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