It is cold outside, twenties, and there is a dusting of snow coming down. It dances on the roadways, all the salt washed off by the rains and the big melt over the weekend. There is a winter storm warning in effect. It is likely to be a thrilling commute and I am planning my strategy already. The snow will continue through the morning, halt, and return at the end of the week. Everyone is thoroughly tired of this weather, and I am scheduled to be downtown at the end of the day, the last place I want to be on a snow day.

The cold and fire continue dominate the local scene. A row house burned in Northeast, one of a block in the process of being gentrified. A 71-year old woman died and one of the daughters is the prime suspect for arson. The urban pioneer next door was asked to comment and she looked at the camera and said it was tragic. Word just in from Connecticut indicates a nursing home burned, killing at least ten. The fallout and the blame-game from the nightclub fire in Rhode Island continues. A carnivorous lawyer was cheerful and uncharacteristically honest on the tube last night. He said someone would pay, if not the owners of the club, or a heavy-metal band in the twilight of its career, then the manufacturers of the acoustic tile, or the city. Someone will pay, that’s all he knows, and the search for the deep pockets will commence.

This tragedy can’t be the fault of some roadie’s minimum-wage conversation with a bartender. The pain is too great.

I heard that the families of the 9-11 victims have a lawyer who is going after Saudi Arabia for a trillion dollars in damages. Deep pockets, indeed. The portents of conflict are on the radio. The French have stopped calling America a superpower and instead have adopted the term “Hyper Power,” which presumably connotes a need of a dose of Ritalin. In Britain, embattled Tony Blair is wrapping himself in the mantel of Churchill, the Greatest Briton, standing tall at Question Time in the House of Commons against renegades from his own party. We have many born-again peaceniks on our side of the pond, and our latest George II commented caustically on Saddam’s admission that he had found two more little leftover biologic bombs. Secretary Rumsfeld had Al Jazeera, the Qatari Cable TV Network, come to his office in the Pentagon where he told them that the US had no interest in Iraqi oil or occupying their country. He also mentioned that Saddam had three choices; he could do nothing, he could disarm or he could leave the country. Figure the odds. It would probably make a good bet, and there are some deep pockets out there.

Elsewhere in town, the Coast Guard, Customs and Immigration trooped over to Nebraska Avenue to report to their new master, Secretary Ridge. This is going to be an interesting process, trying to integrate these diverse cultures into a new dynamic paradigm. I won’t say it won’t work, but there is going to be some confusion. I heard the Office of Management and Budget went to the Congressional Justification Books and cut and pasted the funding profiles. I think they missed some things, and no one is really home yet at Homeland Security to check the numbers. They are going to reach into their pockets there and come up a little short.

I think Secretary Powell is traveling, though he took time to chide the Turks about allowing US troops to land. Oil prices are up again, and Maylasia is talking about an Islamic oil embargo to throw a monkey wrench into the war planning of the West. There is a lot of low comedy going on. A peace group says it is going to bombard the Senate with autodialed phone calls and bring the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body to its collective knees. Which is an unsettling image. The whole thing reminds me a little of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata, where the plot is about as simple as it gets: Athenian women, fed up with the duration of the Peloponnesian War, barricade themselves in the Acropolis and go on a sex strike to force their husbands to vote for peace with Sparta. The men are finally forced to beat their swords into plowshares. Or something.

Or maybe the uncertain nature of this enterprise better recalls Shirley Jackson’s play “The Lottery.” It takes a while for the audience to figure out that winning the lottery isn’t a good thing in that little village, and I have a bit of that feeling right now. Unintended consequences will come from war. A Turkish hegemony across what was northern Iraq? An independent Kurdish State that destabilizes the secular government in Ankara? An environmental Gotterdamerung? Or maybe just dictator on the afternoon flight to exile, deep pockets bulging, and a regime change and democracy?

There is an office pool on when the war will start. It began with a studious fellow who had a lunar chart and a subscription to Aviation Week. It began to turn into spread sheets with significant dates, meteorologic data, political factors and shipping times from East Coast to Arabian Sea. I am betting on sometime after the next Hans Blix Arms Inspection report to the Security Council, which is due on March 7th. Others are looking at lunar charts and saying that American will go near the dark of the moon. Others study the annual climatology, looking at temperature trends. It will be hot in the Gulf soon, and Mr. Rumsfeld was candid about the effects of enforced inactivity on highly trained personnel.

The annual football pool is composed of a gridded rectangle. I buy a square on the grid for $25, and then each week someone draws the numbers for the Redskins and their opponents in the Sunday game. The last digit of the score is entered by team along the “X” and “Y” axes of the grid. Depending on the status of the game at the end of each quarter, you could theoretically win $100 on a game. If the score stayed the same. But a hundred bucks buys a lot of lunches and qualifies for deep pockets in the office. Anyway, I am going to look at that. I don’t know what should go on the grid. Temperature? Date? Lunar phase?

I the grids should sell for $2 a square, since there is probably only a few weeks for the pool to run. What do you think?

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra