Stuff - Just Some Things I Felt Like Talking About

I love my snow shovel.

Ok, I'll admit that doesn't exactly rank up there with Tristan and Isolde (look it up) or Rachel and Ross (see "Tristan and Isolde" or "Monica and Chandler"). But some of us are just prone to simple passions. And here in Michigan, from about the third week of December through the third week of March, a snow shovel is a guy's best friend, the infantryman's rifle, Zorro's sword, Linus' blanket.

Every Midwestern man knows that his snow shovel is his winter lifeline. Without it, he could get completely snowed-in, trapped, unable to provide his family with any of the basic necessities of winter survival, like Doritos and beer.

January in Michigan means the sharp smell of wood smoke in the crisp winter air, the windblown drifts of purest snow outlining the soft contour of the compost heap, the thrill of skidding on one heel across an icy parking lot with an armload of groceries, and the chore of chipping snotcicles from the tip of your frostbitten nose.

But as wonderful as this season may be in so many ways, some of us are not all that crazy about the fact that we get to see the sun for maybe an hour a month. Not only are the days ridiculously short, we also have a brooding shroud of clouds parked overhead pretty much from November through March.

The Gray Days are so profound around here that they can cause their very own form of clinical depression, a psychological disorder with maybe the most appropriate acronym ever – SAD. This stands for Seasonal Affective Disorder, which pretty much boils down to sufferers being clinically pissed off about all the crappy weather.

Since late last week anyone more alert than, say, a block of wood, has been obsessing over the dramatic story of US Airways Flight 1549. For any blocks of wood among my readers, this was the commercial airline flight that sucked some extremely (and briefly) surprised Canada geese into both engines and lost power 3,000 feet over New York City.

The pilot of the airplane, Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III (for reasons that should be fairly obvious, everyone calls him "Sully"), made a series of split-second decisions, flew dead-stick across Midtown, barely cleared the George Washington Bridge, and executed a masterful crash landing in the middle of the Hudson River. All 150 passengers and crew aboard walked away from Flight 1549 without serious injury.

The current Miss Illinois, Katie Lorenz, just happens to be the daughter of one of my closest friends. This is pretty amazing to me - I've known this kid since the key to her ultimate happiness involved nothing more than clean diapers and a Blues Clues sippie cup.

Now, in less than two weeks, she will take the stage in Las Vegas with 51 other drop-dead beautiful young women and compete for the title of "Miss America."

Yikes! Think about it - out of 6,538,961 women who live in Illinois, Katie is the one chosen to represent the Land of Blagojevich in this year's Pageant of Pageants. And the thing is, she is absolutely the best choice they could have made.

So now the champagne bottles are in the recycling bin, most of the confetti is in the trash bag, and we have bid a fond farewell to the year gone by as it swirled festively down the old toilet. That means that it's time once again for my annual Year In Preview edition.

I almost didn't write this one. Not too long ago, I heard from a helpful reader who pointed out that in all my previous Preview columns I had failed to get so much as one thing completely right. He went on to compare me to the Republican party who, according to him, have not managed to get anything right since the Eisenhower administration.
   
I think that's a little unfair. I was only nine when Eisenhower left office.

But anyway, here goes: