I've shoveled a lot of snow.  I've gotten backaches and frozen hands.  I've been road slush-spattered by high-off-the-ground pickups, and I've sprawled in bed, depressed at the thought of getting up to shovel.  This winter in my part of the world has been a mild one, except for a very cold two weeks.  The snowfall has been below average.  I don't mind this, although snow philosophers speak of the necessity of enough snow to make the ground fertile come spring.  I accept this practical wisdom.  Why deny it?  My point is, though, I don't like to shovel snow.  It's a chore I accept for the same reason I eat carrots.  No snow shoveling after a storm and it might be difficult to get the car on the street.  No carrots and other fibrous vegetables and it might be difficult to get shit out of my body.  If the gross bluntness of the previous sentence offends any readers, bear in mind it's simply a statement of practical wisdom.  Why deny it?
     New York is the location of a concentration of news media, like the compound eyes of a gigantic fly.  If something, a storm say, is about to hit New York, news outlets have platoons of reporters to deploy.  If the shit is hitting the fan, it gives broadcasters something to do when the fan is New York.  If the big event is an oncoming swirling thing over the Atlantic Ocean, New York's newsmen and -women need only talk about that for a few days, and some of them will get to stand in a blizzard's strong unpleasant winds.
     For the record, I have been outside in a few blizzards, and not by choice.  My instinct in such a weather event is to be inside.  I can look at it from warmth and comfort and know how stupid it is to be out there, if it's not necessary to be out there.
     In this storm named Juno, Weather Channel and cable news reporters have demonstrated their willingness to be blown while saying mostly the obvious in New York all the way to New England.  Along the Massachusetts coast, some towns were hit hard, sea walls breaking in at least two towns.  Boston and other New England cities and towns have so far received two feet of snow.
     Like last year's "Polar Vortex," a new term has been offered: Bombogenesis, referring to some special happening I can't explain but found funny enough to pass along.  I suggest this definition: "Making things, using bomb explosions."
     New England has received a lot of snow.  New York, though, had to deal with ten inches and none of the promised "hurricane force winds."  New York-based news media spent much of its energy preparing America for something huge.  Instead, they got what I call a snowstorm, but a snowstorm in New York, therefore of prime significance.  Don't talk about the coup d'état in Yemen.  What's up with Obama's war against ISIS?  Who cares?  How can even these important events
compete with Bombogenesis?
     Viewers, I guess, want to see reporters in winter coats talking about how devoid of traffic parts of New York look after Mayor De Blasio called for a halt to anything but emergency vehicle traffic.  Chris Hayes of MSNBC, normally intelligent, used the word "eerie" to describe the streets of New York, but if there's a readily understood cause and effect explanation for something, how can it be eerie?  Is the absence of the usual glut of Manhattan taxicabs last night an uncanny phenomenon, too?

                                                                          Vic Neptune
    
        
    

