Tea Parties, Snow, Hackers, and Death

Tomorrow, Saturday, Feb. 27 — one year after the small first New York City Tea Party protest at City Hall that led to a gigantic, underreported Tea Party protest there a month or so later (both of which I attended) — there will be an 11am Tea Party anniversary rally, once more at City Hall.  If things are still cold and slushy from the snowfall of the past twenty-four hours, though, I fear attendance may be more along the lines of the smaller first protest.  I will be with them in spirit but physically somewhere warm and dry — but, y’know, you should go, because why should I suffer?

I should note, once again, that despite the attempts to label the Tea Partiers crazy or racist, I saw countless signs with Rand quotes and anti-spending slogans at the events and no racist slogans (though with thousands of people at the larger rally, I’m sure you could find something awful if you insisted on trying — though not as easily as, say, finding anti-Semitic slogans at antiwar rallies).

If you go tomorrow, in fact, consider wearing this snazzy Atlas Shrugged book cover t-shirt pointed out to me by Ali Kokmen (who is not an Objectivist and indeed isn’t even sure he approves of Rand’s fondness for James Bond, arguably not her most shocking position).

I’ll say this for print books, even though I’m one of those people who thinks paper is doomed sooner or later: At least books on paper can’t be hacked, as this site recently was, and my apologies if it takes me and my able webmaster a while to delete some of the freaky-looking but mercifully infrequent glyphs now scattered in my old entries.

A grim reminder how much snow we got: I think I may technically have heard a man killed by the storm yesterday, or at least, after ACSH let us out of work early, I was near 69th and Fifth in Central Park at about 3:25pm, trudging home and a bit disturbed by the size of the slushy ice clumps falling like a meteor shower from the trees — and then I heard an immense and protracted “crack” that sounded exactly like a huge tree limb breaking off, learning only today that a man died at that time in that area due to a falling limb.  I heard no cries of alarm or anything but recall briefly thinking, “That sounded like a big, dangerous tree limb falling, and I’m glad I’m nearly out of the Park.”  Tomorrow, then, is likely to be better than yesterday.