearing) and really, hilariously funny. The show was so good that I've resolved that I want to get out to comedy clubs more often. My wife, who was raised on more conventional TV and movies, asked me who I would want to go see. The first two names that came to mind were Larry Miller and Bob Nelson. Then revealing my true comedy-saturated past to her, I had to put these people in some sort of context. "Well, the first one is the clerk in the store where Richard Gere and Julia Roberts buy all their clothes in Pretty Woman, and the second one is Arnold Schwarzenegger's partner's boyfriend from Kindergarten Cop. Easy to remember, right?



Hmm. Ok.



When I graduated from college, I taught school for a while in a place that didn't have cable. Yep, no cable and only bad network reception out in the boondocks of Maine...for some reason the population was so sparse where I was that it wasn't profitable for the cable company to actually lay down the lines unless they knew they'd have enough subscribers. So the lines just stopped about five miles on either end of the road running throughour little town because we were that isolated. And so my days without comedy began.



I moved to Massachusetts a year later and had it back for a little while, but then for some reason it wasn't part of the standard cable package and I was once again comedyless. At the time we were too cheap to pay for the next tier of pricing - why do I want to pay $10 a month for one more channel I want to see, when it means I have to flip through The Fungus Network and The Madagascar Movie Channel to get to it? But last year, when they reworked the cable packages, it was all of a sudden magically back...and I just didn't care.



What happened to Comedy Central? I mean, it's not like I'm clamoring for a return of Rich Hall's Onion World, but some stand-up would be nice. Who wants to see reruns of talk shows? How does Late Night with Conan O'Brien qualify as a comedy show? I never found Dave Attell all that funny, let alone Dave Attell walking around at 3 in the morning, and while Dave Chappell was completely snubbed for an Oscar after his work as Achoo in "Robin Hood: Men in Tights", is that really what little it takes to get a show these days? Maybe Wayne's World was eerily prescient...I dunno. (By the way, "prescient" has to be one of my favorite words that I can toss around in writing but I'd never say because I don't really know how to pronounce it. Fun stuff.)



Maybe we need to start HA! up again or something...sorta like MuchMusic taking MTV to task (ok, so that may be overstating it a little bit). I yearn for the days of "Tommy Sledge, Private Eye" or "Night After Night with Allan Havey". Hell, I'd even sit through some of those old 70's stand-up routines by Steve Mittelman or Carol Leifer.



Ok, that's two Carol Leifer references in a week. Better stop now.

Ah, weekend television...


If you're like me - a Boston-area sports fan - you're doing yourself a disservice if you're not a regular reader of Bill Simmons' pieces. For those of you not up on your Simmonsiana, he's formerly known as the Boston Sports Guy (of the now-defunct but still-forwarding bostonsportsguy.com). He's dropped the Boston from his nom de plume (nom de keyboard?) now that he writes for ESPN.com, but there's still a decided Beantown slant to his writings. Anyway, he's not just a sports columnist; he also has an insatiable appetite for pop culture and he's convinced that one day he should be in charge of a network. So if you like your sports columns sprinkled with references to The Karate Kid, Hoosiers, Beverly Hills 90210, etc., check him out.



My reason for mentioning this? Well, every so often he has one of these columns that he calls "Ramblings from the Sports Guy" where he basically turns his mental file cabinet upside down and shakes it until it empties out. Much randomness and hilarity invariably ensue. This weekend I was enjoying a non-traveling weekend (after the greater New England Guster tour of late November/early December and then the holidays) and watching tons of TV. So in honor of both Bill Simmons and the dear, departed title of this column, I present...Dave's Brain Dump.



I don't know how they do it, but for every Carrot Top and (insert name here) Wayans they get to do one of those dial-around number commercials, they somehow get an Alyssa Milano or a Jaime Pressley to do the corresponding female versions of them. You would think they would be relegated to the Mindy Cohns or Bea Arthurs of the world for these.



Speaking of the "I can't believe they managed to clear their schedule" award of the week, I was subjected to the new version of Star Search, and noticed that Naomi Judd was one of the judges. For those of you who have yet to undergo exposure to this show, there are three regular judges and a fourth guest judge. While I can understand Carol Leifer being around (she's a comedienne and writer who wrote for Seinfeld), I wonder what kind of pictures the produces have of Ben Stein to get him to agree to be on the show.



