Define "Blizzard"

Evidently, a blizzard must last for at least three hours to count. Fuck that. We had a temporary little blizzard here in Providence this evening, completely unexpectedly (by me), and it was awesome. Especially since I went walking through the snow clear across campus today only to discover my destination not really there, twice. (Which was actually kind of fun. Honestly.)

Here's another thing I liked about Obama's speech, and I kind of think it might be something I like about a lot of Obama's speeches. I didn't notice it at first, but some good old-fashioned hard numerical analysis revealed it and I think it's important. He doesn't use values buzzwords.
Between his 2009 and 2010 SotU or SotU-esque speeches, Obama has used the following words a total of only forty-five times: trust, security, liberty, free, freedom, equal, equality, diverse, diversity, rights, justice, fair, fairness, fairer, unite, unity, opportunity, god, tradition, traditional. By comparison, in his 2002 and 2006 SotU addresses, Bush used those words a total of 106 times. Especially "free(dom)", which Bush used 39 times and Obama used 4 times. It's not that I don't like those concepts; in fact, it's rather the opposite. Those are all words that one literally is not allowed not to like, with the possible exceptions of diversity (from the right) and tradition (from the left). I actually think that Obama doesn't naturally use very much of this kind of quasi-meaningless buzzwording, and I like that, because it's sooooo easy to speak Orwell using any of the above-mentioned words. And it's actually kind of tricky without them, or at least a lot harder. And the speech feels like a real policy speech rather than just a "let's all be free! hooray for opportunity!" kind of thing. I'd be very curious to check Bob McDonnell's speech for those same words... perhaps I'll do that tomorrow...