Day 4: When Hell Freezes Over

(My icy bird feeder and snowy bird bath.)

I always figured I was in my own personal Hell here in Alabama.  Oh, I joked about it for years...poor pitiful me, a New Jersey chick stuck in Alabama since 1990 (or thereabouts...I'm not even going to count).

What seriously could be worse?  It's like I'm in a "Twilight Zone" episode...they hate people from the north here...I can't even begin to tell you how many times I heard (with obvious disgust), "Oh, yer a Yankee!" each time I'd mention I was from Jersey.  And, I have to endure countless "Oh, bless your wittle heart..." (yes, they like to say "wittle" for some odd reason) comments each time I say anything remotely sounding like complaining. 

I hear it a lot. 

And they aren't fooling me with their southernisms...I know as well as they do that what they really are saying is the south's euphemism for "fuck you".  I know they are - they say it the same way we say "fuck you" in Jersey, only we say it without the southern accent.. And, I guess you might say that our counterpart to "wittle" would be "frig"...as in, "What the frig did you just say?  Wittle?  You said 'wittle' to me?  Say 'wittle' again, I dare you, I double dare you, motherfrigger..say 'wittle' one more goddamn time!"  (I said that in my best Samuel L. Jackson "Pulp Fiction" voice, by the way.)

But...I know it's my Hell.  People don't even get sarcasm.  I will be all sarcastic saying silly stuff...and they will look at me...they look at me like I'm that Venusian diner guy with the three eyes in that "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" episode of "Twilight Zone".  So, yeah...I know it's Hell...because it's yet another "Twilight Zone" episode I'm in.  They will look at me and stare - and I will say "It's sarcasm...ha ha...sarcasm??" and then they stare some more while I will walk away thinking, "This IS my Hell, isn't it?"

And it is.  And, last Tuesday, Hell froze over.  If anyone nonchalantly remarks to you..."Yeah, sure...I'll do that...when Hell freezes over!" you can tell them that's already happened.

Oh, everyone jokes about it...I was one of the first...it was comical really...a "dusting of snow"...a mere 1-2 inches and Alabama (and more infamously, Atlanta, Georgia) came crashing to a grinding halt. 

In Jersey, two inches was nothing.  It wasn't even child's play.  Real kids waited until there was at least six inches to a foot of the white stuff before we'd throw on a coat and freeze our little woolen-mittened stumps of hands off -- feverishly building a snowman with raw abandon. Snot oozing out of our noses only to be wiped away with our frozen-mittened stumps...only to freeze once more...a nice snot-laden-tiered coating for our hands...layer upon layer of frozen nose mucus -- and it didn't phase anyone one bit.  If it happened during school...we'd still build our snowmen with our snot-coated mittens while all the teachers huddled around the flagpole puffing away their Marlboro's - their deeply inhaled smoke would look the same upon exhalation as our breath did in the frigid weather. And, we, like proper kids of the day, would blow out our imaginary cigarette smoke out - in between getting pelted with rock-covered snowballs and wiping our red frozen noses.

And, no one...no one ever got a day off from school...or at least rarely. You see, we had these things called "plows" and other things called "road salt" - and the plows would be running all pre-dawn hours ensuring they'd put a damper on dashing our hopes of hearing our school's number being rattled off on some Philadelphia radio station's channel by some guy who could talk faster than an auctioneer on crack.  And then you'd scurry to get ready because your bus was going to be there any minute...and you couldn't sit around waiting.

But...to a standstill everything came here...and then we all waited.

When I ventured outside early Tuesday, the sleet had begun...my car already getting a nice glaze of ice.  I turned both the faucets on...the one in front of the house...and the one in back.  I heard a bunch of sirens and I thought to myself, "There it starts...they should really just stay home...these people can't drive in the snow...and no one can drive on ice..."  A few hours later I heard that a man and his 2-year-old daughter had died in a seven car accident on an icy bridge a couple miles from me.  The snow, that was now falling...wasn't magical mitten stuff anymore...it was deadly. 

And, as you all pretty much know...Atlanta's ice froze people in their tracks.  Birmingham had them same plight...and county after county here in Alabama, they shut down their roads.  I sat in disbelief -- county roads were closed, state highways were closed...and so were the interstates running in and out of here.  One of my Facebook "friends" was stuck in his car, on an Atlanta highway, for 19 hours.  Nineteen.  How do you do that?  That...is a bit worse than rosy cheeks and groans of school being open...that, my friends, is what Hell looks like when it's frozen over.

