And now, a bit of defensive and utterly inconsequential media criticism

I'm in DC this week, visiting the girlfriend and other friends.

I stopped at a coffee shop yesterday to get some work done, and the local TV news was on. There was a Lighthearted bit about a new trend in the crazy northern Midwest: snowboarding down city streets. They showed a few kids doing it in downtown Madison--and the newscasters got really confused as to why there were no cars in their way. (They even suggested that it was because of the snow. Which is what happens in cities like DC--two inches and the whole damn town shuts down--but not in Chicago or destinations north.)

Anyway, it was obvious that the footage was shot on State Street, which is regionally famous as a pedestrian mall--i.e., no cars allowed. Like Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis, the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, or the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. The kids weren't being reckless--they were playing in one of the lowest-danger city streets in the country.

Of course, to know that, you'd have to actually talk to somebody from the tri-state area before putting your crazy-provincial-folks punchline on the DC news. Maybe the Iowa caucus still has the coastal elites central-time-zoned out...