Global warming making it cool to be cold

(661 words)

This weekend I’m feeling like the hysterical woman in the 1961 “Midnight Sun” episode of “The Twilight Zone.” The classic stars Lois Nettleton as a distraught New Yorker imprisoned in her apartment as the mercury soars.

Earth is edging closer to the sun and we’re all about to be incinerated.

But the show has a happy ending, albeit “happy” is relative in a Rod Serling way.

It was all a dream!

The earth is not moving closer to the sun. 

It is instead moving further away and we’re all destined to in days turn into human popsicles. The doomed woman revives enough to — ahh! — smile at her frigid fate. Sure beats the heat!

It’s a coin toss, but in these days of mounting global warming I’m suddenly finding sub-freezing weather charming.

It’s cool to be cold.

Understand, it’s only cool as long as I’m insulated from it.

The forecast high for the next three days is 19. That’s 72 hours of the kind of bitterness that would have had the hardy men (and token pregnant Indian woman) of the Lewis & Clark expedition looking for a Motel 6. 

I’ll only be out doors for a total of about 45 minutes this weekend — 44 if parking spaces nearest the bar door are available. Bar time is an essential remedy to those of us prone to cabin fever.

Ensconced in our home right near the warm hearth, I’ll stir the fire, watch TV, read and smell the simmering soups.

Cold weather induces in inert relaxation; warm weather, frenzy.

A typical spring/summer/fall weekend involves yard work, house maintenance, garden weeding, mulch spreading, hyper recreation, etc. Oh, and it all involves lots of things that sting. It’s all in the pursuit of happiness, as misleading a phrase as there’s ever been.

Pursuit’s unnecessary. Find a comfy enough chair and happiness will find you.

I can list three reasons for my growing affinity for winter. One is brevity. This is a nasty stretch, but it’s only three days. It’ll be 50 again by Wednesday and in winter 50 is the new 70.

Two is ingenuity. I enjoy finding ways to outsmart winter, as I’ve done in the above picture. It’s my pullover hoodie splayed out in front of the furnace register. It infuses every fiber of the garment with a warmth that armors the body for the cold to come. 

Happily, the girls have inherited the wisdom of this trick and on days like this parts of the house resemble the warehouses where they ready the big floats for the Macy’s parade. Sadly, this will likely be the only thing the girls will inherit from me.

Third, I’ve outgrown the foolish need to behave stupidly outdoors.

I’m talking about attending the Steelers playoff game Sunday. Windchill temperature at 1 p.m. kickoff is forecast to be minus-4.

Ten or so years ago and I’d have been there. Heck, 10 or so years ago I was there.

It was the 2004 AFC Championship game versus the New England Patriots. Kickoff was 6 p.m. The high that day was 11 degrees. It was the second coldest game in Steeler history and maybe the coldest I’ve ever been in my life.

I’m a bitter-ender so I stayed till the final whistle, praying the whole time my car would start. We lost 41-27. I remember thinking, “Well, it was a tough loss, but hats off to New England. They won fair and square.”

Wrong.

Pats coach Bill Belichick later confessed in the NFL Spygate investigation he’d cheated and agreed to pay a $500,000 fine.

So on Sunday I’ll be cheering the Steelers from my recliner and hoping both teams play a fair game.

Because that’s the way of the six-time Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Steelers.

And when the game is over, I’ll drop another log onto the fire, enjoy a hot meal and await the girls’ decision as to that evening’s filmed entertainment.

I’m hoping it’s “Frozen.”

Related …

In praise of, yikes, winter?

Winter’s over; Keith heads south

Winter forecasts all folked up

Future town halls to determine weather

Roll Tide: The last winter day

PA should annex West Virginia: Our visit to Oglebay

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I’d checked nearly all the boxes you see in the splashy West Virginia tourist ads.

I’d hiked. I’d bungeed. I’d biked. I’d rafted. I’d scaled. I’d golfed. And I’d zip lined across the leafy Appalachian tree canopies until I thought all my hair was going to fly off.

It was wild. It was wonderful.

And it was as exhausting as it was exhilarating.

So during a summer which was destined to be emotionally and physically tumultuous (moving my dementia-addled mother from Pittsburgh to Latrobe) we sought some serenity.

We found it at Oglebay Resort.

The fabled resort is a self-sustaining park, a one-of-a-kind endeavor, located in the hills above Wheeling. 

It exists through the grace of philanthropist Earl W. Oglebay who in 1926 deeded the property to the city of Wheeling for the express purpose of public recreation.

Yes, it’s near Wheeling, but if feels more like Willoughby. 

Willoughby was the namesake town in a memorable 1960 “Twilight Zone” episode called “A Stop in Willoughby.” It’s the one where a harried advertising executive dreams his evening commute allows him to stop at a place of peace and splendor.

It seems to the executive like heaven. In fact, the Rod Serling twist at the end hints it may be just that.

That’s how Oglebay felt to me for three days back in June.

It’s probably most famous for it’s annual Festival of Lights since 1985. The Christmas celebration covers 125 park acres. 

In fact, I’ve been going to Oglebay for about 40 years. My old man used to love to golf at the Robert Trent Jones course there. I have wonderful heirloom memories of golfing there and then sipping beers in the great clubhouse and rehashing the round.

And, yes, I hope to do just that with my father again if I ever make it to Willoughby.

