It’s Cold.

…and I don’t care about the State of the Union…

Where I live, it’s cold right now. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll note that I live in New Brunswick – part of a tiny fiefdom within the Canadian Confederation known as The Maritime Provinces. The Maritime Provinces are a sheet of permafrost with colorful houses, Tim Horton’s coffee shops and Unemployment Insurance offices built on top of a bigger sheet of super-ultra-permafrost.

When the Norse gods need some spare ice for their hell, they come to New Brunswick in January. It’s so ridiculously cold that even the normally amorous-while-frozen Emperor Penguins won’t get busy here. Atop our sheet of ice-on-supernatural-ice, the landmass projects out into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. In a windstorm, frozen harp seals regularly are blown to land, thudding down on houses, children and slow-moving pets.

Currently we are in an epic cold spell that is now into its second week – the temperature has been hovering around 30 below freezing or nearly –22 for those of you who live in large, stupid Fahrenheit countries. That’s the kind of cold that snaps power lines, causes trees to literally explode and makes the manliest among us shriek in falsetto tones while shielding our tender bits from the evil, biting frost. This kind of weather hates you; it calls you names and speaks dark, pornographic thoughts about your spouse, loved ones, extra-marital lovers and preferred prostitutes. This weather is racist, steals from charities and wants George W Bush to have six more terms as President. This weather thinks Ann Coulter is hot and smart. Ewww.

Local radio (deserving of another post entirely) is full of helpful warnings that people should wear warm clothing, and not let their kids play outside naked. Further, people are strongly admonished to watch their pets carefully as our little friends are also at risk.

Not my pets, Jim. They couldn’t be more comfy, safe and warm. Mrs. Sinister and I have two cats, and they are in no danger at all.

The elder of the two is a really long, aggressively stupid kitty who is part angora or wooly mammoth or something. Cloaked in his miasma of fur, he seems monstrously large despite only weighing in at about 6 pounds. Imagine a black and white picture of the Crab Nebula with a head — an empty head, but a head. This aged lump of cat moves only to eat, find a new place to sleep or wander casually to excrete near, but never in the cat box. Our cat box is so huge that the United States Navy recently refitted it with anti-missile systems and whale-friendly sonar, so I assume that he’s doing it on purpose.

Cat number two is a loaf of blubber besieged by frantic terror when anything other than its kitty self moves, breathes or is described in hushed tones by people as far away as Scotland. If you even think about preparing to consider analyzing the prospect of contemplating a loud noise, Blubber Loaf is gone faster than bourbon down the hatch of Paula Abdul. The list of offending noises includes both of our doors to the outside, car horns (active and inactive) as well as loud colors.

So, it is safe to assume that the cold weather will not affect our cats. My children are both too young to get out of their pen in the basement, so they’re good too. The entire family then will be inside, all warm and toasty tonight while we endure the chilly weather and do everything possible to ignore the State of the Union.

The State of the Union is delivered annually by the President to the combined houses of Congress and a gallery of distinguished guests who are skilled in the art of bribery. In earlier times, many Presidents did not deliver the speech in person, but rather assigned a designate (usually Dan Rather) to read the speech for them. Modern Presidents, beginning with one of them that I can’t be bothered to look up, changed all of this and now we are stuck in this horrible situation.

I love American politics but even I cannot bring myself to sit through a full hour of the President going on and on about a list of things that will never happen or have already not happened. Having said this, I did some research and have a pretty good summary of the points likely to be found in the speech;

1. The troop surge in Iraq will be referred to not as an escalation, but rather as The Engorgement of the American Military Unit. (Codename; Swollen Emu)
2. The President plans to replace the Secretary of State with a more popular figure; Peyton Manning.
3. A comprehensive healthcare plan will be unveiled; the President will announce that the lowest-income Americans can “just go straight to hell”.
4. The new energy policy will be centered on the use of “the anti-matter machine from Star Trek” – but the version with Captain Kirk, and not that snooty French guy.
5. To relieve the pressure on National Guard units stationed in Iraq, the Pentagon will undertake the training and deployment of Captain Marvel. The President will admit that this is an imperfect solution, but the new Superman is kind of a sissy and Batman scares him.
6. It will be revealed that the woman in all those Abu Ghirab pictures was actually Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
7. The figure of President Abraham Lincoln will be removed from the Lincoln memorial to be replaced with the frozen corpse of James Brown.
8. Barack Obama will be asked to chair a special Presidential Commission on “not being so appealing all the time and making me look bad”.
9. The spelling on ‘nuclear’ will be changed to ‘nukular’ just to finally put that to rest.
10. Tim Russert and Dick Cheney will meet in the Rotunda for a no-holds-barred Texas Deathmatch.

So you can see why I’m skipping it – you guys can do better than Captain Marvel.