I'm genuinely amazed that my brief observations about the weather elicited so many comments. Now I wonder how many of you are aware of this breaking story.

EDIT:  It appears that I scooped Bill Moyers by almost a week.    Moyers screened the first portion of this exact same video on his show on PBS last night.

Here in east central Illinois, so far this winter we've had rain, freezing rain, snow, sleet, ice storms, high winds, flooding, and a temperature drop of about 50 degrees in just a few hours.  My kitchen flooded, I've had an infestation of ants, and my truck quit.  Today the forecast is for "freezing fog".  I don't think I've ever even HEARD of freezing fog before.  I can't wait till Obama gets elected, so that he can take care of some of this crazy weather and the economy.

Well, I hope you’ve been enjoying my world music playlist for
the past week or two. I did it for YOU,
you know, to give you a little taste of what I play on my weekly radio
show.  I can’t even access it from my private Xanga
page. To listen to my own songs, I have
to open a separate browser and leave it open to my Xanga public home page. You, incidentally, can do the same thing
should you wish to listen to my music while reading other blogs or performing other
computer functions.

When I sent out my little SOS to all of my subscribers and
Xanga friends, only AngryFlower was able to explain the process in sufficient
detail that I was able to figure out how to do it. Quite a number of you, on the other hand,
replied, “I have no idea how to create a playlist, but if you find out how to
do it, please explain it to ME!” So I
promised some of you that I would indeed write a little tutorial explaining how
to create a playlist which you can add to your Xanga (or to your MySpace or
Facebook, if you have such a thing). A
couple of you have also asked me how to post videos on your Xanga, so I’m going
to explain that to you also. Actually, I’ll
do that first since it’s the easiest.

Before I begin, I’d like to thank the anonymous person who
bought me lifetime Xanga Premium. I don’t
know how much I’ll use the Premium features – I don’t like a lot of visual
clutter, and prefer to let my content speak for itself – but I expect to live
for at least six more months, and who knows what I might dream up in that
length of time? So thank you, Anonymous
Benefactor.

Now…posting a video link in a Xanga blog entry is the
easiest thing in the world. Here’s what
you do:

1) Open a web browser and find the video clip you want to
link to. I’ll assume that you’re going
to use YouTube. It’s the only site I’m
familiar with, though I’m sure other sites and other videos work similarly.
2) To the right of the actual video screen on YouTube there’s
a light grey box that says, “About This Video”.
At the bottom of THAT box there’s a smaller box with some HTML code in
it, and above it the word “Embed”.
Highlight the HTML code in the small box, and click “Copy”. Or you can do it later. In any case, leave the browser open.
3) Open another browser and use it to go to your Xanga
site. Click on “New Weblog Entry”.
4) Enter as much text as you want. When you get ready to insert the video link, check
the little box in the upper right hand corner that says “Edit HTML”. You’ll get a box delineated by dotted lines.
5) Inside the dotted-line box, paste the HTML code that you
copied to your clipboard on the YouTube site.
Or, if you haven’t copied it yet, go back to the YouTube window,
highlight the HTML code under “Embed”, click “Copy”, then come back to your
Xanga window and click “Paste”.
6) If you want to add more text below the video, uncheck the
“Edit HTML” box. The dotted lines will
disappear, and you’ll be back to the regular text entry screen.
7) When you’re finished with your new Xanga entry, click “Save
Changes” at the bottom in the usual manner.
It should display on your home page, with the graphic of the video
screen where you inserted it. And that’s
it.

Well, shit. I can’t
seem to figure out how to insert a video link in the MIDDLE of text. It’s more complicated than I thought. You’ll just have to play around with it. Meanwhile I’ll leave you with some farting
elves. And I’ll save the playlist
instructions, which are a bit more complex but not much, for another day. Meanwhile you can enjoy inserting links to
video clips in your Xanga blog entries.

A little humor from Reader's Digest:

**********

Dear Abie,

The other day I set off for work, leaving my husband in the house watching the TV.  I hadn't gone more than a mile when my engine conked out and the car shuddered to a halt.  I walked back home, only to find my husband making love to our neighbor.  He was let go from his job six months ago, and he says he has been feeling increasingly depressed and worthless.  I love him very much, but I don't know if I can trust him any more.  What should I do?