But I’d never played the Arnold Palmer course (built about 15 years ago) until my visit. It’s wonderful. Great rolling terrain, beautiful vistas and challenging approaches.

Now, my two favorite Arnold Palmer-design courses — Oglebay at Stonewall Jackson Lake Resort — both call West Virginia home.

Happily, fretting over a 6-foot birdie putt was the only activity to elevate my blood pressure for my three days at Oglebay.

The rest was pure relaxation, the kind that still restores the soul nearly two months later.

As a southwestern Pennsylvanian, I’m now convinced I could contentedly vacation exclusively in our neighboring state for the rest of my life.

I’d golf and boat at Stonewall Resort and Lakeview, revel in bold nature at Adventures on the Gorge at the spectacular New River, and I’d immerse myself in luxury at The Greenbrier and The Homestead.

And I’d head to Oglebay when my muscles and my mind needed some supple respite.

Really, I’m thinking of petitioning the Pennsylvania state legislature to look into the commonwealth benefits of annexing the whole shebang.

Too many of us confuse motion with entertainment. We need a day crowded with activities we can post to prove to our Facebook friends we’re hyper-alive.

Then it’s off to the casino to ensure the next day we’ll wake up both broke and hungover and ready to race through it all over again.

Oglebay proves that in West Virginia wild is wonderful, but mild can be marvelous.

If you go … Oglebay Resort 

Related …

I stop blogging for a week in West Virginia; readership surges

The Greenbrier, the bunker & the billionaire

Will eternity seem like an eternity?

Being bullish in meat lover’s paradise

Custer's Last Penis

The topic of General George Armstrong Custer’s penis has been on my mind for several months now. Please don’t take that literally and get that awful image out of your head this instant.

I’ll not change my profile picture to accommodate your lurid imagination.

It’s been there since about March when I finished Nathaniel Philbrick’s “The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull & The Battle of Little Big Horn.”

I’ve been reluctant to address it -- the topic, not the penis -- for several reasons. First, it’s just so unseemly, as patient readers are about to learn.

Second, I know the instant I type “general custer’s penis” into a subject line it may awaken a sleeping automatonic army of Custer devotees who stir when the computer pings over that very subject.

They’re probably all very pleasant and informed people. Certainly, they’re history buffs like myself and we’d no doubt find much agreeable ground to discuss.

But the mutilated penis of a historically inept general is an unsound basis for lasting friendship. I’d much rather engage someone over, say, a shared fondness of Mark Knopfler music.

I tackle the topic now because a part of me that is very dear made what very well could be its last stand three weeks ago.

I am, of course, talking about my hair.

I’ve had long, luscious hair several times in my adult days and it’s always controversial. My many redneck friends, several of them former servicemen, stereotypically tease I’m some sort of sissy.

One joked it looked like I’d enlisted. Really, I asked? What century?

Because the second most enduring memory of the Custer era has to do with military hair. It was everywhere.

It cascaded down their shoulders. It spilled over their lips, cheeks and chins.

It was mostly that way with the mustachioed Custer, too, in 1876, the year he met his doom. Yes, one of America’s most famous and beloved generals could have time traveled a century hence and fit right in on stage with the Village People.

So when did short hair become so synonymous with our servicemen?

The most obvious answer is when the military became more mechanized. Perhaps some long-locked solider got his curls twisted in a Gatling gun. Or maybe it was for sanitary purposes, short hair giving crafty head lice fewer places to hide.

Either way, it’s a pity. Some of the greatest fighting men in literature and history -- Zeus, Samson, Robert the Bruce -- had long hair.

In fact, all the braves who slew Custer at Little Big Horn had what could be called Cher hair.

Yet, these long hairs were often virile and lady-loving men. Take Custer nemesis, Capt. Frederick Benteen, not to be confused with Capt. Benteen from the outstanding 1963 “Twilight Zone” episode, “On Thursday We Leave for Home.”

This Capt. Benteen was a warrior with an artistic bent. From Philbrick’s book: “He loved his wife, Frabbie, intensely and passionately (he sometimes decorated his letters to her with anatomically precise drawings of his erect penis).”

So primitive sexting pre-dated the smart phone by nearly 130 years.

Philbrick is even more emphatic when detailing Custer’s lusts. It turns out the man whose name is most synonymous with American military catastrophe was a serial rapist who repeatedly violated Indian women as the spoils of war.

One of the last quotes attributed to him in the book deals not with military strategy, but of sexual violence: “When we get to the village I’m going to find the Sioux girl with the most elk teeth on her dress and take her along with me!”

The reference goes unexplained, but I’ll bet elk teeth dresses aren’t synonymous with a squaw’s ability prepare a tasty meal.

His reputation for wanton massacre, treaty violation and rape was so renown that two Cheyenne women pierced the ear drums of his lifeless body with long sewing awls in the hopes he’d hear better in the afterlife. How thoughtful.

What I’d never heard before -- and can now never forget -- is those same women jammed an arrow up the general’s penis. The afterlife lesson they were trying to impart there eludes me.

So what are we to make of this man once so beloved by his contemporaries and today reviled by those of us who abhor war crimes and injustice? What would we say to his spirit?

I do not know. All I know is we’ll have plenty of time to decide.

We’re bound to see Custer coming from a mile away.

Related . . .

The true story of the Pilgrim turkey rapist

Dickin’ ‘round with Moby and other whales

Indians, Custer, downed trees & me

Boston Corbett, America’s greatest eunuch