A brief musing during the holiday week

Regular Bleakonomy readers (both of you) will, perhaps, recall that the Official Bleakonomy Home Office is located in southern Maine. I live in the "seacoast region," which could be considered distant exurbs of Boston. While not the darkest deeps of Aroostook County (where a job recruiter once worked really, really hard to get me to consider a job in Caribou, a particularly hard sell given that I lived in Manhattan at the time), I do live in a rural, wooded area, far from the world's seats of power and finance.

I ended up staying home on Monday as massive amounts of snow were dumped on the Northeast, which afforded me the opportunity to dig out my house. By late Monday, however, the roads were essentially passable thanks to efficient plowing, and transit was back to normal in the wilds of my town by the next day.

Which is to say that I find it incredibly amusing that (arguably) the two most powerful cities in the world were brought to a grinding halt by snow over the past week. For the best response I've yet seen, I refer you to the priceless Hadley Freeman:

Snow – have you heard of it?

If so, you have a head start on pretty much every transportation bigwig in this country. But perhaps after two nationally paralysing snow storms this year, Britain's airports and train operators will come to grips with the concept of "snow" falling in this season we call "winter" and prepare accordingly.