The Scottosphere

Today was to be the day I would buy my Leica. I found the per­fect one: chrome fin­ish, Leitz logo, great con­di­tion, good price. I called today.

“Sorry, we sold that one yesterday.”

Every­one I’ve talked to so far says that get­ting one will be a mat­ter of luck. Evi­dently they are usu­ally bought within a day or two of being listed. For some­one accus­tomed to a con­sumer cul­ture, this is extremely frustrating.

Thun­der­snow!

Where the heck is the 3-5 inches of snow we were promised last night? The NWS never acknowl­edges errors in their fore­cast prod­ucts, but for­tu­nately you can also read the tech­ni­cal dis­cus­sion:

    BASED UPON RADAR TRENDS AND LATEST MODEL GUIDANCE WE ARE BACKING OFF
    ON ACCUMULATIONS FROM PREVIOUS FORECAST...AND WILL DROP ADVISORIES 
    FOR I-95 CORRIDOR AND LOWER WARNINGS TO ADVISORIES FOR S COASTAL 
    ZONES.

    IF WE WERE ALL AT 10KFT THIS WOULD BE A GOOD SNOWSTORM...BUT LOW 
    LEVEL DRY AIR HAS BEEN WINNING THE BATTLE ALL NIGHT AND WILL LIMIT 
    NORTHWARD EXTENT OF SNOW SHIELD THIS MORNING. SURFACE MESOANALYSIS 
    SHOWS RIDGING WORKING DOWN INTO NORTHERN CT...NW RI AND MUCH OF SE MA
    WHICH CAN ALSO BE SEEN BY A LACK OF ECHOES ON KBOX 88D.

on music

As a mat­ter of des­per­a­tion, I ate lunch at Au Bon Pain today. They were play­ing painfully slow Sinatra-esque ren­di­tions of AM radio favorites like “Sil­ver Bells.” Who knew tor­ture could take the name of “hol­i­day cheer.” In my mind I was moments away from gun­ning down every­one in the room when the music made an abrupt change to that of the Ray­mond Scott Quin­tette. For real!

on guns

Some­where near the Illinois-Indiana bor­der, where end­less fal­low corn­fields meet the life­less high­way, I spot­ted a new line of road­side bill­boards in the style of Burma-Shave. I think they speak vol­umes about Amer­ica. Here is one exam­ple of a five-sign sequence:

TERRORISTS
LIKE GUN CONTROL
DISARMED VICTIMS
ARE THEIR GOAL
GUNS SAVE LIFE.com

on trees

The sub­ject of this week’s polit­i­cal con­tro­versy here in Boston is a tree. The offi­cial Christ­mas tree has been newly re-minted as a “Hol­i­day Tree.” Every­one has some­thing to say about it. Regret­tably, nobody seems to have noticed that we can set­tle this prob­lem with­out delv­ing into the issue of reli­gious sen­si­tiv­ity. The proper ques­tion to ask is, “What hol­i­day, besides Christ­mas, is sym­bol­ized by a giant conifer?”

Keep think­ing.