Tuesday, December 28, 2010

MixBlog 12-27-10

Now that Christmas is over, we can look forward to the end of 2010. I thought about doing something on this blog this week, perhaps pointing out some of my favorite posts or something. Anyway, that will be for the week to come. I've got a few things to go through now...

Christmas Music: I just removed the holiday songs from my iPod. Here are my Top 5 Most-Played Christmas Songs:

Baby, It's Cold Outside - Glee Cast (16 plays)
Baseball Glove - Gord Bamford (13)
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Annie Lennox (10)
Put A Little Love In Your Heart - Annie Lennox and Al Green (10)
We Need A Little Christmas - Glee Cast (9)

All of the songs from the new Annie Lennox and Glee albums were played at least 5 times.

Snow: We officially had 12.4 inches Sunday into this morning. The forecasts generally went like this: from nothing (Thursday) to a coating to an inch (Friday) to 6-12 inches (early Saturday) to 10-15 inches (later Saturday evening) to 5-10 inches (late Sunday afternoon). The development of this storm, we're told, was very tricky to forecast. (Aren't they all?) As it turned out, all day and much of the night Sunday, the heaviest bands of snow that were circling around the low pressure as it moved north along the coast were unable to push across the Delaware River and into Pennsylvania.
So while a lot of areas at the Jersey Shore hit 20 inches or more, outside my house as of about 8 pm there were only 4 inches. However, one area of snow managed to reach the city and immediate western suburbs and stick around for a while, thus inflating our totals. I think the video I posted to Facebook Sunday clearly explains how I feel...



Eagles: Or, Snow, Part Deux: First the NFL moved the game with Minnesota from 1 pm to 8 pm so NBC could show it, even though Minnesota is lousy this year. Clearly they were hoping for a Brett Favre cameo. Then, the dire forecasts for Sunday led to the league postponing the game two days. In the past, the NFL has postponed or even moved games because of things like hurricanes, wildfires, and roof collapses. But for plain old snow? Never before. Since the forecasts called for the height of the storm -- 1 to 2 inches of snow per hour, wind gusts past 50 mph -- to occur right during the hours the game would be played, the league thought it would be best to postpone it.

This set off a firestorm of really stupid criticism, not just from the typical yahoo callers to WIP but even by a newspaper columnist (in today's Daily News) and Governor Ed Rendell (who used to be our mayor and now appears on Eagles Post-Game Live on Comcast Sportsnet). Besides pointing out that the NFL has played many games in snow (which is true), they decided that it was the fault of the current mayor. As if Mayor Nutter canceled the game. Actually, he only declared a snow emergency. All that means is that drivers aren't allowed to park on designated emergency routes so they can be quickly plowed. It doesn't mean everyone must stay indoors or that every event must be canceled. That doesn't mean the decision to postpone was correct or incorrect. It just means that the mayor had nothing to do with it.

At first I thought it shouldn't be called, but considering how bad conditions were, to have so many people trying to get to and from the game would have been very difficult, even if they all took the subway -- and I guarantee that many of them wouldn't do so, because people are nuts when it comes to driving.

(Another thing I've sort of changed my mind on: Ed Rendell did a great job as our mayor, but he's been a really incompetent governor.)

Meanwhile, the idle Eagles clinched the NFC Eastern Division Championship when the pathetic New York Giants were destroyed by Green Bay. As a reward, the Giants have been stuck in Green Bay for two extra nights thanks to the blizzard (which was a lot worse in New York City than it was here).

Coming Attractions: My week in comics and my opinion of "I Love You Phillip Morris."

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