Our roads were closed that Tuesday until Friday. Luckily I was home when all this happened...some never made it home.

So, while everyone up north keeps joking about how stupid Atlanta's mayor was and how uproariously funny it was that the south was crippled by a "dusting of snow"...just shut the fuck up. 



Oh, and bless your wittle hearts.

Today's prompt is "When Hell Freezes Over".  Please join all the other writers over at "We Work for Cheese" - and read their takes on Hell.  :)

It all boils down to two words, folks:  Or else.

Take for example, today...that asteroid is either going to hit the Earth...or else...it's not.

There's no real other way of looking at things if you think about it.  Everything can be hypothesized into two things.  There's no real third.

Either ghosts are real...or else they aren't.

Aliens?  Exist...or else they don't.

Either I will age gracefully...or else...I won't.

There's no real middle to things.  No great "Oreo" of thinking - two things.  No hidden meaning...no crunchy nougat wedged between...no alternative to the other two alternatives.  It's either one...or else it's the other.

Then there's the "Yeah, or else what?" way of thinking of things...

..."You better do what I tell you or else."

Really?  Or else what?  Or else I won't?

C'mon.  We grew up learning that one as kids...usually there was no "or else"...or else...there was.  Yet, we used the same pseudo-threats on our own kids.  But, I know what some of you are going to say.  You're going to say that YOU didn't.  Which further proves my point...the point of "or else".  Either you used that tactic on your own kids...or else you didn't.  See?  It's an endless loop based on two possibilities.

There's no "Door Number Three" in life.  There's no coin landing on its edge like in that "Twilight Zone" episode...it either lands on "heads"...or else it lands on "tails".

And either this blog makes perfect sense...or else it won't.

And, regardless, it doesn't much matter in the grand scheme of things, as I'm either going to wake up in the morning...or else...I won't -- just like everyone else.

I wrote this blog before I toddled off to bed only to find out that Russia got impacted by a meteor flying past a few hours ago.  Not fun...so I hope no one else gets hurt today.  I'm not going to change my blog now...but...sheesh...what a way to start a morning (and my blog).  You can read the story here (if you haven't already):  CNN

And, if you haven't yet...go on over to "We Work for Cheese" to read everyone's interpretation of today's "Or else" prompt.  

Stay safe everyone.

Theories About Doctors and Spies

Well, here I will sit all weekend long watching my "Doctor Who" DVDs I rented from Netflix...I also have seven hours and five minutes of "Doctor Who" shows I TiVo'd as BBC America had the good sense about them to have had a marathon last week (some tonite as well)...unlike a certain SyFy channel who couldn't bother to continue with their great tradition of back-to-back "Twilight Zone" episodes for days on end.

I asked my son to come out of his room last nite to talk about what to have for our 4th of July dinner. I'm not too sure if I will grill anything and Alex doesn't want to be bothered with the grilling chore at all; as manly a task as they lead you to believe it is. My daughter's been wanting me to make Beignets, so I guess at one point that will happen...I've only put off making them enough times that my Cafe Du Monde mix is now out of date...but since it's just basically flour and yeast...I'm willing to bet the yeast doesn't know if it's May 30th or July 3rd. Yes, I'm crazy that way...stand back...I'm a risk taker for sure.

So, because "Doctor Who" was playing, my son opted to sit down as well and, after watching the David Tennant "Doctor Who" episodes for a bit, he concluded Tennant was indeed better than the new one...altho the new one isn't bad. Mr daughter is a Tennant girl as well.

My thoughts? I'm still a Tom Baker Doctor kinda girl...and therein lies my theory.

My theory is that you like the Doctor you grew up with. Just as with James Bond...most people will tend to tell you the one they liked the best...was the one they grew up with. I liked the nice campy Bond of the 1970s...yes, don't start throwing rocks at me just yet; I can't help it, I like Roger Moore. I never thought Sean Connery was sexy until he was much older. Pierce Brosnan is hot...and the new Bond, Daniel Craig - eh...he reminds me of a much older Jason Bourne.

But back to The Doctors...I grew up with the toothy, maniacal, long-scarfed Tom Baker who elevated the show when he took it from the original droll military episodes each week and morphed the regimentation of the weekly array of Colonels and upper crust "old chaps" into something else entirely: being silly and fighting a whole different type of monster. When Baker left, a series of other doctors came and went...hardly catching a moment's glimpse of my attention until David Tennant.

