Happy New Year

Putting an exclamation point at the end would be emotional lying as I ended up going to bed at 11:30 p.m. on the 31th. Yes, I am an old man. I can't wait for Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes.

I went to Florida for a week with Mom and Tina. We mostly stayed at the beach, and had a relaxing time. Global warming though has taken away the cache of vacationing to a warm climate.

I live in Washington D.C., an area that, up until a few years ago, had a potent combination of unpredictable winter weather and neurotic, fear-spongy residents. The local news stations are experts at whipping up weather-related fear. One of their tools is promotional ads for their respective station's "Storm Center".

The ads start off with a gruesome collection of winter images. People trudging to work through wind-whipped snow. Cars stacked on top of each other. Babies floating down the Potomac. An announcer utters with immense gravity: "Washington. Under Siege". Or: "Winter Warning: Is the Snow-Nado Back?"

Oh, no! What do we do? The announcer's voices softens: "Tune in to Channel 5, the only local channel with the Channel 5 Snow Patrol Doppler 5000 Protection League! Of Justice." Whew.

Then Channel 7 airs their promo, except they have the Doppler 7000. Wow, that's 2,000 more Doppler! And Channel 9 has the Doppler 9000, and Channel 13 has the Doppler 13000, and...wait a minute. Those Doppler douche-bags.

Anyway, the weather has been so mild this season that it has derailed most of the usual weather hysteria. I wish the unseasonable weather was a fluke, but as the Bush administration has stated, the warming trend over the past several years is real, and is caused, we know now, by what the scientific community calls "Angry Monkeys in Outer Space".

These angry monkeys have made the last few winters in D.C. almost devoid of snow and forced local news stations to lower their promo airing standards from "Threat of Flurries" to "Brr! It's cloudy outside." (Seriously. They occasionally can't help to air one of the promos, but the announcer has a tint of shame to his speech, like a co-worker the next day after he crapped his pants at the office holiday party.)

Back to my point. Thanks to angry space monkeys, vacationing to a warm climate in the winter barely earns a quiver of jealously anymore. This is a typical conversation I had with my friends when I got home:

ME: "How was your Christmas?"
FRIEND: "I'm Jewish."
ME: "That's good to hear. Guess what! I was in Florida!"
FRIEND: "That's nice."
ME: "Yup. 70 degrees weather the whole time. What was the weather like here?"
FRIEND: "60 degrees the whole time."
ME: "Oh."
FRIEND: "Yeah, we had another warm front."
ME: "Well, it was so warm in Florida that I could wear shorts at night."
FRIEND: "Lucky. I had to switch to pants after 8:00 p.m."

There's no way to make people jealous anymore with a winter trip. Where am I going to fly to now to make people jealous? Outer space? Not without a food-fitted Gatling gun and a box full of bananas. Besides, I would probably just have this conversation:

ME: "Guess what! I went to the Sun!"
FRIEND: "That's nice."
ME: "Yup. 6,000 Kelvin the whole time."
FRIEND: "4,000 Kelvin here."
ME: "Oh."
FRIEND: "Yeah, we had another hole in the ozone layer."
ME: "Well, it was so warm on he Sun that I was vaporized instantly into hydrogen."
FRIEND: "Lucky. I had to be a semi-liquid after 10 p.m."