After each act, Arsenio Hall (the host, who's actually funnier than some of the comedians, much to their chagrin) reminds the viewing audience that it's not just the judges who decide who goes on, but that viewers are welcome to vote as well. Somehow I have a hard time imagining Joe Sixpack bolting from his seat and throwing his popcorn aside in an attempt to sway the voting for the "Best Adult Singer".



Do you think the phrase "Adult Singer" makes it sound like their performance should be NC-17? No? Me neither. Just checking.



I can't even remember what I was watching in this particular instance, but an ad came on in the middle of it hawking the extremely rare $20 double eagle. For just about the entire ad, it's basically a picture of a gold coin, rotating. But in the bottom left-hand corner, is a one-word disclaimer that puzzled me: Dramatization. To me, usually, dramatizations take place on shows like America's Most Wanted or Rescue: 911, or Unsolved Mysteries. You're getting the drift, right? Situations that involve actors. Situations that involve actING. Situations that involve...drama. Maybe, to paraphrase "Groundhog Day", television fails to truly capture the drama inherent in a spinning chunk of metal.



I can NOT be the only one who completely fails to grasp the Joan Rivers phenomenon. For some reason my wife can barely muster the strength to flip away from her. I'm convinced that she has some sort of low-grade hypnotic power produced by what appears to be someone grabbing her scalp and yanking it upwards. It just looks like her face doesn't fit her, like something out of Men In Black. Wouldn't surprise me at all. Okay, no more electrons wasted on her, recycled or not.


If you were anywhere within five miles of a TV set this weekend, the Ted Turner Ego Trip Experience made sure you got the message that his newest movie event (movies don't exist anymore; they're "movie events"!) was premiering Sunday night at 8pm. Because after all, if you only knew JFK, Jr. through the media, this was a chance to get to know him...um...through the media again. Earth to Ted - TV is "the media" too. I hardly think Maria Shriver was going to drop in and give unsolicited testimony on "America's Prince" for this hack job on the Kennedy family. Plus the time 8pm Sunday rolled around, that theme song they wrote for the ads was like an ice pick in my ear drum. A prime example of what I'll call "negative marketing" - not only am I not interested in having anything to do with this movie, but I'm actively discouraging others from seeing it, such is the irritation brought on by the advertising onslaught. Though that may prove difficult.



Someone needs to tell the Ted Turner Ego Trip Experience that it's ok not to show the same movie eighteen times a week. I mean, it's basically a way of guaranteeing that people aren't going to watch your station for those two hours if they've just seen it the night before, right? Like my wife, I also really, really like the Shawshank Redemption, but they might as well rename the SuperStation to the ShawShankStation. If you haven't seen it...well, that's just not possible. But you should.



Seriously, The Shawshank Redemption is turning into this decade's version of "Wings" - in the mid-90's, you couldn't click around for more than 5 minutes without running into Crystal Bernard & Co. at Tom Nevers Field. And until "Monk" came around, I didn't know that Tony Shalhoub didn't have an accent.



Speaking of which, where's his dial-around number ad?

Yep, changed the name of the blog. There's something so unelegant about "Dave's Brain Dump" that suggests...well...dumping. So instead I'm now having thoughts instead of dumping (god forbid I do both at the same time...)

I also changed the color to green from blue. Green has somehow become my favorite color through very little choosing of my own - you may have noticed that my email address is greenone@whatever (some of you know me at grendelnet.com, others know me at bluestraveler.net... okay, so there are only like three of you reading this. stop laughing.) But in going through why green is my favorite color...well, let's just say it's the power of the Internet.

(warning - geek factor twelve ahead...)

Back when I was in college, I had a horrendous freshman roommate experience. Actually, I had a series of bizarre roommate experiences, but that's another story for another time. My freshman roommate was a nice enough guy at first - an upstate New Yorker who was actually pretty friendly - but quickly devolved into the height of inconsiderateness. He was never really out-and-out rude; we just had completely different lifestyles. Like he drank. And smoked pot (not just a little bit of puffing here and there...he had a huge bong and smoked the nastiest, smelliest, greenest shit I have EVER smelled...and believe me, I've smelled a lot of pot in my day thanks to my concert experiences). And chewed tobacco. And spit it into a Snapple bottle that he would leave on his foot locker in the middle of the room (and occasionally knock over in the dark). He had a girlfriend, who would visit every so often, and I'd get 'sexiled' while they were, um, visiting. When she was gone, he'd hook up with several other females in the dorm, sometimes not even checking to make sure I was out of the room or completely asleep when he'd bring them back to our room. He also stole a pair of my jeans (I later found them in his dresser, with a rip in them), my wallet (when I asked him if he'd seen mine, he just said "Dude, they stole mine too!" and I then saw it on his dresser the next day) and gave away the couch we'd bought together when he finally dropped out in March.

