Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} At the Sign of the Snowman's Skull by Peter Atkins At the Sign of the Snowman's Skull by Peter Atkins. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 660e37e8ea884dca • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Three Eyed Snowman Kill Task. Blind Snowman tells you, "Then he grabbed my Perfect Eye! You have to get it back for me. I heard him exclaim as he bounced out of hearing that he was going to use it as a third eye so he could see better to hit people with iceballs. The villain!" Blind Snowman tells you, "Go and find the Three Eyed Snowman and get me back my eye. And teach that no good Three Eye a lesson. Kill him five times and maybe he will learn not to go around stealing other peoples dreams." Completing Kill Task. Blind Snowman tells you, "Excellent, I hope that teaches ol' Three Eye a lesson. Here a little secret I found in the snow the other day." Ligonier Ministries The teaching fellowship of R.C. Sproul. While this website will work in the browser you are using, it is not optimized for legacy browsers. Latest Posts | Best of Blog | Most Popular. God’s Undertaker. One of the most common ways of looking at the relationship between science and faith is the conflict thesis, which posits an inherent conflict between science and religion. The conflict thesis was popularized in the nineteenth century by John William Draper and by Andrew Dickson White. Despite the acknowledged poor scholarship underlying these works, the conflict thesis has persisted among both believers and unbelievers. Today, some scientists, including Peter Atkins, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins, are asserting that there should no longer be any conflict because science has shown us either that God does not exist or that God almost certainly does not exist. Not all scientists adhere to the conflict thesis. There are believing scientists such as Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne who argue that science and faith are complementary. Others, such as the atheist Steven Jay Gould, argue that science and faith may coexist because they deal with completely separate subject matter, or in Gould’s terminology, “nonoverlapping magisteria.” In short, there is no agreement on the issue even among scientists. The views of men such as Dawkins, Dennett, and Atkins, however, have been the most publicized, and because of this, there are many who wonder whether science has in fact demonstrated that God does not exist. There have been a number of books published in an attempt to answer this question. Many of them are quite good, but certainly among the two or three best is a recent lay level book by Dr. John C. Lennox entitled God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? Dr. Lennox has earned doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Wales. He is presently a reader in mathematics at the University of Oxford and fellow in mathematics and the philosophy of science at Green College, Oxford. He achieved some recognition in the United States recently when he engaged in a highly publicized debate with Richard Dawkins in Birmingham, Alabama. God’s Undertaker is his response to the arguments made by dogmatic atheist scientists. God’s Undertaker contains eleven relatively brief chapters. In his first chapter, Lennox demonstrates that the real conflict that exists is not between science and faith but between two competing worldviews: naturalism and theism. This is important because it is the unproven presuppositions of naturalism, rather than empirical evidence, that underlies many of the arguments made by atheistic scientists. In chapter 2, Lennox deals with the difficult and controversial issues surrounding the definition of “science,” while in chapter 3, he deals with the materialistic reductionism of some scientists. Chapter 4 examines some of the many facts about our universe, which, rather than pointing us away from the idea of God, actually provide evidence for God’s existence. Most of the remaining chapters deal with various arguments related to biological science. Lennox examines and finds wanting the argument made by Dawkins and others that Darwin’s theory disproves the existence of God. In chapter 6, he looks closely at some of the numerous flaws that exist in the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Lennox recognizes that daring to question evolutionary orthodoxy will likely result in being declared a lunatic by the high priests of the Darwinist Inquisition, but he has prepared his own epitaph just in case: “Here lies the body of John Lennox. You ask me why he’s in this box? He died of something worse than pox, On Darwinism—heterodox.” The following chapters deal with the problems involved in a naturalistic conception of the origin of life and of the information in the genetic code, in particular the repeated use of “Darwin of the gaps” arguments by atheists. In chapter 10, Lennox provides devastating evidence of the self-contradictory nature of some of Dawkins’ suggestions as to how life could have originated. Such topics have been dealt with many times in many books, but rarely have they been dealt with as well as they have been here. In contrast to the shrill and irrational ranting of several of the recent