Our Culture: February 2007 Archives

Finally, someone had the good sense to give Martin Scorcese an Adademy Award.

I didn't watch the awards and I haven't seen "The Departed" yet, but the honor is long overdue for one of the great filmmakers of all time. Scorcese is a visionary director and masterful storyteller.

In the past, he was robbed. In '76, "Taxi Driver" lost best picture to "Rocky." Scorcese wasn't even nominated for directing it. "GoodFellas" lost to "Dances With Wolves" and Scorcese lost to Kevin Costner. Give me a break.

The biggest crime, though, was in 1980 when Scorcese's masterpiece, "Raging Bull," lost to "Ordinary People" and Scorcese lost to Robert Redford. "Ordinary People" was a nice made-for-TV-like movie. "Raging Bull" was, and still is, a landmark. I just saw it again recently and it's astonishing how good it is.

Interestingly, all three of these Scorcese flicks are on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest movies ever made. Of the films that beat them for best picture, only "Rocky" is on the list.

Anyway, no sour grapes. Congrats, Marty. It's about time.

This hard: On Saturday, I attempted to remove the glacier surrounding my mailbox using a pick.

I took a swing. It took a small chip out of the glacier.

I took a bigger swing and the blade of the pick bent.

The glacier won.

OK, I point this out every year.

In New Orleans, they party like there's no tomorrow.

In Rio, they dance nekkid in the streets.

Here, we eat doughnuts.

Life isn't fair.

But come to think of it, too many doughnuts and you probably shouldn't be dancing nekkid in the streets. It might scare people.

Boy, lots of us used to love snow days. Had a day off, got to play in the snow, didn't have a worry in the world about the sadistic snow plow guy coming by and mounding a Himalayan-like chain of ice at the foot of your driveway.

I was thinking this when, Wednesday, I attempted to shovel my driveway for the third time.Some fun.

Today, like a lot of you, it feels like somebody beat me with a baseball bat.

And driving to work was an adventure. The hill leading away from my home into town was like a bobsled track. Good thing was, the ruts in the ice were so deep, I didn't even have to steer!

Good news on the horizon: The ice is expected to melt by May, prehaps June.

So it's snowing out and we have, I don't know, about a quarter-inch of snow and the noon news on a certain local TV station is covering it like it's the end of the world.

Of course, a quarter-inch of snow in these parts is the end of the world.

I stand corrected.

Snow's coming.

Or at least, I think snow's coming. One sure sign of snow is the bread aisle at the grocery store. If all that's left is a loaf of sawdust whole grain stuff, you know snow's on the way.

Weird thing, though. And I'm sure I'm not the only who's noticed this, and I'm sure there's some kind of reasonable explanation for it, but why, every time it snows, is the Pennsylvania Turnpike the line of demarcation between heavier snow and lighter snow.

Always, heavier snow north of the turnpike, lighter to the south.

What kind of magical qualities does the turnpike possess?

OK, maybe there is.

At Tuesday's White House press briefing, a reporter asked mouthpiece Tony Snow this:

"Presidents may not be able to predict the weather or change the weather, but is there anything that the President has been either briefed on about the current cold wave across the country, or any federal resources that are being brought to bear?"

White House mouthpiece Tony Snow answered, "I don't know. I'll find out."

Hadn't that reporter heard about the administration's plan to change our climate and battle global warming with a giant space mirror and shiny balloons?

I'd be remiss if I didn't note and mourn the passing of the one the greats in journalism.

Columnist Molly Ivins passed away after a lengthy battle with breast cancer. She was an astonishingly good journalist and story teller. Just a great, great woman.

I had the opportunity to meet her. Some years ago, at a writers' conference, I skipped out of one the sessions and wound up in the hotel bar with Molly and Rich Aregood, then the editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Daily News. Hanging out with these two passionate and accomplished journalists was like going to grad school.

When Molly passed, I told my wife I knew she was very sick, but I had hoped she would have been able to hang in there long enough to see Dubya leave the White House. (She called Dubya "Shrub.")

We'll miss her.

All day Tuesday, we were treated to 'round-the-clock coverage of the crazy astronaut who drove from Houston to Florida to confront the woman vying for the attention of her alleged object of affection.

And every time you turned on one of the cable news channels, the script at the bottom of the screen read: "Houston, we have a problem." CNN, MS-NBC, all of them. Even ESPN, on the sports yakker Pardon The Interruption, as hosts Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon dissected the case, the type at the bottom of the screen read, well, you know.

On the positive side, though, it did give Kornheiser an opportunity to crack wise and make a Uranus joke related to the allegation that the astronaut wore a diaper as she drove the 900 miles from Houston to Orlando. Kornheiser is the nation's leading distributor of Uranus jokes outside of middle schools.

We need a new cliche. Something like, "Houston, looks like we have a screw loose up there."