You don't need a weatherman

In an online column yesterday, the founder of the Weather Channel wrote: "Global Warming. It is the hoax. It is bad science. It is a high jacking of public policy. It is no joke. It is the greatest scam in history."

John Coleman, who is now a weatherman at KUSI-TV in San Diego, added: "I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it."

Which is more surprising — that the founder of the Weather Channel thinks global warming is a hoax or that the founder of the Weather Channel is now a weatherman for Ch. 51 in San Diego?

More surprising
	He thinks global warming is hoax
	He's a local weatherman
/td>

The benefits of having a complicated ancestry

Our new president is giving us mixed messages on the weather.

One the one hand, Barack Obama is telling D.C. what it needs to hear: this city is too wimpy when it comes to snow and ice. On Wednesday, he told reporters: "My children's school was canceled today. Because of what? Some ice? . . . We're going to have to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town."

But then his senior adviser David Axelrod told the New York Times that the reason Obama wasn't wearing a suit jacket in the Oval Office the other day is that the president hates the cold and had cranked up the thermostat: “He’s from Hawaii, O.K.? He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.”

A question for my younger readers

On last week's episode of Gossip Girl, applicants from the Constance Billard School for Girls waited by their cell phones to learn the fate of their college applications.

Yale University's "acceptance letter" came to Serena van der Woodsen as a text message. Yale used the same mode of communication to inform Blair Waldorf that she was waitlisted.¹

Is that really how acceptance (and rejection) letters arrive these days? If so, do the schools also send a real letter printed on 8½ x 11" paper?

Meanwhile, Blair got a 2300 on the SAT — in my day, a 1600 was a perfect score.<sup>2


1</sup>On second thought, maybe it wasn't a text message. Blair's friends kept telling her to "hit reload" on her phone, which might mean the information was posted on a Web page.
²I took the SAT just a few hours after Wisconsin beat Michigan State in Tokyo, Japan, to win its first Big Ten championship in 31 years. Those of my friends who had wisely picked a different day to take the SAT stormed the goalposts at Camp Randall Stadium, while I got in a car and drove to Janesville, Wis., for the test. (I got a 540 on math and 800 on sports.)

When movie stars get in the way

Before Tuesday's presidential inauguration, Marnie & I saw Denzel Washington walking around our section. Once the ceremony started, there were a bunch of people who refused to take their seats, choosing instead to stand in aisle and block our view.

Thanks to David Bergman's gigapan image of the event, we now have proof that my section's "Down in front!" chants were directed at Denzel.

Change, seen at sub-freezing temperatures

At one point during today's presidential inauguration, Marnie turned around and took this picture. Click here to see a few more that we took. (Many more coming later.)

Yellow Section 5

Marnie liked what she saw once she took stock of our inauguration seats. See below:

When in doubt, blame the editor

I don't doubt for a second that the Secret Service knows what it's doing when it comes to protecting VIPs.

I've seen them do a security sweep (of my living room, in fact) — it's impressive.

Presumably, they performed such an exercise yesterday at the Washington Post before Barack Obama's visit to the newsroom.

Still, Howard Kurtz says that at one point during the meeting with newspaper staff and the president-elect, a Secret Service agent "ordered assistant national editor Carlos Lozada to take his hands out of his pockets."

Sure, blame the editor.

Where the wild things are

Right now, the Republicans are in the political wilderness. That's what the pundits say, anyway, meaning it as an insult.

But the wilderness is a nice place to be. Who doesn't like the wilderness?

The definition of wilderness is: "A piece of land set aside to grow wild."

Thus, we have one party that is forced to navigate one-way streets downtown and try to find parking.

And the other party gets to go off on its own and be wild. And good god, look at all that parking out there in the wilderness.

At the senseless age of 85

I finally got around to watching Brit Hume's interview on Fox News Sunday with George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush.

The best part was when the elder Bush talked about his desire to continue his traditional birthday celebration, a 12,500-foot parachute jump, even when he turns 85 years old this summer:

You don't want to sit around just because you're an old guy, drooling in the corner.

Did we lose the Cold War?

Nowadays, if our democratically elected government wants to get serious about solving a problem, it installs a czar.

Need to combat the drug problem? Create a drug czar. We also have a terrorism czar, cyber security czar and even a war czar.

Soon we'll have a climate czar, of course.

To stir up trouble, the front page of the Washington Times proclaims: "Obama climate czar has socialist ties."

Sigh.

Vote for the Obama/IKEA ticket

IKEA, the build-it-yourself Scandinavian furniture store, is the latest business to capitalize on Barack Obama's marketing success. I filmed the above video this week at the Farragut North Metro stop.

It's a clever ad campaign, really.

Show me the price!

While shopping on Amazon, I've noticed that sometimes the shopping site does not display the price of an item until I click a link.

Knowing such behavior is annoying, they kindly provide a page titled, "Why don't we show the price?" This page explains the policy thus:

At a physical store, you may have to check the display or ask a salesperson to find out the in-store price of this product. At Amazon, by clicking on "click here to see price," you are asking to see the price, at which point we show it to you.

What, what? Why they don't show the price? I don't get it.

She blinded me with Christmas

Remember when I complained about a house across the street? Well now it's time to discuss a house two blocks away.

Take a look at the flashy holiday light display!

Don't drink the water

GREENBELT, Md. — The water running into Greenbelt Lake along Albert S. Buddy Attick Lake Park doesn't look to be the right color.

At least that's what I thought.

Upon returning home, I showed this picture to Marnie, who said it does indeed look like a normal color.

She paused.

... for a polluted river, she added.

If you love me, plant a rose for me

A couple months ago, the New York Times discussed the so-called "slow blogging movement," saying that some leaders of this movement "experiment to see how infrequently they can post before readers desert them."

At what point would you desert me?
	Two weeks
	Two months
	Two years
	I read this site via RSS, so the question is moot
	I'll desert you for reasons other than frequency of updates

Not one for a halftime speech

With Penn State trailing USC 31-7 at halftime of today's Rose Bowl¹, ESPN's Lisa Salters reported from the sideline about Nittany Lion coach Joe Paterno, who has a hip injury.

"As you guys already know, Joe Paterno did not come down to the locker room to talk to the guys, but he did send down a message. He told them to play Penn State football."

Nice work, coach. Way to earn your $500,000 salary.


¹The full name of the bowl game is the Rose Bowl Presented By Citi. Rather than poke a little fun at Paterno, a Pennsylvania icon who has done a lot to help his university community, perhaps I should be questioning whether Citi should be spending its money sponsoring a college football bowl game, given its financial woes.