Sincerely,
Frustrated

Dear Frustrated,

A car stalling can be caused by a variety of faults with the engine.  Check that there is no debris in the fuel line.  If it's clear, check the jubilee clips holding the vacuum pipes onto the inlet manifold.  Or it could be that the fuel pump itself is faulty, causing low delivery pressure to the carburetor float chamber.

I hope this helps.
Abie

**********

I will add parenthetically that this isn't even particularly good automotive advice. 

"Solve all your d1ck-related issues at once by clicking here"

Firefighting 101 –
The Winter Fire

Today it’s almost 50 degrees Fahrenheit here in east central Illinois.  But last Thursday, as I was leaving my
apartment to go and do my radio show, the temperature was in single digits,
with a wind chill that brought the perceived temperature to well below zero.  I noticed an AT&T employee near the alley
behind my building.  Prior to beginning
work on the grey box sticking up out of the ground, he was erecting a yellow
tent around the box to keep himself warm. 
Not a bad idea, I thought.

Suddenly I flashed back to my sixteen years of
firefighting.  No yellow tents for us, I
recalled.  No little stools to sit on
while working.  No warm thermos of coffee
to sip.  No coffee breaks where we could
sit in the idling truck and get warm.

How do I convey this so that you can understand it?  Where do I begin?  I suppose the best analogy would be to the
military.  Being a firefighter is
something like fighting in a war, except that you don’t kill anyone, and you do
get to go home, generally, when your 24-hour shift is over.

Imagine a large two-story home, or an eight-unit apartment
building, or a three-story commercial building in the downtown area.  It’s “fully involved”, as we used to say –
firefighter jargon for the building being completely on fire from front to
back, top to bottom.  Flames shooting out
the windows or through the roof.  You
have to stay there until you’re certain that the fire is completely
extinguished.  That’s it.  Period. 
The only way out is via the hospital, or the morgue.

So it’s winter, let’s say 5 degrees, 20 below with the wind
chill.  Hopefully you have your long
underwear on already, because you won't have time to put it on when the fire alarm rings.  Then there’s your duty
uniform.  Beyond that, there’s only your “turnout
gear” – coat, boots, helmet, and gloves.

The coat is made of Nomex, a fire-resistant material, and
has a liner.  Thus it’s fairly warm in
winter but murder in summer.  The boots
are made of rubber lined with a felt material – either hip-high boots worn with
a long coat, or shorter boots worn with “bunker pants”, lined pants made of the
same Nomex material as the coat.  Bunker
pants are much safer than the long boots without bunker pants, and they’re
warmer in winter.  But like the coat,
they’re murder in the summer.

Your helmet does have ear flaps to protect your ears.  And you may be wearing a Nomex hood – rather like
a ski mask – under the helmet.

And then there’s your hands. 
Gloves can be made of leather, rubber or vinyl, or simple cotton.  There may be some new materials out now.  But in my experience, no glove had  been invented that would keep your hands dry
while firefighting.  Within the first
couple of minutes of spraying water, your gloves would be soaking wet, and your
fingers starting to go numb.  After
trying them all, I settled on the simple cheap brown jersey work gloves, because
even soaking wet they somehow retained a tiny bit of body warmth.  You would simply take them off, wring them
out, and put them back on.

A house fire might be extinguished in an hour or two or maybe much longer, depending on the size of the house and the degree of fire involvement.  A fire in a commercial structure normally takes longer to put out than a house fire, due to the generally greater size of the building and the heavier fire load.  A crew can occasionally be at the site of a commercial fire for 24 hours or longer.

One of the factors determining how long it takes to put a
fire out is the number of firefighters working to extinguish it.  The National Fire Protection Association
recommends a minimum of four firefighters per “rig” (truck), and most urban fire
departments send at least three rigs as a first response to any sort of
structure fire.

In my relatively small town the entire fire department consisted of only 15
firefighters, five per 24-hour shift.  So
our maximum possible first response to a structure fire, even in a commercial building,
was five firefighters in two pumpers.  If
someone was on vacation or a sick day, that left only four firefighters to
respond.  At one point there was a layoff
and we got down to four firefighters per shift, three in the event of a
vacation or sick day.  I can remember
many times when I was driving a fire engine to a fire all by myself – watching the
traffic, running the siren, talking on the radio, the whole nine yards.  Of course once we arrived at the scene we also had far more work to do than we would have had on a larger fire department. 

