Dear Barack Obama supporters:

Please stop complaining that Hillary Clinton has the temerity to win the popular vote from time to time and won’t just die. If you want to play the inevitability game here, go back six months and review who was the inevitable Democratic candidate at that point. Hint: It wasn’t Barack Obama.

Please also remember that your man is in a contest with a Clinton, and Clintons don’t stop coming. It’s embarrassing you have to be reminded of this at this late point.

And in sum: This is what you get for huffing your own fumes. Please get some fresh air and come back in when you are rational and not foamy.

Thank you for your attention once more.

Since I’m now getting a lot of writers wanting to participate in The Big Idea feature, I figure it will be useful to give them a reference document on how to write one (and how not to). Hence the following, which I will direct folks to rather than having to write this all over and over again. I am nothing if not efficient. To spare those of you who don’t care while this is on the Whatever front page, all of the gory details await behind the cut.

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The same storm that knocked out my power for more than half a day also deposited a skating rink worth of ice onto my  yard. To be accurate, the water which would become the ice was already in the lawn because up until yesterday afternoon, the temperatures were in the 40s and 50s, and all the snow that was melting was being added to the rain that was raining, and thus: water in the part of my lawn the drains into the creek. It all froze last night. Temperatures are supposed to get slightly above freezing today and tomorrow, which means that if I’m lucky, some of this skate rink will actually melt and drain away. If not, it’ll be here at least through the weekend.

I hear rumor that spring is just around the corner. I’ll believe it when I see it.

The Washington Post headline read: In Rural Ohio, It’s No Country For Democrats, and I thought, bet you it’s about where I live. And sure enough, the reporter went to Greenville, county seat of Darke County (and where, some of you OMW readers may recall, John Perry went to get inducted into the Colonial Defense Forces), about 11 miles from where I am typing this. Come see a big-city reporter’s view of where I live.

Note also that Greenville, with 13,000 residents, is the big city of the entire county; Bradford, where I live, has 1,800 people in it, and because the county line goes straight down our main street half of them live in a different county. Rural America, folks: It’s here.

The winter storm that went through Ohio knocked out power here starting yesterday afternoon and continuing through about five minutes ago (5 am). I’m catching up with everything right now, online and off. I’ll probably not be posting a lot here today. Of course, I always say that and then go on a posting tear. But let’s assume it’ll be true for now.