works written by the new atheists, Lennox deals with the subject calmly and rationally, dismantling point by point their often absurd assertions. This is one of those books that comes around every so often that you not only need to read but that you need to have your high school and college-age children and grandchildren read. The metaphysical claims of atheist scientists are one of the main challenges facing young people and adults alike today. Read this book and discover why so many of those claims are vacuous. At the Sign of the Snowman's Skull by Peter Atkins. STEPHEN JONES lives in London, England. He is the winner of three World Fantasy Awards, four Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Awards and three International Horror Guild Awards as well as being a seventeen-time recipient of the British Fantasy Award and a Hugo Award nominee. A former television producer/director and genre movie publicist and consultant (the first three Hellraiser movies, Night Life, Nightbreed, Split Second, Mind Ripper, Last Gasp etc.), he is the co-editor of Horror: 100 Best Books, Horror: Another 100 Best Books, The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, Gaslight & Ghosts, Now We Are Sick, H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, Secret City: Strange Tales of London, Great Ghost Stories, Tales to Freeze the Blood: More Great Ghost Stories and the Dark Terrors, Dark Voices and Fantasy Tales series. He has written Stardust: The Visual Companion, Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide, The Essential Monster Movie Guide, The Illustrated Vampire Movie Guide, The Illustrated Dinosaur Movie Guide, The Illustrated Frankenstein Movie Guide and The Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide, and compiled The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series, The Mammoth Book of Terror, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Mammoth Book of Zombies, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, The Mammoth Book of Dracula, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories By Women, The Mammoth Book of New Terror, The Mammoth Book of Monsters, Shadows Over Innsmouth, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, Dark Detectives, Dancing with the Dark, Dark of the Night, White of the Moon, Keep Out the Night, By Moonlight Only, Don’t Turn Out the Light, H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, Travellers in Darkness, Summer Chills, Exorcisms and Ecstasies by Karl Edward Wagner, The Vampire Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Phantoms and Fiends and Frights and Fancies by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, James Herbert: By Horror Haunted, The Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard, The Emperor of Dreams: The Lost Worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories by Leigh Brackett, The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales by Rudyard Kipling, Clive Barker’s A–Z of Horror, Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden, Clive Barker’s The Nightbreed Chronicles and the Hellraiser Chronicles. He was a Guest of Honour at the 2002 World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the 2004 World Horror Convention in Phoenix, Arizona. You can visit his web site at www.herebedragons.co.uk/jones. The Mammoth Book of 20th Century Science Fiction. The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga. The Mammoth Book of Best New SF. The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends. The Mammoth Book of Chess. The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy. The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes. The Mammoth Book of CSI. The Mammoth Book of the Deep. The Mammoth Book of Dirty, Sick X-Rated & Politically Incorrect Jokes. The Mammoth Book of the Edge. The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits. The Mammoth Book of Erotic Photography. The Mammoth Book of Erotic Women. The Mammoth Book of Extreme SF. The Mammoth Book of Famous Trials. The Mammoth Book of Great Detective Stones. The Mammoth Book of Great Inventions. The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stones. The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits. The Mammoth Book of Illustrated True Crime. The Mammoth Book of International Erotica. The Mammoth Book of IQ Puzzles. The Mammoth Book of Jokes. The Mammoth Book of King Arthur. The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Erotica. The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stones. The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters. The Mammoth Book of New Terror. The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures. The Mammoth Book of On the Road. The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries. The Mammoth Book of Pirates. The Mammoth Book of Polar Journeys. The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits. The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits. The Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles. The Mammoth Book of Seriously Comic Fantasy. The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n' Roll. The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers' Tales. The Mammoth Book of Sudoku. The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters. The Mammoth Book of SAS & Special Forces. The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels. The Mammoth Book of Special Ops. The Mammoth Book of Sudoku. The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places. The Mammoth Book of True Crime. The Mammoth Book of True War Stones. The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes. The Mammoth Book of Vampires. The Mammoth Book of Vintage Whodunnits. The Mammoth Book of Wild Journeys. The Mammoth Book of Women Who Kill. The Mammoth Book of the World’s Funniest Cartoons. The Mammoth Book of the World’s Greatest Chess Games. Constable & Robinson Ltd. 3 The Lanchesters. 