The Orange Bowl Parade has been cancelled after 62 parades in 65 years, stopping only for World War II until now. The parade lost its national television contract in 1997, and corporate sponsors bailed immediately thereafter because they weren't getting the exposure for the money.

The 2000 Orange Bowl Parade (just before the 2001 National Championship game, OU vs. Florida State) was broadcast on the PAX-TV network and was truly abysmal. The commentators were syndicated radio hosts who stammered and stuttered and had no idea what the picture was showing, the commercial breaks interrupted them in mid-sentence, the coverage of the marching bands was horrible (you could barely hear them), and it was generally a comedy of errors.

From personal experience, though, I couldn't be happier to see that particular exercise in torture dispatched to the nether regions of history. I marched in three Orange Bowl parades (1985-1987), and each time it was an incredibly painful experience. The staging area was overrun by "Orange people" -- self-important radio-bearing hacks in Orange blazers who all want to tell everyone what to do and treat anyone without an Orange blazer as sub-human.

They demanded that marching bands show up in uniform and stand in place four hours before the parade started, and got royally pissed at any band whose members didn't pretty much stand stationery for all that time before embarking on a five-mile march. Coach used to bring the OU band in an hour or two ahead of the parade -- two or three hours after they wanted us there -- and they would just scream at him for violating their rules. But they knew the paradegoers came to see bands like the OU band, and he wasn't going to ruin our day just because the Orange People had individual delusions of grandeur.

On top of all that, the grandstand and all the television cameras were within the first half-mile of the parade, but it went on for another four and a half miles, sometimes through rather rough neighborhoods without much security or many viewers. I remember that during the 1986 parade, it poured rain the entire time, from standing in place through the entire five mile march. It washed the varnish off my clarinet and soaked everyone through the skin. It was the single worst band experience I had in my life.

Citizens of Miami are missing all the bright floats and attention coming their way, and that's understandable. The Miami Herald article has people complaining that the parade wasn't diverse -- specifically, that all the high school marching bands were white kids from the midwest instead of latino and black kids from other parts of the country that, no one bothers to point out, don't have great marching band traditions (though I don't know why not).

I've always heard stories that the Tournament of Roses Parade is a great experience -- even though it's a longer parade (7 miles) and starts at 8AM local time, the organizers are always described as professional, the community supportive, and the experience positive. But for most people who were actually in the Orange parade, it was a hellish experience, and I'm personally overjoyed no one will have to go through it again. It should tell you something that the vote from the Orange Bowl Committee was 120-1 to kill it -- mostly that there are too many little emperors in orange blazers. Good riddance to a boondoggle that outlived its usefulness.

Slate's Today's Papers has a couple of follow-ups on the recent disclosure that the Bush administration is preparing plans to use "tactical" nuclear weapons as a first-strike capability against some nations it doesn't like if it can't win in conventional war.

The Washington Post stuffs a report that the Bush administration's nuclear weapons policy review, which has caused an uproar, "follows a pattern set five years ago by a nuclear directive signed by then-President Bill Clinton." The paper explains that the previous plan also envisioned scenarios in which the U.S. would launch nukes at "rogue" states using weapons of mass destruction. "Nothing has changed," said one former Pentagon official.

A New York Times editorial doesn't mention Clinton's nukes policies, and slams Bush's revised vision:

If another country were planning to develop a new nuclear weapon and contemplating pre-emptive strikes against a list of non-nuclear powers, Washington would rightly label that nation a dangerous rogue state. Yet such is the course recommended to President Bush by a new Pentagon planning paper that became public last weekend. Mr. Bush needs to send that document back to its authors and ask for a new version less menacing to the security of future American generations.