The Author recollects from yesterday's wait on the freezing cold train platform for the Los Angeles Green Line to Redondo Beach:

If the wind was any faster, there would have been no problem, really: we'd all have been dead in three seconds of hypothermia.

Wilmington Station was like some monsterously ill-conceived junior high science fair experiment fancied up by a slow kid with a convalescent sadistic streak. I can just see it, a brood of bewildered and angst-shot gerbils huddled together on a formica strip and moated by two sluggish streams of liquid nitrogen.

The intercession of this kid's doting uncle, a senescent Senator with his hands all over the mass-transit swag, explains the stunned-penguin expressions I witnessed at the Station today. This is an open-air platform sandwiched by eight lanes of mean-on bull highway. The normally studiously neutral expressions of entraining Angelenos recorded a collective refound astonishment at the presence of actual weather in Southern California.