Letter from the Vineyard

For the last eighteen hours it has been snowing steadily here in Claverack; about ten inches in on the ground and it’s supposed to continue snowing until morning. The snowplow was just here to plow the drive and got stuck backing down the drive. Another truck had to come and pull him out. It was interesting to watch. I went out and asked the driver of the stuck truck if he wanted to come in and wait inside but he demurred and shortly after his boss arrived and they managed the situation.

Two and a half feet of snow are piled on the deck; icicles ring the house and the snow keeps falling. It’s very much winter in the Northeast. Boston is buried in snow again and has run out of room to put the newest snowfall. Some in Boston are calling this winter “absurd.”

From pictures I have seen today from Alabama, it is not very wintry there. Gay couples in shirtsleeves showed up this morning to get married. In some counties they could and in some counties they couldn’t and in some counties nobody could get married, gay or straight.

The Alabama Supreme Court Justice, Roy Moore, declared that Probate Judges, who issue marriage licenses, didn’t have to obey a Federal Court order that they had to start marrying gays. Understandably, some confusion ensued. The Supreme Court of the United States refused a request by the Attorney General of Alabama to stay gay marriage in that state until the Supreme Court rules upon the matter later this spring.

So, some gay men and women got married in Alabama today, the 37^th state to now acknowledge gay marriage. At least in some places.

The Ukraine crisis stutters along. More consultations will take place, ministers will meet, Heads of State will confer but, as the Washington Post, opined today we don’t have a long-term strategy towards Ukraine. Putin seems to have one. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and other foreign ministers were at the annual Munich Security Conference on Saturday. Lavrov continued the Russian hard line while also apparently insinuating that the re-unification of Germany might not have been legal. Normally a staid affair, it was anything but this year.

In Marseilles, gunfire erupted between drug related gangs, with the city’s police chief momentarily pinned down by the violence. The French Prime Minister was just arriving in the city to boast how crime was on the decline in Marseilles, a big center for drug trafficking from Morocco.

In what was disturbing news today, even a bit creepy, is that apparently your Smart TV, if equipped with voice recognition software, might just be spying on you. That fight with your significant other might be being piped over to the servers of the set’s builders. And it has been sometimes been happening even when the feature has been turned off. I think that unseemly. I wonder if Amazon’s Alexa does that? I will have to be careful of what I say when I am over at my neighbor’s.

Tags: Alabama, Alabama Gay Marriage, Claverack, Lavrov, Marseilles, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Roy Moore, Smart TV, Ukraine

This entry was posted on February 9, 2015 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Social Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.