The Gender Barrier Crashes at the Hundred Acre Wood

Sure, there's all sorts of Internet announcements today, including Yahoo! Answers (today's No. 10 top blog post and the Yahoo! version of Ask Jeeves), and Google's new Transit Planner (which is today's No. 3 top link), a Google Maps service applied to public transit (and currently limited to Portland, OR).

Major changes ahead
But major changes are in store for the Hundred Acre Wood, where Christopher Robin (today's burstiest person) will be replaced by a yet-to-be named female character in 2007 to make the whole Winnie the Pooh franchise more, you know, marketable to a broader audience. USA Today coverage of the gender shift is today's No. 2 most-cited link and the subject of today's top blog post. And lots of commentary, including a "dream on, Disney" lecture from DebbieSchlussel.com. she's joined by this invective from a LiveJournaler: "Clearly TPTB at Disney need to be smacked repeatedly with the smitey book. These people are clearly of very, very little brain." What's next...Hey God, It's Me, Michael? Arnold Bedilia Strikes Out? "The Ghost and Mrs. Chicken?"

Mother Nature's wrath
You'd think that "December = snow" would start to sink into the public consciousness after all these years, but the snowstorm that swept the U.S. midsection Thursday created this scenario: it took me longer to drive from the airport to my house (25 minutes TOPS on a normal bad-traffic day) than it took me to fly from Rochester NY to Cincinnati, all because of a rush-hour snowstorm. Still, hurricanes have it all over Mother's Nature's snow and floods in the blogosphere...