His one good point: his taste in music. Before I went to college, I'd never heard Phish, Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Nirvana...and the big one (for me): Blues Traveler.

Early on that year, I discovered their first CD in his collection and I'd pretty much play it non-stop whenever I was in the room (which wasn't much). When I wasn't in the room, I pretty much went the only other place I could (other than the library, I suppose...) - the computer lab. Back in '93 when I was a freshman, the Internet was a vastly different place. If you're my age or older, you probably remember the days of Gopher and Telnet, using Mosaic and LYNX as Internet browsers, etc. One of the big things back then was playing on places called MUDs, or Multi-User Dimensions. They're still around these days but they've been mostly supplanted by chat rooms and online games like Incredibly Deadly Tournament of Death and Dismemberment. Back then, it was all text-based descriptions of places that you navigated around by typing instructions like "go west" or "climb tree". The one I frequented with great, uh, frequency, was a place called Ancient Anguish. As a screen name, I first chose the name Vassago, who's a character from a Dean Koontz novel (Hideaway, I think - I was a huge Koontz fan back then). The character was a bad-ass and in contrast to the real-life geek I was at the time, I felt like being a bad-ass. Of course, I was a bad-ass sitting at a terminal in the computer lab while my roommate had sex in our room, but that's beside the point.

Pretty soon, I forgot Vassago's password, and instead of going through the trouble of trying to remember it, I simply created another character. I liked the letter V (surprise surprise, considering my wife's name) so I just flipped to a random V page in the dictionary and picked a name - Verdant. So Verdant I was from that day forth. I managed not to forget Verdant's password and played a ton of Ancient Anguish, enough so that I made quite a few friends through the MUD and emailed them off-line so we could talk "in real life". People were calling me "Verdy" or "Greenie", but since Verdant has exactly zero to do with my email address at the time, I put a little tag line after it, so people would know who I was. So then it showed up like "xxxxxx@middlebury.edu (The Green One)".

When I came back to school the next year, I had gotten completely hooked on Blues Traveler - their new album had come out that fall and I'd begun collecting tapes. I was on the discussion list and was in regular contact with Misha Rutman, who maintained a fan web site for the band. I realized that while he had some great stuff on his page, his lyrics section was sorely lacking, so I started appealing to the discussion list to get me copies of songs that hadn't been transcribed yet. At the time, there were roughly 87 gazillion guys named Dave on the list, so when one more (me) elbowed his way into regular postings, they had to have a nickname for me. Look no further than my email address - they started calling me The Green One.

I eventually start my own web site with just lyrics on it, then it expands to a discography and all sorts of other things that I won't bore you with (yet, anyway). If you're really interested in it, head to bluestraveler.net and browse to your heart's content. And for lack of a better name, that page becomes "The Green One's Blues Traveler Resources", thereby cementing the nickname. When the time comes for me to graduate from college and the @middlebury.edu is no longer an option, my friend Mike, the then-security admin at grendelnet.com, offers me a free email account which I've been abusing ever since. Only problem is that Dave is taken, so I ask for and get greenone@grendelnet.com.

By now people have gotten so used to the whole greenone thing - and we've gotten so far away from the original source of greenness - that people just assume green is my favorite color. I start making it easy for people to find me at concerts and other gatherings by wearing the few green garments I own, and pretty soon - yep, you guessed it - green becomes my favorite color. So there you have it.

Hey, wake up! Story's over.

