Wherein I clear my spindle

I know what 'clearing my spindle' means as a metaphor, but I haven't found its literal meaning. It sounds healthy tho, so let's go:

• I won a Daily Telegraph photo competition with this picture:

• I won 3rd honourable mention in the 1st Al Gore Poetry Prize with this haiku:

Fake data buries
Science settled like the snow
Outside my window.

I was beaten to 2nd honourable mention by a haiku that will grace anthologies:
      

Fox's Glacier Mints
Don't contain real glaciers.
Tossers.

While I've been hibernating in New Jersey a seal has been cavorting near my apartment in London, 20 miles up the Thames from the sea. This is a big deal and emphasizes how relatively healthy this once toxic river is these days. As Britain's become richer, the environment's got cleaner. Who'd a thunk it? Well apart from thee and me, who'd a thunk it?

I really liked the action sequences and photography in The Hurt Locker,  a film about a bomb disposal team in Iraq, and the leading character (Jeremy Renner) is sometimes terrific, but this review in Variety pinpoints its weakness:

War may be hell, but watching war movies can also be hell, especially when they don't get to the point. Often gripping at a straight thriller level, but increasingly weakened by its fuzzy (and hardly original) psychology.

• We're a day away from the Massachusetts election for US Senate and there's good hopes for a Republican win. My forecast is Brown (R) +12, higher than the polls which are sample skewed and don't purport to project momentum. The more one sees and learns of Coakley (D), the worse she looks, and the converse for Brown (aka Hottie McAwesome).

• Since there hasn't been a Republican senator for Mass since 1972 and since Obama won Mass +26 and since Coakley was showing +30 in November and since this is a referendum on Obama Year 1 and Obamacare, the Democrats have already lost, even if they win by single low single digits. Such a shift in Mass portends a political earthquake such that ObamaReidPelosi won't be able to cram their unpolished legislative turds down the throats of their terrified troops in Congress. The least worst thing that can happen to Obama is to lose in Mass and re-tool Obamacare with whatever RINO's he can bribe. It may too late tho, his authority is so compromised. 
• I read somewhere that this has been 'the coldest winter since Global Warming began.' The whole house of cards of this Scientistic superstition is trembling now, but it's been a damn close run thing as Wellington said of Waterloo. You could say the same about Obamacare, Obama's Waterloo....1 senate vote.
• Dont forget, Massachusettsians, Martin Luther King was Republican. I'm not, but he was, and today is his day, so all you inessential government workers who unaccountably are allowed to vote to tax the rest of us, stay home today and stay home tomorrow. It's cold out there.