     I don't like the New England Patriots as coached by Bill Belichick.  I didn't think about them much until Spygate, when it was revealed that Belichick was in the habit of videotaping the hand signals of his opponents' coaching staffs, an NFL rule breaker for which he was fined 500,000 dollars. 
     By then, the Patriots had won three Super Bowls with the Belichick-Tom Brady as quarterback combination.  Although they've played in two more Super Bowls (both against the New York Giants), they haven't won since before Spygate.  After Spygate they had the remarkable undefeated season which resulted in their first loss to the Giants.  One of my vivid memories of that game is the conclusion, when Belichick jogged out on the field to shake Giants head coach Tom Coughlin's hand.  The game actually required one more play with the Giants in possession of the ball, and a second or two remaining on the clock.  The officials herded players and team employees off the field so the game could be completed, but a shot showed Bill Belichick stomping off the field to the locker room before the game ended.  Up till then I had never seen a coach or a player leave the field before the end of a game.  It confirmed something I already knew about Belichick: he's not a gentleman, he lacks grace, he's a degenerate in a culture that values successful sociopaths. 
     The degree to which the New England Patriots were defended by sports media after Spygate, worshipped as "the greatest football team of all time" during their undefeated season (undefeated until the underdog Giants beat them), was enough to roil my intellectual vomit at the time.  Since Super Bowl 42, when Belichick couldn't handle staying on the field until the game ended, the Patriots have been strong contenders in the NFL, losing again to the Giants in another Super Bowl, but nevertheless receiving that arrogant title, "America's Team," formerly bestowed unthinkingly on the Dallas Cowboys.  The title, I guess, urges us to regard a team led by a cheating head coach as the team to root for, just like we were supposed to root for the invasion of Afghanistan. 
     My grumpiness aside, the Patriots are at it again.  On Sunday, January 18, 2015, the Indianapolis Colts faced the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship Game, the winner to travel to Arizona to meet the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl 49.  The Patriots, playing at home, beat the Colts 45-7.  Granted, the Colts had a hard few hours to deal with, but NFL officialdom has concluded the Patriots used underinflated balls eleven out of twelve times.  Underinflation in cold weather makes the ball easier to grip, or so I understand, giving the quarterback, Tom Brady in this case, a better grip on the thing than otherwise.  Would the Colts have won or scored far more points if the Patriots hadn't (once again in the Belichick era) cheated?  Unknowable.  What is known are NFL rules.  Underinflating balls, knowingly giving your quarterback an advantage the other team doesn't have, is a violation. 
     What follows the Patriots around are excuses in sports media for their behavior.  Some say that the Colts played so badly that the pliability of Tom Brady's balls doesn't matter.  Another comment I heard on ESPN suggested that the Patriots could've been using ping pong balls and they still would've destroyed the Colts.  Some people on television and radio get paid appreciable salaries, and they make such irrelevant statements, the kind that would get them fired if I ran their organization. 
     I admit the Patriots give me spiritual heartburn.  I ingest their activities and those activities back up again. 
     The penalties for "Deflategate," as it's actually being called, could involve fines and taking away a draft pick or two for the coming season.  Belichick's half a million dollar fine after Spygate was made irrelevant when Patriots owner Robert Kraft raised his salary the following season.  This is just another way of saying, Rich fuckers don't get punished.  Instead, Belichick went on to more winning seasons, winning and losing playoff games, always a serious competitor in the League, but not winning more Super Bowls.
     I think Belichick's motive, if he knew about it or decided to do it, for deflating footballs points to his win-at-any-cost character flaw.  The irony of a three-time Super Bowl winning head coach resorting to taping his opponents to gain what could only have been occasional advantage over them, and later resorting to using rule-breaking balls in a Championship Game, can be explained, perhaps, by a driving need to win more Super Bowls after a decade-long dry spell.  Superstar quarterback Tom Brady has just so many years left, but he is a very great quarterback, which makes me wonder: why does such a phenomenal athlete with a genius football mind  need the help rules-violating trickery provides?  The New England Patriots going to Super Bowl 49 have proven themselves an excellent team this season.  Why cheat?  Is it like asking why a well-off person steals a purse from a store?  Because she's a kleptomaniac?  Is Bill Belichick, with his already well-earned three Super Bowl rings, a pathological abuser of NFL regulations, knowing he can get away with it in a time when Commissioner Roger Goodell has demonstrated, with the Ray Rice domestic abuse case, his own spineless degeneracy?
     Whatever happens with all of it, I'm rooting with all my heart for the Seattle Seahawks on Super Bowl Sunday.

                                                                             Vic Neptune         

     Barack Obama has received the condemnation of Fox and Friends hosts Steve Doocy, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, and Brian Kilmeade, combined I.Q. unknown.  Obama has let down the world, I guess, because he didn't attend the mass demonstration in Paris, which featured approximately three million, seven hundred thousand people and "over forty" world leaders.  The leaders linked arms and walked like it was Paris 1968.  Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority was there.  Benjamin Netanyahu, fresh from ordering a war against Palestinian civilians, was there.  Angela Merkel of Germany was there.  No Obama, or Biden, or even John Kerry.  A U.S. ambassador walked among the great, representing Washington, D.C., but that's seen by the many critics of this faux pas as a hardly adequate representative supposed to make a show of solidarity for liberty and the pen's freedom. 
     On January 7, 2015, two brothers, Muslims, carried out a massacre at the offices of a satirical magazine in Paris.  The magazine had published cartoons featuring depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.  As we've seen in the past, this can generate gunfire.  The Prophet is not to be depicted, although I wonder how it's even possible to depict Muhammad, since no one alive knows what he looked like.  Let's say he had a beard, but beyond that, who knows?  It's like drawing or painting Jesus of Nazareth.  No one knows what Jesus looked like, although he certainly didn't have blue eyes.
     That some Muslims can be offended by a depiction of the Prophet has been long known, but a fraction of that group take it to lethal levels.  They are fundamentalists, and like all fundamentalists of whatever religion, their senses of humor about their faiths are non-existent. 
     For two days Paris went into major cop mode, a la Boston after the Marathon bombing.  Talking heads on the news in America spoke of ISIS carrying out massacres here, al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula working its plots on our soil.  The War on Terror, maybe no longer called that in official circles, thrives as the first world continues to bomb and exploit the third.  Some of those first world leaders linking arms in Paris are among the bombers and exploiters.  It would've been appropriate for Obama or Biden to link arms with a killer like Benjamin Netanyahu, showing anyone who can perceive irony, leaders who employ terror tactics condemning terrorism.
     Doocy, Hasselbeck, and Kilmeade, aglow with smugness, easily allowed their contempt for Obama's lapse in not joining the parade overshadow any comprehension of Obama's own role in the overall shittiness of the world situation as regards the whirlpool of stateless and state terrorism, and how this war, call it World War Three, is pulling us all down while the climate changes badly. 
     In American news the narrative on the huge Parisian demonstration tended to focus on the Obama Administration's fuck-up, ignoring the vast crowd expressing their shock and disgust at the massacre, and their support of free speech.  But I say, who gives a fuck that "forty plus" world leaders linked arms?  How supportive of free speech are some of those leaders in their own countries?  How supportive of free speech and the free exchange of ideas are Steve Doocy and his doltish co-hosts, considering how much their network, Fox News Channel, propagandizes?
    
