By Phineas J. Stone
One thing a Bostonian tried and true will never do is tell you it’s cold.
The past week has been one of the longest cold snaps in 100 years by the numbers,
I heard it was colder on Tuesday in Winnipeg than on the planet Mars.
Still, doesn’t matter.
If you were to ask any native strutting around with a windbreaker and a Donegal on the head, they’d tell you everything seemed normal.
“The cold doesn’t bother me,” said my buddy who walks everywhere…without a hat. “I really think it was colder for longer in the 1980s.”
Why is this the case?
We can’t help it.
The other day I was speaking with a fella from the British Isles visiting our fair city and he was astounded at the cold, naturally.
It was an opening, and I took the Boston bait.
There I was in the next moment talking about the fact that it wasn’t really that cold; that he should have been here four years ago. I talked all about how the ice was so thick once when I was a kid that we could use it like a ladder to climb up the gutters.
I guess once you’ve lived through a lifetime of winters here, the reality is that they are so bad, you just don’t want to admit to the fact that now is the worst.
It always seems like last year, or 20 years ago, was truly brutal.
And that’s how we say it here.
It’s not “cold outside.”
It’s friggin’ brutal.
- • • •
There’s no better time than January for prognostication, and it’s a good time for procrastination too.
But today we’re going to prognosticate.
What exactly was former Vice President Joe Biden doing in Boston on Monday for the Inauguration?
It’s fishy if you ask me.
My radar went up immediately, as did those of my friends who seem to always know the inside loot.
Uncle Joe seemingly had no other business in Boston, and a former #2 of the free world doesn’t just fly north on a holiday when it’s -10 degrees to see the mayor of a second-tier U.S. city like Boston be inaugurated. And not just that, to speak in wonderfully glowing terms as well.
So, what’s the setup?
Is ol’ Liz Warren feeling a little too far off the beaten path for the Dem elite? Have they lost confidence in her ability to bring everyone together?
I certainly would, but I’m not everyone.
So, the great question now is whether Mayor Walsh is being groomed by the national party…and for what?