I can also remember the day when a colleague and I were on a
rescue call, leaving the assistant chief on duty to respond to a fire in a
commercial building all by himself. 
There isn’t much you can do at a fire all by yourself.  That assistant chief was criticized by a city
official for “running around in circles” at that fire…as if there was anything
else he could do without assistance. 
Eventually my colleague and I tore ourselves away from the rescue call
and responded to the structure fire.  And
eventually the rest of the department, who had been paged, showed up.  But that all took a while.

But I’ve strayed from my topic, which was winter
firefighting.  No warm-up breaks, no
coffee breaks, no nothing breaks until the fire was out.  Once in a great while, if it was a big fire at night in the winter, there was one particular commander of the local Salvation Army
who would show up with his wife in tow and with coffee.  Unfortunately I didn’t drink coffee, and he
brought nothing else.  I couldn't drink the guy's wife.

If it’s cold enough, you have to leave the nozzles cracked
to allow a little bit of water to flow through the hoses at all times, or else
the water will freeze in the hose.  And
if it’s REALLY cold, the air in your air pack will start to freeze due to the
water vapor that’s in the air in the tank. 
The coldest it ever was at a fire, in my experience, was 90 below with
the wind chill – probably 40 below without – and it felt like I simply couldn’t
suck enough air out of my air pack.

By the time the fire is finally extinguished you’re
generally pretty exhausted.  But you
still have to roll up your hose and put away all your equipment.  Then, back at the station, you have to unload
all the wet hose you just loaded, hang it in the hose tower to dry, and repack
the truck with fresh hose.  Once
everything is cleaned up, including the truck itself, you’re finally free to
clean yourself up and try to get some much-needed rest, while hoping that the
alarm won’t ring again.

When you get back to the station after a winter fire, you
can take your coat off and stand it up on the floor, and it’s so encrusted with
ice that it’ll just remain standing there upright until the ice melts, as if a
body was still inside it.

I’m sure being a soldier is tougher.  But firefighting is definitely a young person’s
job.  More on firefighting at a later
date, when I’m once again feeling a bit energetic and nostalgic.  If you want to ask questions in your comments, I'll be happy to try and answer them in my next post.

I wish I had something else as interesting to say as that post on Hillary apparently was.  I thoroughly enjoyed all the comments, and I made a few fascinating new friends.  And that to me is what Xanga is ultimately all about.  For me we are a genuine community of ordinary human beings - and some rather extraordinary ones masquerading as ordinary - who share our observations and opinions, and ultimately our joys and sorrows.

Maybe I'll think of something else to ruminate about one of these days.    Meanwhile, please take as much of my love with you as you can comfortably carry, as you go on with your life's journey the next few days.

EDIT:  Actually, there IS one thing.  If you're free to listen to the radio tomorrow (Thursday) afternoon between 2 and 4 PM Central Standard Time, would you mind listening to my world music radio show on your computer via  webcast?  Go to http://weft.org and click the green box in the upper right corner that says "Listen Online".  I'd like to get 25 online listeners.  Just 25.  It would give me "street cred" and help me win a sort of contest which I helped to initiate.  You, in turn, would get to hear my voice and some pretty interesting music.  You might just get addicted.    I'd love to have you there!

I got carried away writing a comment over on civildis' blog, so I decided to make my comment a blog entry here.  Hope you don't mind.  I'm such a lazy writer that I always try to "kill two birds with one stone". 

I've been thinking quite a bit about Hillary's "emotional moment",
trying to be totally honest about my own response to it and also trying
to decide what would be an appropriate response.  Among other things, I'm attempting to walk the very thin tightrope between inappropriate sexism and legitimate analysis.

We tend to hold our national politicians to impossibly high and artificial standards.  I certainly don't think that emotion is always inappropriate, and I think Hillary's
relatively minor display of emotion was somewhat exaggerated and distorted by her
critics for their own political ends.  I cry too, a lot more than Hillary did there in New Hampshire, though of course I'm not a public figure.  I don't think
strength and emotion are mutually exclusive.  Not at all.

We're also somewhat selective about how we respond to emotion in our politicians, depending on how we perceive them in general.  We as a nation seemed to rather like it when Bill Clinton would bite his lip and say, with ostensible sincerity just dripping off of him, "I feel your pain."  Now in retrospect we know that he probably didn't really feel anyone else's pain all that deeply; he was just a pretty darned good actor.  But we liked him as a person, just as we liked Jimmy Carter before him.  A bit of emotion was permissible from them.