                                                                              Vic Neptune
           

     Today, two remarkable objects came into my possession.  Gifts of a beautiful ring or a long wanted book can inspire joy and surprise, but these pieces, call them in an imaginary auction, Lot #1, American Christmas Kitsch 1970s Folk Artless, are beyond ordinary crap art.  So utterly godawful are these Christmas ornaments it's as if their maker were inspired by a movie director to design and fabricate the worst possible hideous bulky Christmas ornaments for a scene set in the living room of characters with no taste whatsoever. 
     A coworker of mine, going through old boxes of decorations by past (and probably passed in the cemetery sense) volunteers, found a cardboard box, about 15 inches by 20 by 18, labelled Velvet Balls.  She hung a few on one of the remaining decorative Christmas trees to see how they looked.  All of my coworkers invited to take a look at them found them curious.  "Retro" was the common comment.  In the box were at least twenty to twenty-five of these things, each wrapped in white tissue paper.
     The "velvet" balls are actually variously colored lenticular felt cuttings glued onto Styrofoam spheroids, each section divided by faded gold braid running vertically from pole to pole.  A braid loop at one end allows the insertion of an ornament hook: at the other end a gold tassel (such as might depend from a mortarboard) has been cut with sharp 1970s scissors, leaving decorative angel hair pasta-thickness tassel dangling, almost drawing the eye away from the ornament's overall hideousness.  Most of the ornaments, about four inches in diameter, would be hard for anyone with small hands to pick up one-handed.  A few of them are relative miniatures, reflecting, perhaps, the unknown artist's possession of some smaller balls, and a desire to use up all the felt, putting them into disharmonious color combinations such as pale blue next to dusty orange next to purple. 
     The felt pieces, furthermore, are uneven, making some sections quite wide, others narrow.  When the larger balls, especially, hang on a tree, their Jupiter-like bulk pushes them outwards, the tassels, which should be jaunty, drooping rather than hanging straight. 
     My coworker, who uncovered this find, offered the entire box of Velvet Balls to anyone who wanted them.  It was a day of getting rid of crap in the storage rooms.  Others took sundry items of Christmases past; no one bit on the temptation of the Velvet Balls. 
     "I don't like them," I said, "but I can't stop looking at them."
     A minute later, still staring at the ones on the tree in growing awe, I started laughing and I couldn't stop.  It became the kind of laughter that tightens the body.  My eyes became wet.  Like the tassels I couldn't stand up straight.  My coworkers were amused, I think, although maybe a few who don't know me well found my amusement odd.  I opened the box and took out two wrapped Velvet Balls, the big kind, moving aside the paper to see the clashing colors.  Satisfied, I stowed them in my work area.  Encouraged by the coworker who found them to take the whole box, I replied, truthfully, "I can only handle these two."
     I carried the Balls, one in each hand like kings' orbs of sovereignty, to the car, ten below wind chill, placing them on the passenger seat where one of them rolled and bonked against the door during a sharp turn. 
     I couldn't explain while at work why I laughed, but now I know.  Some creative endeavors yield great art.  More often, a range of mediocre to good work is produced, in whatever medium.  This leaves (I know I'm generalizing) the bad and the even worse.  As the saying goes, though, "There's no accounting for taste."  It's true.  Plan 9 From Outer Space is often called, sometimes reflexively, "the worst movie ever made," but I love it.  I've seen it five or six times and it never disappoints me.  I notice different things about it each time I see it.  It was made by its director and writer, Edward D. Wood, Jr., with loving enthusiasm.  This "worst film" has lasted after nearly sixty years, still watched and enjoyed while thousands of films of the same period are forgotten. 
     Are the Velvet Balls a kind of Plan 9?  Something so bad they're good?  I don't want to use the word "good" to describe the Balls.  They do, however, achieve something unusual: their lack of sensible construction, their non-existent color harmony, their repulsive appearance overall, the fact that they aren't velvet, push them, incredibly, so far beyond common horrible art they manage to land, or dangle awkwardly, in a realm of aesthetic sublimity.  If beauty has its archetypes, its models, then so does crap art, and that should be respected.
     Plus, unlike with the Venus de Milo, it's okay to laugh at Velvet Balls.

                                                                               Vic Neptune