Snow


Like most of the eastern seaboard, we got hit by a rather sizeable snow storm over Christmas. I never bothered to check the final amount, because it was just a lot. I was also in the car for most of it (on the way to my parents' house in Maine. "Hey, a snowstorm's coming; let's drive north! No way it'll follow us up there!") and celebrating Christmas for the rest of it. And for some reason, hearing from the weatherman that we got ten inches instead of the expected twelve doesn't make shoveling the front walk or the driveway of my parents' place any easier. I also find it a little silly that we need to rely on the weather report or the Internet to tell us how many inches of show we got. Who can't go down to their front door, stick a booted foot in the snow and estimate, more or less, how much snow we got? I would think the really local measurement (i.e. our front porch) would be a bit more accurate than what meteorologist Todd Gross comes up with, if I really wanted to know down to the micrometer. It always cracks me up that he introduces himself as "meteorologist Todd Gross". Unless your profession comes with a title, like "Doctor" or "Father", it seems a bit much (hi, I'm air conditioner maintenance technician Todd Gross). I don't really need to be reminded that he's a meteorologist; the fact that he's giving the weather forecast is my hint that he's not a seamstress. I'll take for granted that he has his degree in the meteorological arts. What it all came down to was that was a white Christmas, and I was happy with that.


When she woke up this morning, my wife turned on the news and watched it as we slowly geared up for the return to work (blah). It's too early for the Today show, so they're showing the local news, and she sees that telltale blue band across the bottom of the screen that means one thing: school closings. The news filters back to the bedroom (where I'm still semi-conscious in bed - I am not a morning person): "Ooh, it snowed last night!". What with the school closings, I'm picturing four, five inches of snow on the ground. I stumble to the window and roll up the shade to see what can be charitably described as a dusting of snow. Honestly, I've seen more powder on a chocolate-filled donut (and on my sweater after I try to eat one. my Dunkin' Donuts regular order used to be one of these and a coconut donut. they might as well call that order 'The Blizzard Special' for the havoc it wreaked on my shirt, trying to eat them on the way home...)


So I'm trying to reconcile what I'm seeing out the window with what's wafting my way from the Channel 7 StormCenter, or whatever goofy name they put on their winter weather warnings these days... And of course, I have a theory: TV is trying to make us afraid of snow. Hear me out on this one - because who has more to gain from people being afraid of snow? Well, tell me what you do when you're snowed in? That's right...watch TV.


As mentioned above, they come up with these inane names to scare you from the get-go: StormCenter, or StormTrak, or DangerZone (ok, so that last one was a "Top Gun" reference. But admit to yourself that it sounds plausible). Everything above two or three inches is a potential "Storm of the Century". Now, I realize that as centuries go, this one is pretty young. But having been alive for the Blizzard of '78 (I have memories of my father hoisting the garage door, and me not being able to see over the wall of snow in front of us) I'm pretty sure that one would have precedence over pretty much any other storm that the last century had to offer. But a quick Google search for Boston and "Storm of the Century" yields separate storms in '35, '78, '93, '98 (this had the special title of the "freezing rain storm of the century"...I wasn't aware that there was an opening for the position) and several other storms that had heavier snowfalls than others. Semantically speaking, this presents a problem - "Storm (singular) of the Century". As far as ones I actually remember, I'd vote for '98's ice storm because that closed the school I was teaching at for the first time in decades. But I digress.


The other thing the broadcasts do to scare us is station some poor sap out in the middle of the storm, wearing a super-warm-looking jacket so we're not concerned for their safety. These jackets (emblazoned, of course, with the station's logo, call letters, dangerous-sounding segment name, etc. To borrow a phrase from my friend Chris, a few more logos and the reporter would look like a NASCAR vehicle) remind me of the clothes your mother would make you wear to school the day you took school pictures - do you think the reporters actually like wearing them? I doubt they go out to snowblow their driveways in them, or take them out on the slopes ("hey, you're that DangerZone guy! i loved you in "Top Gun"!). Never mind the fact that their face and microphone hand are exposed to the supposedly dangerous elements out there - we need to be where news is happening!


Anyway - since these are people who are accustomed to waving at fictitious weather patterns on a blue screen in a studio, of course they're going to look miserable when stationed in the middle of any snowfall. I mean, bad weather is why we take the car to the grocery store - nobody wants to have snow blowing in their face. But the thing is, it could be eight flakes or eight bazillion - these field reporters don't like being out there, especially for the every-five-minutes updates ("yep, I'm still here! and I'm still chipper! and it's STILL SNOWING, in case you were wondering!"). The thing is, they could just go to the window, point their camera out, and capture images of the same (finger quotations)storm(finger quotations). There's no reason to have the weatherperson out in the actual (finger quotations)storm(finger quotations). I think they do it to make people think that it's worse than it actually is...except for one fact. Chances are, if you can stand out in the middle of it with a camera and lighting crew...it's not the storm of the century.