February 2010 Archives

  CAN YOU IMAGINE?  It's been sixty-two years since we felt this good. Sixty two years since a really really fat American won a gold medal in the Olympic Games.

  Like yours, my eyes moistened last night when I saw the American gold medal winning bobsled team jump into that souped up NASCAR entry called "The Night Train." It was like watching them boys from the Dukes of Hazard jump into the General Lee.  Yee haaa, who's gonna beat this lead sled down the hill?!?

  No one in the world, as it turned out.

   At least the skipper of the Night Train looked like a mechanic -- a short, fat, bald mechanic.  Steve Holcomb, driver/skipper of the USA's gold medal winning four-man bobsled team, is one of those guys that spandex wasn't made for.  During beefy  Team USA's  final run Saturday one of the NBC announcers marvelled,  " Look how low these athletes get in this sled."

  I'm sorry, that was just plain funny.

And to think that the United States has been denied this moment of national joy and accomplishment  since 1948.

WHEN SNOW GETS UGLY, which is right about now for those keeping score at home, it tends to mountain up in dirty piles ten feet tall.  When snow gets ugly, it's lost its charm and even its  menace.  It's just there.  It no longer everywhere.  It's no longer unavoidable. It's like a week's worth of trash that hasn't been picked up for two weeks.

  This pile on Montgomery Avenue in Narberth is more than a week old, and even then it was decorated by a hopeful message in red "(Spring is Coming!") plus the black logo of the Main Line Bicycle store (those are supposed to be bicycle chain links, although to me it looks more like the word "grog") where the pile takes up one of its parking spaces.

 I haven't seen this much snow hang around Philadelphia this long since the Winter of '77.   That's the winter of Nineteen Seventy-Seven -- Dag Nabbit!!  -- the coldest winter anyone in  these parts can remember..  With another snow storm on its way Thursday and Friday, our already record-breaking winter snowfall may actually become the equivalen of the epic "Snows of Yesteryear" we used to hear about from our grandparents.

LITTLE BY LITTLE over the last couple of years the stone facades of buildings along South Broad Street on the blocks below City Hall have been highlighted with a blueish hue,  making the Avenue of the Arts look positively bluesy at night.  It's a striking look and it's been slowing creeping south, building by building, until now it's beginning make the predominent first impression.

  For some reason, Broad Street has always seemed dark to me at night.  More than just dark, Broad Street seemed to be the place where light went to die.  Even with crowded sidewalks and the majesty of City Hall looming ahead, South Broad Street, the heart if Center City Philadelphia, always looked gloomy in years past.

  These blue lights highlight Broad Street's architechture, the  "beetling gibraltars of concrete", which is how Public Ledger columnist Christopher Morley described the same stretch of South Broad in the early 1920's.. 

THERE'S ONLY SO MUCH a guy can do to document the snowiest Philadelphia winter in any living person's lifetime.  I've taken hundreds of photos so far to document the depth and breadth of our record-breaking snowfalls of February 2010 (with more due tomorrow) and I can only show one at a time.  So here's the one I've chosen for today.

  That's Casper the Friendly Snowman sitting smack dab in the middle of the Swann Fountain at Logan Circle in Center City.  Casper's eyes seem to have been concocted out of someone's woolen gloves (voluntarily surrendered, perhaps?).

  Casper joins the three other permanent Philadelphia presences in the fountain -- the Delaware, the Schuylkill and the Wissahickon, which is what the the three human Indian figures (sculpted by Alexander Sterling Calder, son the City Hall master sculptor -- including the 37-foot-tall bronze of William Penn -- Alexander Milne Calder) symbolically represent.

How permanent Casper remains depends on how cruel the Winter of 'Ten continues.

I JUST STOLE THIS OFF THE INTERNET.  Just like that. A friend sent this to me and now I share it with you. This is funny on any level you want to argue.  It's like seeing the Di Brothers do Sammy. -- live --!!!  There are some things you have to be there -- have been there -- to have a clue. This is not a code.