1. It’s Monday, February 9, 2015. It’s 40 days until spring and 55 days until Opening Night at Wrigley Field.

2. The live-action version of “Frozen” is going on in parts of New England. 

Before the storm that dumped several more inches of snow overnight, parts of Maine and Massachusetts already look like they’ve been overtaken by glaciers. In Kennebunkport, Maine, where I spent the weekend, they didn’t shovel or used a snowblower on the sidewalks – they plowed them, creating hard-packed snow walls on either side.

Some day, the snow will melt – I just hope the good people up there don’t have to wait for Elsa to see the light before that happens. 

3.   It’s amazing that the Brian Williams debacle hasn’t faded yet. David Carr’s take in The New York Times is a pretty good explanation as to why.

To Carr, Williams just hasn’t done the one thing that would finally put this mess behind him: apologize. Instead, Williams has taken himself off the air and NBC has started a probe, both moves Carr finds counter-productive.  

4. When I was a kid, I had a coin collection and a stamp collection. Those were the kinds of hobbies youngsters and teens had back in the day. I didn’t build models, but that was another one kids had.

And then there were the tinkerers, who built electronic gadgets out of gizmos and whatnots. The tinkerers had two things: a lot of free time to build that stuff, and RadioShack to supply them with the components. As a good story in The Wall Street Journal points out, once people lost that free time, RadioShack was in trouble.

5. Alabama is a pretty state with some ugly-spirited people.

The latest character who seems to welcome being on the wrong side of history and morality is the state’s chief justice. He has told courts to defy a federal ruling overturning the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. The U.S. Supreme Court has refused the state attorney general’s attempt to block the federal ruling.

Fortunately, Alabama also has people who believe in justice and don’t want to be the bad guys in some 2065 movie. The New York Times reports that probate judges in Birmingham and Montgomery are defying the crackpot chief justice and issuing licenses.