New Year, Old News

It's a new year, boys and girls, but it seems as if unfortunate trends of the old year won't give up the ghost. Maybe Bono was right about January 1; nothing changes on it.

Tropical Storm Zeta - yes, that's right, a tropical storm formed after the winter solstice - developed west of the Azores in the eastern Atlantic Ocean this past week. Though it has coasted harmlessly away from land and has no chance of becoming a strong storm, the fact that it formed should be the proverbial canary in the coal mine regarding the future of the earth's sufarce temperature. Incidentally, this brings the official 2005 tropical storm tally up to 27, and if another storm forms this month, it will be considered the first storm of the 2006 season - which doesn't even start until June 1!

Meanwhile, Amtrak's problems keep multiplying as the beleagured national passenger railroad slouches toward its thirty-fifth birthday. A Silver Meteor train that left Miami early Thursday morning reached New York on Saturday at 11 A.M. - 28 hours late - because it was delayed in Jacksonville by a derailment of a CSX frieght train that took twelve hours to correct and ended up stopping again in Georgia to wait for the tracks to reopen. (Unlike its better-funded French and German counterparts, SNCF and ICE, Amtrak has to rent most of the track fit uses from private freight rail lines.) To add insult to injury, the passenger train ran out of toilet paper and unable to provide more than a sandwich and a soda to each passenger for the entire ordeal. More than one angered passenger leaving the Silver Meteor at New York declared that Amtrak made many airline customers out of the passengers who used the train out of a fear of flying.

Not only is Amtrak too ill-funded to respond to such a major inconvenience, but apparently CSX did little if anything to help Amtrak mitigate the disaster. I don't want to suggest a conspiracy here, but Treasury Secretary John Snow - who serves at the pleasure of a presidential administration hellbent on breaking up Amtrak - is the former CEO of CSX, whose tracks would be freed up somewhat if Amtrak were to be liquidated.