162 Fulham Palace Road. First published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2007. Collection and editorial material copyright © Stephen Jones 2007. All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library. eBook ISBN: 978-1-78033-277-2. Printed and bound in the EU. Introduction: Horror in 2006. The Night Watch. The Luxury of Harm. The Saffron Gatherers. What Nature Abhors. The American Dead. Between the Cold Moon and the Earth. Sob in the Silence. Dr Prida’s Dream-Plagued Patient. The Ones We Leave Behind. Houses Under the Sea. CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN. The Clockwork Horror. F. GWYNPLAINE MacINTYRE. RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON. Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy) The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train. STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN. I would like to thank David Barraclough, Kim Newman, Michael Marshall Smith, Sara and Randy Broecker, Val and Les Edwards, Max Burnell, Rodger Turner and Wayne MacLaurin (www.sfsite.com), Gordon Van Gelder, Peter Crowther, Mandy Slater, Pamela Brooks, Hugh Lamb, Claudia Dyer, Tim Lucas, Brian Mooney, Violet Jones, Amanda Foubister, Christopher Wicking and, especially, Pete Duncan and Dorothy Lumley for all their help and support. Special thanks are also due to Locus, Variety, Ansible and all the other sources that were used for reference in the Introduction and the Necrology. INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2006 copyright © Stephen Jones 2007. SUMMER copyright © Al Sarrantonio 2006. Originally published in Retro Pulp Tales. Reprinted by permission of the author. DIGGING DEEP copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2006. Originally published in Phobic: Modern Horror Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author. THE NIGHT WATCH copyright © John Gordon 2006. Originally published in Left in the Dark: The Supernatural Tales of John Gordon. Reprinted by permission of the author. THE LUXURY OF HARM copyright © Christopher Fowler 2006. Originally published in The British Fantasy Society: A Celebration. Reprinted by permission of the author. SENTINELS copyright © Mark Samuels 2006. Originally published in Alone on the Darkside: Echoes from the Shadows of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author. THE SAFFRON GATHERERS copyright © Elizabeth Hand 2006. Originally published in Saffron & Brimstone: Strange Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author. WHAT NATURE ABHORS copyright © Mark Morris 2006. Originally published in Night Visions 12. Reprinted by permission of the author. THE LAST REEL copyright © Lynda E. Rucker 2006. Originally published in Supernatural Tales 10, 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author. THE AMERICAN DEAD copyright © Joseph E. Lake, Jr. 2006. Originally published in Interzone, Issue #203, April 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author. BETWEEN THE COLD MOON AND THE EARTH copyright © Peter Atkins 2006. Originally published in At the Sign of the Snowman’s Skull. Reprinted by permission of the author. SOB IN THE SILENCE copyright © Gene Wolfe 2006. Originally published in Strange Birds. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc. CONTINUITY ERROR copyright © Nicholas Royle 2006. Originally published in London: City of Disappearances. Reprinted by permission of the author. DR PRIDA’S DREAM-PLAGUED PATIENT copyright © Michael Bishop 2006. Originally published in Aberrant Dreams #7, Spring 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author. THE ONES WE LEAVE BEHIND copyright © Mark Chadbourn 2006. Originally published in Dark Horizons, Issue No.48, Spring 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author. MINE copyright © Joel Lane 2006. Originally published in The Lost District and Other Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author. OBSEQUY copyright © David J. Schow 2006. Originally published in Subterranean, Issue #3. Reprinted by permission of the author. THROWN copyright © Don Tumasonis 2006. Originally published in New Genre, Issue Four, Winter 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author. HOUSES UNDER THE SEA copyright © Caitlín R. Kiernan 2006. Originally published in Thrillers 2. Reprinted by permission of the author. THEY copyright © David Morrell 2006. Originally published on Amazon Shorts, September 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author. THE CLOCKWORK HORROR copyright © F. Gwynplaine Maclntyre. Originally published in Evermore. Reprinted by permission of the author. MAKING CABINETS copyright © Richard Christian Matheson. Originally published in Masques V. Reprinted by permission of the author. POL POT’S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER (FANTASY) copyright © Geoff Ryman 2006. