Yeah snowstorm! I wish this thing had started a day later, as I'd probably be looking at a snow day from work. Here's hoping the pipes burst or the heat went belly-up at the building over the weekend.

We headed out to Target just as the first flakes were falling, and by the time we left it was a full-on snowstorm. They were doing quite a brisk business in flying saucer sleds! The lack of cabs resulted in my first NYC bus ride. Not much to report. Your metro card goes into a little black box and comes popping out the top, just like on the PATH train. Much easier than swiping. The subways should do this too.

Cabin fever forced us out into the blizzard again, this time to Teeda, a Thai restaurant. The owner was probably so glad to see some business he gave us each a glass of wine and dessert on the house.

SpongeBob, as his song goes, "lives in a pineapple under the sea/absorbent and yellow and porous is he!" SpongeBush lives in a bubble in D.C./absorbent and shallow and porous is he! SpongeBush ensnared the country in a whale of a mess in Iraq because he guilelessly absorbed the neocons' dire warnings about Saddam's weapons capabilities and their rosy assumptions about Ahmad Chalabi's leadership capabilities. Dick Cheney is a gruff Mr. Krabs taskmaster to SpongeBush, but SpongeBush is crazy about him anyhow. W. trustingly let his vice president make the worst-case scenario about Iraq a first-case scenario. A Bunch of Krabby Patties by Maureen Dowd.

So looks like I'll be moving this weekend. I'm trading the luxury of an in-house W/D for the luxury of a bedroom that opens onto a giant backyard. Even though I'm only moving about 5 blocks away from my current place, my whole neighborhood is shifting and I can now avoid the mall and use a new PATH stop. Thank God. I was getting really tired of the unwelcome comments from the mall security guards each morning on my way to work, everything from a simple "hi" to the totally bizzare "Is that coat warm?" What? Leave me alone! Christ. So hopefully there will be a laundromat on my way to the PATH, as I've already decided to engage in the very urban practice of laundry drop-off. While I'm not thrilled at the idea of strangers washing my clothes, I'm less thrilled with the idea of sitting in a laudromat for two hours each week.

The minimizing - and in some cases outright elimination - of Abu Ghraib and its aftermath from network news coverage is in part (but only in part) political. Fox News, needless to say, has trivialized the story from the get-go, as hallmarked by Bill O'Reilly's proud refusal to run the photos of Graner & Company after they first surfaced at CBS. (This is in keeping with the agenda of the entire Murdoch empire, whose flagship American paper, The New York Post, twice ran Prince Harry's Nazi costume as a Page 1 banner while relegating Specialist Graner's conviction a day later to the bottom of Page 9.) During the presidential campaign, John Kerry barely mentioned Abu Ghraib, giving TV another reason to let snarling dogs lie. Senator John Warner's initially vigilant Congressional hearings - which threatened to elevate the craggy Virginia Republican to a TV stardom akin to Sam Ervin's during Watergate - mysteriously petered out. On Television, Torture Takes a Holiday by Frank Rich.