1.25.5

So, the big Blizzard of 2005 has come and gone. Apparently, I'm lucky to find my self situated in Rhode Island for the first portion of my graduate work as my beloved bay state took on anywhere from 24''-38'' of snow. Yikes! We're measuring in feet!

Though Rhode Island didn't fair much better. The average was about two feet, which while Beantown kept the T (the god of public transit) running (both buses and subways) Rhode Island was crippled. It's just a very lazy state, like the Alabama of the North East.

So, what do you do if you're snowed in? Well, if you're an esoteric wise man like myself, you gravitate towards your library and see if you have any interesting reads. However, I'm copiously behind on my reading list. As such, the next best option is to gravitate towards the radio, preferably trying to pick up broadcasts from out of the region and listen to how a typical New England winter is made out to be an apocalypse.

Across the nation, news casts made it look like there was nothing left of New England, some forecasters even postulating 40 inches of snow! New England, so far as the rest of the country was concerned, had been rendered a densely layered artic tundra, oddly reminiscent of, oh, say, the DAY AFTER TOMORROW!

While Bell hasn't been broadcasting much about climate change recently, you know on the inside the creepy little man has got to be shitting himself with glee. From Tsunamis, to California rains, Western snows, Midwest snows and flooding and now a New England Blizzard, Bell could snide: "I told you so, I told you! Mock me, will you? I told you New York would freeze over! Will I ever be legit?!?"

Okay, maybe he's not doing that, but I can't help but marvel add the neat and tidy timing of this fierce winter weather. One year ago around this time Bell began a five month long plug fest on the weekend edition of Coast hyping up the Day After Tomorrow with his good friend, the inventor of the anal probe, Whitely Strieber. The movie hit, environmentalists enjoyed the attention, however brief, it brought their cause, though most scientists derided the movie as bunk. After the opening weekend, we didn't hear much about it, though occasionally Bell would bring up the possibility of global climate change now occurring.

Flash forward to January 2005. Scientists have all but forgotten the movie. No one on Coast dares utters its name. Environmentalists have better things to do. Bell's got his radio station and a personal war going on against fiber optic lines, and Noory still hasn't seen the flick.

Then came last night. I was listening to Matt Drudge after a day of tuning into various radio shows. All of them had mentioned how astonishing this Blizzard was, however, Drudge took the prize. The man was nuts! He was absolutely raving over the New England Blizzard and devoted his first hour to calls from Boston only. He couldn't get over the snow: "they're going to be shoveling out for days!" "Boston is going to be stopped for a week!" "This is unbelievable!"

And gradually he builds.

The rain and mudslides in California. The snow in the west and the Midwest. Now the blizzard. "Weather has never been so fierce as these days," he says.

Then, to the phones!

First, Joe from Boston. The guy sounds like he might attempt a Howard Stern plug, but he doesn't. Next call, another Joe from Boston. He and Drudge get into it. He's confirmed all of Drudge's hype. Drudge is once again flabbergasted by the amount of snow, and by the fact that a New England Blizzard is essentially a hurricane in the winter and there were winds clocking in at 85mph. Then, Joe from Boston drops it: "well, you know, Art Bell and George Noory on Coast to Coast AM have been doing a lot of research on climate change and -- "

At this point, I laughed my balls off.

Drudge is taken aback for about a millisecond after Joe dropped the C-bomb on the air. I am also taken aback for the same amount of time; the words "Noory", (not so much Bell), "Coast to Coast AM" and "research" used in the same sentence seemed so unfathomable, so utterly incomprehensible, so entirely incredulous, so fantastic, that my cynical intellectualism, intrigued fascination and sense of irony all just sort of came crumbling in together and left me saying, "holy shit!" Thus, the laughing my balls off.

Drudge recovered nicely, however. "Joe, Joe, I know all about this, we're entering a cycle, now it's global warming."

Joe tries to continue his point: "the global warming causes the climate change because it freezes certain waters and -- "

Drudge cuts him off "I know all about the cycle, but go back thirty years ago and it wasn't global warming we were blaming on the weather. Thirty years ago we were heading for another ice age. It's like the chicken and the egg. What came first the global warming or the cooling?"

Aside from entirely obscure the theory of global climate change, the incident on Drudge last night is most tantalizing as it marks a new level in Coastdome. For years now, Howard Stern crank callers have been the bane of every serious radio and television talk show. Now, as Coast's temperature rises and the show gets hotter the currents are starting to change; move over Howard's Hooligans, Coast's Crazies are commencing their movement to take over the talk show phone lines and clog up the airways!

Imagine the scene on CNN's Talk Back Live:

"We're discussing President Bush's controversial decision to allocate millions of tax payer dollars into the space program. One the phone, Richard from New Mexico; Richard, what do you think?"

"I think this is just another move to control NASA."

"Control NASA? You mean the future of the Space Program?"

"No, I mean going to Mars and electing Richard C. Hoagland as NASA administrator! Wooooo!"

"Alright, alright, ummm, that's not the first nor the last time we've had calls like that. Robin, from Coral Castle, you're up!"

"I just have one thing I'd like to say to your guest who opposes additional funding for NASA."

"What's that Robin?"

"Cydonia! "

"Son of a --"

More than the probability of Coast callers taking over the airwaves, this sublime moment on Drudge last night on goes to serve as further evidence of a thesis proposed sometime ago at Binnall of America HQ: With Noory at the helm and his "no-promo-is-too-low-for-me" ethic, Coast to Coast AM threatens to break from the bonds of eccentric subculture to bonafide pop culture phenomenon. I've listened to Coast for about 6 years, and each year successively I've noticed more and more walks of life who know first hand my dirty little secret from 1am-5am every night. This has grown every so gradually to approaching people who have never visited the Kingdom of Nye and handing them a well crafted invitation to "join the party." I tell you, a random trip on the T will provide you with a handful of conversations eerily echoing theories pronounced and prognosticated on Coast, which leads me to believe we are three years or so away from Coast exploding on the American Pop-Culture scene. People will discuss Coast by the water cooler like Seinfeld of old. We'll see shirts saying "I'm with Friedman" and "I don't ignore Richard Hoagland's Wild, Lunatic Fantasies!"

And, of course, our nation's productivity will plummet as we all loose sleep and head in to our 8 or 9am jobs or we'll convert to a nocturnal society.

Friends, we're on the brink of something special, if not frightening. Should my scenario pan out we may very well have NASA administrator Hoagland.