Happy New Year's!

A Jabbo Allen Special Edition
Reporting to you from the bottom of the fiscal cliff we tumbled over last night because our elected legislators wanted to make it home for dinner. At 2 am this morning, the Senate passed the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 with a vote of 89-8. Two hours after the dreaded Fiscal Cliff. Which means we skittered over the edge. Life as we know it is over. It's now headed over to the House for a post-mortem examination.

Apparently, the resulting bill from these long months of negotation, resembles the sort of compromise for which we hired our esteemed representatives. Digging in like a sullen teenager is fun every once in a while, but I want to get my money's worth out of the US Legislature. I want to see Wheeling and Dealing. Give and Take. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke coined the term "fiscal cliff" in February 2012. It has taken them ten months not to pass a budget. It took our Founding Fathers only four months to invent our whole government from scratch. They were all Classics majors, by the way.

According to the venerable New York Times, this recent deal includes:

• An increase in the estate, dividends, and capital gains taxes
• A phase out of of the Bush era tax cuts
• A provision to protect the Middle Class from the AMT
• An extension of unemployment benefits

We didn't actually stay up until midnight. Really, a New Year's Eve without the Holmeses is like a Margarita without Cointreau. What's the point?

Haute Cuisine
Today, January 1st, 2013, all across the South, my friends and countrymen (and countrywomen) will be partaking of that New Year's staple, black-eyed peas. But why?

Black-eyed peas are the central dish eaten at Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. Jews celebrate the Talmud as the second most important text in Judaism, the first being the Torah, also known as the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy - isn't it funny how our names for these books all come from Greek?). In two places (Horayot 12A and Kritot 5B), the Talmud prescribes black-eyed peas as the officially sanctioned Rosh Hashana meal. This tradition came to America with Sephardi Jews that migrated to Georgia in the 1730s. By the 1860s, this traditional meal had spread to the non-Jews of the Deep South. Many blame Sherman.

William Tecumseh Sherman captured Atlanta in mid-November of 1864. I'm sure you've seen Gone with the Wind. You know what I'm talking about. From mid-November to late December, Sherman marched to Savannah on the coast, keeping or destroying all live stock and food crops in his path. According to legend, the Union troops didn't destroy Field Peas, a crop considered only fitting for livestock in the North. Since the Yankees took all the livestock anyway, the disgusting field peas didn't merit their effort. The survivors of Sherman's march had only field peas, known to us as black-eyed peas, to eat in the New Year.

A traditional New Year's meal includes black-eyed peas, greens (they could be mustard, collard, turnip, or, as my family always served, cabbage), pork (we always had sausage), and cornbread.

Peas symbolize prosperity because they swell when cooked. Greens symbolize money, obviously. Pork represents positive forward motion in life because pigs move forward when foraging. On the other hand, lobsters (which move backwards) and chickens (which scratch in reverse) are verboten for New Year's meals since they represent regression. Cornbread symbolizes gold.

Some people add a penny to the pot of black-eyed peas to make it extra lucky. Technically, you have to eat exactly 365 peas to extend your luck over the entire year.

Snow Again
Yesterday it snowed all day long.

This morning, the New Year greeted us with a muffled huzzah under layers of snow. So, I have some quick snow facts for you.

Nature makes four types of snow:

• Columns - tiny little cylindrical crystals with six sides
• Dendrites - your classic snowflake, it looks like a star with six points
• Needles - needle-shaped crystals, as you can probably tell from the name
• Rimed Snow - these dendrites are coated with frozen water droplets

In the movies, when the protagonist trudges through the snow and you hear that perfect crunching noise, you're actually hearing the cornstarch, salt, or cat litter used by the special effects department. Real snow doesn't sound like that. At low temperatures (in the teens), snow squeaks. Our snow made a sort of squeaky-poppy sound like a cross between bubble wrap and scooting forward on a leather sofa.

I took some time to observe and record tracks in the snow from indigenous wildlife. Here are my results:

Squirrel Tracks

Crankle Tracks

Jabbo Tracks

Lady Tracks

Drunken Elf on a Pogo Stick Tracks