Ice is nice (?) and will suffice

TPP's major achievement for today is to have gotten to the safety of his office without breaking a hip. As a nice change of pace in the winter weather, over night the area was treated to a very thin, very slick glazing of ice produced by freezing rain.  This first near fall occurred while fetching the morning newspaper from the front steps. It was treacherous out there, and TPP witnessed several sliding cars, a sliding city bus, cars unable to go up even gentle slopes, and people slipping and falling including a fellow wearing a Chi-town Blackhawk hockey jersey. This is rather ironic because TPP's ability to traverse slippery surfaces comes from a misspent youth of hockey playing upon every frozen bit of water that we could find.  And thus who is to say that it was time misspent if you develop such skills and can still smile about it with all your own teeth. 

Messing with gravity

There are things you'd like to count on, and gravity is one of them, yes, even when you're at the top of a ladder.  Here's the thing. Ice has mass; it's heavy because it's water, which is pretty heavy, just ice is just a tad less dense than water, which is one of the few substances whose solid form is less dense than it's liquid phase. Now what is happening is that a lot of ice is melting in Antarctica, so much that the loss of this mass is ever so slightly altering gravity; it's a tiny bit less down there now. When you start messing with gravity, people should start paying attention. Just think how much ice has to melt to affect gravity! It's that darned old global warming to blame. Oh yes, and the water that was ice, what about that?  Well, goodbye Florida, goodbye Louisiana. Will their governors go down with their states denying all the way? Sure.