Snow day

We got a few inches of snow last night, so they closed the schools and the kids had a snow day. You could do worse for family movie fare than Snow Day, which has a pretty trite storyline but a couple nice touches for the grownups, namely comedian (and now novelist!) Chris Elliott as the kid-hating snowplow driver, and unlikely rock'n'roll survivor Iggy Pop as the Lawrence Welk-loving ice rink DJ. And Chevy Chase phones in another goofy dad performance. (At least his bank is thriving.)

So check out this tie (I only got half a snow day), I managed to wear one that's not only representational (a rarity for my abstract aesthetic proclivities), but topical as well. Snow-covered rooftops! Exotic ones, at that: Russian and Eastern European, by the looks of them. It's the onion dome and helmet dome, particular to Eastern Orthodox churches, that give it away. I wondered why anybody thought to make roofs in that shape in the first place, and it turns out it's to keep snow off the roof. And sure enough, the helmet dome and onion dome depicted on the tie have very little snow on them! So chalk one up for the designers at Andrew's Ties for verisimilitude. Now click here if you're interested in learning all the symbolism behind the coloring and placement of onion domes.