doncbruital (FMA Admin)

And while it's alright to eat hot meals and put on heavy coats and make other feeble attempts at offsetting what amounts to a fundamental shift in the character of the world, I can't help but think of those who've gone out to face winter's harshness, to confront it, and wonder what it is they might've felt, this intrepid few: Alfred Wegener, for example, the German scientist who, in 1915, first proposed that whole theory of continental drift in the first place. He was ridiculed by the era's scientific elite, and set about trying to prove his theory by himself, heading north to map the movement of ice. On one such obstinate drift through Greenland, in 1930, Wegener disappeared--a generation before his theory'd be accepted--taking attendant experiential knowledge of the icy north with him.

As I can't claim any comparable experience of the cold's reaches, I've settled for making it the organizing principle for a holiday mix, avaiable over on the left, with which, if afforded a break this week, you might do a little pondering. Its artists bear north in east coast-ratcheting, north-baiting order, from Philadelphia to Providence, up through the snaky wilderness trails of Western Massachusetts, across the border to Montreal's heavy psych furtrading outpost and on into infinity. Some tracks trade in comfort, others in confrontation, but all will help furnish the necessary impulse for facing up to the approaching and sure to be encroaching winter winds.