Happy 70th Birthday, Elvis.

While there is a lot of great Elvis music available, my favorite recording is The Million Dollar Quartet with Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. It's a casual studio session with then-current rock tunes (Brown-Eyed Handsome Man) and gospel standards (Farther Along, I Shall Not Be Moved).

And what an interesting collection of people sharing this birth date: Stephen Hawking, Graham Chapman, Shirley Bassey, Bill Graham, Soupy Sales, David Bowie, among others.

I have family and friends with chronic lung ailments, for whom each breath is something of a miracle. I think of them often as I continue to recover. Breathing is important.

Brother Mike came by yesterday afternoon and shoveled a path from the back deck to the wood pile. We are grateful and humbled. He also gave me a copy of Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Vol. 1, good reading for a snowy day.

A snowy day it will be. The forecast calls for another six inches (15cm) of snow in a short burst from mid-morning through early evening.

On the overnight radio I heard an interview with the BBC's news director as she defended the service's slow response to the south Asia tsunami story. (Mostly, people were away for the holiday, so it was difficult to get a full team together.) The news cycle on the tragedy, it appears, is just about complete. This morning, the BBC News web site reports, as its second story, on the breakup of the marriage of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. The story was featured, although not quite as prominently, on the MSNBC and CNN sites, and buried as a wire service blurb on the New York Times or Boston Globe sites.

A cardinal, bright red against the white snow, has joined the other birds at the feeders out back.