On the other hand, politicians like Richard Nixon, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton are generally perceived, for legitimate or not so legitimate reasons, as being stiff, stern, unfeeling, uncaring.  Should they happen to display a bit of "softness", we don't quite know what to make of it.

All that said, I had this vague feeling that Hillary's "emotional moment" was somewhat bogus
and exploitative, but I couldn't understand quite why until I began to
examine the CONTEXT in which Hillary got emotional.  I'm not convinced
that anyone has done that satisfactorily, though Jesse Jackson Jr.
provided me with a hint.  She did it in reply to a question about
herself.  The questioner, another woman of approximately Hillary's age, asked in essence and very empathetically, "How do you
do it, woman?  How do you make yourself get out of the house?"

Now
good God.  It wasn't a question like, "How do you feel about all those
Iraqi children getting killed and maimed needlessly for the past 17 years?"  Or
"How do you feel about the way the poor have suffered since Hurricane
Katrina?"  No, it was a self-referential question, and a relatively
banal one at that.  And Hillary exploited it for her own purposes.  The question allowed Hillary to feel sorry for herself.

You heard me correctly.  At
the risk of incurring the wrath of all women everywhere, I submit that Hillary's
emotion was a form of self-pity, and it was one that only a woman could
get away with.  She was saying, in essence, "Yes, I am deeply touched
by my own heroism.  I am an incredible, incredible woman, and it makes
me cry just to think about it."  Of course, I'm sure she was thinking about all of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that she has suffered through her years as a public figure.  But it was still an expression of self-pity.  She wasn't crying for Iraqi children, or indeed for America.

Think about it.  What would have
happened if Hillary had been a male politician, asked the same question
and responding in similar fashion?  "How do you do it, John McCain? 
How do you make yourself get out of the house in the morning?"  In reality we can't even IMAGINE anyone ASKING a male politician such a ridiculous question, but bear with me.  Suppose McCain had teared up and said, "It's...it's because I care so very deeply." 
People would have thought he was nuts, and that would have been the end of his candidacy.  He's not even allowed to cry
about being tortured in Viet Nam, for God's sake.  Bravery for a man is quite a different thing than it is for a woman.  So is emotional display.

I'm reminded of an experience I once had with my mother, who was a veritable expert at self-pity and at making her life seem heroic.  (And I confess that my reactions are colored to an extent by having been raised by her.)  I was already an adult by this time, in my thirties.  Sitting on the family sofa one evening, my mother said, a propos of nothing, "You know, I've had the hardest life of any woman I know."  My dad and I just looked at each other.  As usual it was I who dared to speak, to my detriment.  I didn't say ALL that I was thinking, which was this: 

My mother raised only one child, me.  After she had me she never worked outside the home, and she barely worked INSIDE the home.  My dad did fully half of the housework in the evenings and on weekends, in addition to his full-time job, and he did it without complaint.  My mother, on the other hand, after doing a little housework in the morning, watched a couple of soap operas while eating her lunch, then retired to her bedroom, where she watched another soap or two while eating chocolate candy before taking a nap.  Between three and five PM she emptied three cans into three saucepans and heated them up; that was dinner.  And that was it for her.  In the evening she watched more TV.  On the weekends she'd give my dad a lengthy list of chores to do, which included virtually all of the shopping, home maintenance and lawn care, endless painting, etc.  My mother was the "organizer" in the family; she sat in the house and made lists of things for my dad to do.  And she courageously pecked my father on the cheek as he left the house to go and perform his assigned tasks.  That was her "hard life".

I also thought about other women I had known, women who had raised six kids, often with absent or abusive husbands,  while working full-time jobs and getting college degrees, all at the same time.  No, my mother didn't have the hardest life of any woman she knew, not by a long shot.  But my even daring to suggest that she might be exaggerating just a tad made her burst into tears of self-pity and imagined self-sacrificing heroism.

And that, I submit, was analogous to the context in which Hillary Clinton had her "emotional moment" in New Hampshire.  Women resonate with it, because the bar of "heroism" and permissible emotional display is set so low for them.  Men just look at each other and try to keep their mouths shut.

Now feel free to tear my head off, ladies.  Or educate me, as you see fit.