In case you didn't notice, it snowed...

This week has really brought home the utter and absolute inadequacy of "news" programs here in the US of A. This is a warning: I've had a rum and coke in one of my new thermal glasses (of which I'm very proud, ask me about them), my bloody computer has just crashed forcing me to re-type all of this from memory, and I'm in the mood for a rantathon. But first, let me tell you how the week began, or more precisely, how last week ended. Em and I decided to experience the full cross section of American culture. We'd previously been to the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, etc. etc. - yes, Boston is very cultural and therefore full of people who will stand in front of a urinal and say "whaaall it really defines contemporary culture, what, ya?" - and so we (actually, I should be truthful: I) decided that we should experience the other side of the bell-curve and go somewhere where they sell hot-dogs. So it was that we accepted the invitation by Gusti to attend what had been described by various people as "trailer-trash entertainment": Roller-Derby. Apparently the latter word is pronounced "derby", with no pretence of an A hiding sneakily within. Anyway, Gusti picked us up on Saturday evening in his car which, miraculously given its past performances, operated flawlessly and drove us up the '93 to Shriner's Auditorium. This turned out to be a concrete warehouse with a hot-dog kitchen and a bar, and with stands erected around a floor on which yellow tape had been stuck in the shape of two concentric stadia. We found seats at the back of the stand and peered over the heavily tattooed and pierced throng to the action below. The, and I use the term loosely, sport involves two teams of five women who skate anti-clockwise around the track. Four of the team are "blockers" and one is the "jammer". The job of the jammer is to skate past the opposing team's blockers, each one passed accreting a point to that team, and the job of the blockers is to prevent this by shoulder barging the jammers out of the ring and onto their arses in the surrounding area marked "crash zone". And that's it. For three periods of twenty minutes, with twenty minute breaks between. OK, so there are some tactics like using the larger ladies as anchors for the faster birds to slingshot around the curves and such like, but I'm afraid the frenzy that whipped up our fellow observers every time a Boston Derby Dame negotiated a Philadelphia Liberty Belle bypassed me. It didn't help that, disappointingly, a considerable number of the women skaters appeared to be more butch than I am and also it turned out that Boston was mullered by the Philly lasses. So I was sadly disappointed on the way back, but satisfied in the way that we had tried and failed, and not not bothered at all. Actually, one bizarre thing stuck out about the journey back down the motorway. At one point we suddenly smelt the horrible stink of thiols. "That's a skunk" observed Gusti. "What, one skunk?" I asked. Apparently one skunk's spray is potent enough for us to smell it on the motorway for about 15 minutes. I tell you I wouldn't want to piss one of these little critters off. I saw one once on the way back from the pub (I was on the way back, not the skunk) and didn't think much of it: I'll be more careful in future now I know how badly they pong.

So, I expect you probably noticed that this week it was St. Valentine's day on Wednesday. Well if you live in the US you'd have to be living with your head stuck firmly (and by that I mean roughly five hundred metres) in the ground to not realise this. The local convenience store CVS, which, by the way, markets itself as such despite the fact that it doesn't sell bread, fresh fruit or fresh meat - it only sells the important things like confectioneries, celebrity magazines and shampoo - dedicated over the last month two of its limited number of isles to pink fluffy things. For weeks in advance TV adverts have gone Valentine's Bezerk, news shows have been almost monotonic on the subject, so by Wednesday you just wanted to shout "for f*ck's sake it's only f*cking Valentine's day!". Sorry swear, but there's only so much pink anybody should be subjected to in one lifetime. Do you know that we don't even know who the hell "Valentine" was? Also, Wikipedia lists the dude (possible not entirely accurately) as being, amongst other things the patron saint against fainting, of greetings card manufacturers and the plague. But wait (in the manner of US infomertials)! Not only was it V-day but it coincided with the season's first Nor'easter! You may reasonably ask what on Earth a Nor'easter is: a powerful extratropical cyclone that exists, briefly or otherwise, off the North East coast, such that the coastal winds are north-easterly and we in Boston end up getting dumped on with snow. Until now we've had an unusually small amount of snow - the yearly average is 42 inches and all winter so far we'd had about an inch, despite the rest of the US getting far more than their fair share - so in Boston the snow was strangely well received. Therefore, back to the "news". Imagine a news crew who are used to the fact that Boston gets lots of snow and now suddenly everybody else in the US has got loads, while we've got none. The first Nor'easter, hence, rightly takes up 50% of the news every night from its inception in the weather models (sometime last week) until, well it's still up there even now on Sunday, when it really isn't by any stretch "news" any more. But you have to realise that they have trailers for the weather forecasts here. Let me repeat that: Trailers. For the weather forecast. "There's a storm coming in, folks, we'll have all the latest at 11" which means "there's a low on the way": Just give me the flipping weather forecast! But no, it's the Valentine's Nor'Easter, guys! It's SNOWING! SNOOOOOOOOW!!!!!!!! AND ANNA NICOLE SMITH'S POPPED HER CLOGS GUYS! AUTOPSIES! FATHERS OF BABIES! IMPORTANT NEWS!!!!!!!! Ohandtheressomethingaboutnorthkoreaandnuclearweaponsthatsvaguelyimportanttoo.

You see what I'm ranting at? People at work comment that I'm "such a Brit" because I get my news from the BBC website - well that's because the news on the BBC is generally both accurate, important and global. News here is like local "cat stuck up a tree" news back home and that's all. I watched a "World News" program on ABC and the first sentence was "Twenty states in the grip of snow..." Aaargh! This is the country with the world's biggest big red button and the television news is astonishingly introverted!

[Deep breath]

Rant over. I honestly do like living here; it's just certain things can be somewhat trying. Where's that rum?