David is THE best Doctor to have come along in ages. And now, his reign is no more and his replacement is this little wisp of a bow-tied man-child as the displaced Gallifreyan Time Lord. In fact Matt Smith is indeed the youngest Doctor they ever had. Matt had some big shoes to fill, but he seems to be filling them and running in them extremely well. The only issue I have is with his companion. While Amy Pool is awfully cute and makes nice eye candy for the gents...the show is being "Always About Amy" or "The Amy Show" and I don't like that. She should NOT be the most sought after possession in the whole universe. Time to give more air-time to the Doctor in my opinion. He is, after all...The Doctor.

And then it got me thinking last nite watching one of the David Tennant vs The Master (oh, how I love John Simm as The Master) episodes....that secondly to Bond's, "Bond, James Bond" phrase...announcing that you are "The Doctor" holds about...or dare I say perhaps more, distinction.

So, those of you who are familiar with both shows..."James Bond" and "Doctor Who"...who would you rather be? A time lord who saves the world or a spy babe magnet, who also, ironically, saves the world?

And which "Bond" and which "Doctor Who" do you like best? How about "Doctor Who Companions" vs "Bond Girls" for that matter...which one will always hold a fond place...in your...heart?

The Time Is NYE

Well, my "New Year" has come and gone. And it has with about as much fanfare as all my previous ones. Oh, I know I've said it before (I've been doing these blogs for ages here now - so I have a backlog of archives and a backlog of laments, joyousness, and just plain "the way I see it" insights of the 'common man' who just happens to be a woman) but I wish one day to actually GO OUT to celebrate the new year being rung in.

I don't have to go to Times Square - I prefer a place with a bathroom anyway. I don't have to be wined and dined on some ocean cruise or being flown to Australia to herald in the first new year. I would just like, once, to be able to go to a place where they hand you chintzy hats and noisemakers which make kazoos seem wondrous in comparison. I just want to celebrate.

I was online "celebrating" this time around. I had friends call me - I called friends - I liked the fact that people actually took time out of their lives to talk to me at (and around) the stroke of midnite. I had my champagne in my oh-so-special Riedel champagne flute - with its steady stream of bubbles percolating from the bottom because that's what the Riedel people get the big bucks for...for convincing me that bubbles coming up from an etched "X" at the bottom of my glass is more special than "the others" - which don't sport this X-factor bubble phenomenon. Heh...they were free at a Riedel wine-tasting and most people left without claiming their champagne glasses...and me, due to my having absolutely no problem swiping glasses off tables which people left behind...got quite a nice set of these.

But I digress yet again - no - no resolutions to stop digressing. I like to digress.

Did anyone else notice how incredibly banal the NYE television shows are now? I have no idea who half these people are who host them - but I know I can do at least twice as good as they do - and at one-third the pay. There's some mathematical formula in there I'm sure - but, regardless - you don't need to know what X is - to know the shows were worse than ever. And there were more product placements in the Times Square celebration than lights in that NYE ball which I totally missed. My cable decided to give me the multi-coloured test pattern stripes a couple minutes before the Waterford crystal ball, which still reminds me of my sagging bustline, dropped. I have no idea why it did that...but it did - that's right up there with that "Emergency Broadcasting Test Signal Interruption" bit which always seems to occur around 2:00 a.m. when I'm watching some classic film on TCM. I seriously doubt it ever happens during product placement spots when "General Hospital" or "The Price Is Right" is on...but at 2:00 a.m. (somewhere between the advent of the Hays Act and those product placement paydays) it never fails to rear its ugly head. I just wish it would have shown up earlier during that New Year's Eve show with Carson Daly and the brain-dead chick whose name escapes me for just that reason.

Anyway, at least the Sci-Fi channel had the good sense to show a Twilight Zone marathon which is still going on as I write this. Show after show of imaginative creativity with absolutely no product placement whatsoever (yeah, one more reference to it won't hurt)...how did they ever manage to churn this stuff out episode after episode, year after year...while in the here and now, ringing in 2009, NBC felt compelled to air a plethora of less than mediocre fare - attempting to pawn it off as entertainment. Yes, indeedy...someone sure dropped a whole other ball on that one.

Perhaps next year I'll actually be OFF this sofa celebrating and being able to write a whole blog devoted entirely to the ridiculousness of spending X amount of dollars only to get a plastic glass of cheap champagne, a lopsided hat and some slowly deflating balloons to take home to the kids.

So I'll raise my glass and tip my imaginary lopsided hat to 2009...here's hoping we all have a little less to complain about and a little more to celebrate in the coming year. Or, at the very least - more trivial things to complain about and more momentous things to celebrate.