All of a sudden, the news is filled with some of the most ominous words in the English language - earthquake...tsunami...meltdown. It's disturbing.

As I grieve and pray for the traumatized people of Japan, I can't help but think what a precarious planet we live on. Some tectonic plates move a relatively few feet and a chunk of our world convulses for a few seconds. A nation moves, the earth's axis shifts and the landscape changes forever. Those convulsions spawn a monstrous wall of water that erases towns and sweeps away everything in its path. And destructive tsunami waves race 5,000 miles across the Pacific and are felt in California and Oregon. All because of some sliding rock beneath the ocean.

If these past few months were "Wild Winter," then these next few weeks are apparently going to be the sequel - "Soggy Spring." Oh, we might have thought we'd seen the last of those mountains of snow. Wrong again. The weather guys say they're all about to come floating - in melted form - down our rivers and streams. Here we go with floods again. Having lived a long time in a town whose one niche in national newscasts was major flooding, it's a heartache we know all too well.

A movie about a speech? Winning Academy Awards? Yup. "Best Movie," "Best Actor" for a movie called "The King's Speech"!

I don't see many movies (my popcorn is much cheaper and I don't like the sticky "cinemuck" on the floor), and I haven't seen this one. But the story's fascinating.

Once again the cinema's "Beautiful People" were there for Hollywood's annual celebration of itself. It's all about that little gold guy, Oscar. (I hear his name and all I can think of is the slob in the "Odd Couple" or a famous hot dog - I must not be one of the "Beautiful People").

There it was again, displayed for all the world to see. Hundreds of thousands of people, willing to risk everything for one thing. Freedom. The past two weeks, we've watched a powerful real-life struggle for freedom played out in a place called Liberation ("Tahrir") Square in Egypt. Once again, the unquenchable passion to be free has changed a nation.

The Valentines are flying today! Our grandchildren are doing their part at school today. The florists are freaking out today and counting their shekels tonight. And I did my part to help the struggling greeting card company that some suspect invented this day!

This is crazy! We live where snow is pretty rare - but not recently! Today, we're getting the latest in what's been a sudden parade of winter storms. I just went out and measured 9" in our yard - and it's still coming! Why am I singing, "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas?" Christmas never looks like this around here! Check the calendar, Weather Guy - it's almost Valentine's Day!

The spring fashion collections in Paris will be showing a very stylish new hat this year. The cheesehead.

Yes, the Green Bay Packers - whose fans are known for those hats that look like a chunk of cheese - have won the Super Bowl. For now, at least, cheeseheads rule. I'm very happy for them. But I'm not doing the hat.

I'll bet my friend "Steve" had his "cheesehead" hat all dusted off and ready to go yesterday. Yes, it looks like a big hunk of cheese on your head. "Cheesehead" is what they call Green Bay Packers fans, and, man, did they have something to cheer about this year. Their beloved Wisconsin warriors were in the Super Bowl!

Only in America. A day named for the chubby cousin of a rat. A town whose main event is a groundhog playing peekaboo. As Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff says, "I love dis country!"

We even have a movie called "Groundhog Day." It's actually set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the home of the king groundhog. But it was hearing about the premise of the movie, not the location, that intrigues me.