An American Lion

Once Byron is able to safely transport the last of the mink habitat inhabitants down here to St. Thomas, we will no longer have a presence in the State of Maryland. When I made the decision to pull up stakes and leave, there was forty inches of snow on the ground and the Howard County Snow plow driver was throwing bottles of urine at us as he pushed snow into our cul de sac, blocking us in. I shall probably live in New Hampshire once again, but the middling part of the Mid-Atlantic is no where I shall ever live again.

Go straight to hell, Mid-Atlantic. You are uninhabitable for decent people. You are a butt sandwich I’m not going to accept anymore.

That’s why I smirked when I read this:

A major nor’easter is expected to bring blizzard conditions to interior New England and heavy rain and near-hurricane-force wind gusts to Northeastern coastal areas Wednesday through Friday.

Little, if any, snow will fall in Boston, Massachusetts, while Washington, New York and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, could see as much as 5 inches of snow with locally higher amounts, CNN meteorologist Sean Morris said.

Record snowfall totals of 30 inches or more will be possible across upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, Morris said. Very strong winds will combine with the heavy snow to produce dangerous white-out conditions and widespread power outages.

You can do thirty or forty inches of snow in New Hampshire; they have plows there. They have a snow removal system there. You cannot do that same amount of snow in states like Maryland, which have spent all of their money on schools that don’t teach and government programs that ensure that the poor are always poor and cannot read and write. You cannot do that in a state where the people who own snow removal equipment can jack up their prices and collect blood money from the Federal government while you and yours sit snowbound in a development run by an incompetent homeowner’s association that forgot to bribe the equipment-starved county to plow them out first.

You would think all of this snow would have saved a company like Hummer; alas, it did not:

General Motors’ deal to sell its Hummer brand to a Chinese automaker fell through Wednesday and the company said it now plans to shut down the brand.

GM did not give any details about why the agreement to sell Hummer to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machines Co. Ltd. could not be completed, saying only that it was disappointed it was unable to close the deal.

One of the things that I did notice about the snowstorms we received in Maryland earlier this month was that they revealed that the Hummer did fairly well in the snow; hospitals were forced to use them to get sick people into emergency rooms. The military version of the Humvee is preferable; that thing they call a Hummer is a fraud, but it did look like a pretty good runner in the snow. The military version went through the snow like shit through a skinny goose. I dumped the Suburban because, well, why not? I’d rather get a Mercedes and leave it at that.

On the site where Scuddy’s Bar stands, we will construct a mink habitat for Byron and extend our property holdings out and down the narrow lane that brings a single car up to the property. If you were to ask me about hurricanes, I would say that, at least when a hurricane comes and destroys everything, you don’t have to wait for a snowplow to come and save you.