Snow Job

That's me in the picture. The photographer was a visitor that we had on 12/22/13. He arrived during a snow storm and had a hard time getting in, so I plowed him a track to get back out. He took the picture from inside our house, through a window pane. This isn't the worst winter I remember since I moved to God's Country in 1967, but it's the most severe I've seen since we moved to Beaglesonia in 2000. Of course, I'm not getting any younger, which might have something to do with it.

Our local TV weatherman has a daily feature where he asks a question about weather facts and trivia, then he tells the answer after the commercial break. Did you know that the term "The Hawk", used to describe a cold winter wind, originated in Chicago? It was first published in the Defender, an African American newspaper in 1936. I knew about it from the colored folks I met in the army, and I later heard that it originated in Chicago, but I didn't know about the newspaper.

Many of the rural areas in the U.S. have part time volunteer fire departments. They get paid, but only when they are out on a call or training. In cities like Chicago, being a fireman is a full time job. When they are on duty, they stay in the fire hall doing maintenance, and they even sleep there at night. They get paid for this time whether or not they are called out to a fire during their tour of duty. My point is that being a volunteer doesn't necessarily mean that you don't get paid. Militias members are part time volunteer soldiers. Whether or not they get paid has nothing to do with it.

I have no data to back this up, but I have always thought that more people drank during Prohibition than before or after. Maybe this impression came from watching those old Elliot Ness movies on TV. Come to think of it, how would anybody know whether people drank more or less during Prohibition? Did they take polls in those days? It seems like reliable data would be hard to come by. Since it was illegal, people who did it wouldn't be likely to admit it to a stranger. Nowadays, people videotape themselves committing crimes and then publish it on the internet, but I don't think criminals were that arrogant, or that stupid, back in the Roaring 20s.

I'm not sure where you would find a copy of federal, state, and local gun laws, but it must be somewhere on the internet. The ones we're looking for are most likely federal. I have never seen a copy of the law that says bank robbery is illegal either, but I kind of think that it is.

I don't have any data to back this up either, but I first started hearing about the increased sales of guns and ammo right after Obama was elected the first time. What I said about his second term pertained to his inability to get new gun laws passed. I'm just speculating here, but maybe he expended most of his political capital getting his health care law passed, and now he is pretty busy trying to make it work. Personally, I didn't think that his gun law proposal was unreasonable, but I'm not so paranoid as some of my fellow gun nuts. Of course, that's assuming he was telling the truth about what he wanted to see passed.