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction No.655, October/November 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent. DEVIL’S SMILE copyright © Glen Hirshberg 2006. Originally published in American Morons. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Anderson Grinberg Literary Management, Inc. THE MAN WHO GOT OFF THE GHOST TRAIN copyright © Kim Newman 2006. Originally published in The Man from the Diogenes Club. Reprinted by permission of the author. NECROLOGY: 2006 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2007. USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2007. on the occasion of their wedding. IN FEBRUARY 2006, French conglomerate Lagardere bought the Time Warner Book Group for $537.5 million and became the third largest book publisher in the world (after Pearson and McGraw Hill). Lagardere is the parent company of publisher Hachette Livre, which already owned Orion/Gollancz and Hodder Headline in the UK. The acquisition meant that they also took control of the Warner Books, Warner Aspect, Little Brown and Mysterious Press imprints in the US, and Orbit and Atom in the UK. The various imprints were subsequently renamed Hachette Book Group USA and Little Brown Book Group. Following the death of their founder in 2005, Byron Preiss Visual Publications and iBooks, Inc. voluntarily filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and closed down all operations at the end of February. It was announced that the companies did not have sufficient resources to continue operations. They were subsequently put up for public auction, with the back catalogue, copyrights and author agreements included amongst the assets. The companies were acquired by J. Boylston & Company, who placed an initial bid of $125,000 and planned to continue publishing titles under the Byron Preiss imprints. American Marketing Services, which owned Publishers Group West, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on December 26th with debts of $200 million. AMS was the largest book distributor in America, with more than 150 clients including Carroll & Graf, Dark Horse Comics, McSweeney’s, RE/Search, Thunder’s Mouth Press and Underwood Books. HMV acquired Britain’s Ottakar’s bookshop chain for £62.9 million, and pulped several million pounds of stock in the process. The 141 stores were subsequently rebranded as Waterstone’s. Mr Alton Verm of Conroe, Texas, was outraged when he saw the book his fifteen-year-old daughter brought home from the local high school. “It’s just all kinds of filth,” Verm complained. “I want to get the book taken out of the class.” To that end, he filed a “Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials” with the Conroe Independent School District. The book he so vehemently objected to was Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, which is all about a near-future society where books are banned. Of course, Verm didn’t know that – he admitted that he hadn’t actually read it. In September, the Rt Reverend David Gillett, the Bishop of Bolton, accused retailers of creating a “climate of fear” by selling traditional Halloween merchandise. Writing to Britain’s five biggest supermarket chains, he urged them to rethink the way they marketed the pagan holiday: “I share the view of many Christians that large retailers are increasingly keen to commercialise Halloween celebrations in a way that pressurises parents to purchase goods that promote the dark, negative side of Halloween and could encourage anti-social behaviour,” he said. “I am worried that Halloween has the potential to trivialise the realities of evil in the world and that occult practices should not be condoned, even if they are only being presented in a caricatured, light-hearted form.” It was estimated that Britain now spends $120 million on Halloween. Analysts say that the UK is fast catching up with America, where it costs the average family around $120.00 to buy Halloween accessories, in an industry that is worth nearly $9 billion a year. Although some critics decried the growing “Americanisation” of Halloween, in the UK it is the third most profitable event for retailers after Christmas and Easter, with the seven days before October 31st now the second busiest shopping week of the year. In June, author J. K. Rowling was voted Britain’s greatest living writer in an online survey for The Book Magazine. She received almost three times as many votes as the second-placed author, Terry Pratchett. Also down the list were Phillip Pullman (#6), Iain Banks (#14), Alasdair Gray (#19), Neil Gaiman (joint #21), J.G. Ballard (joint #28), Peter Ackroyd (joint #28), Diana Wynne Jones (#36) and Michael Moorcock (#44). By the end of 2006, Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows was already topping the Amazon best-seller list, despite not being published for another six months. Not content with that, the “adult edition” of Rowling’s latest magical opus was firmly established in the #2 slot. However, that did not stop shares in Rowling’s British publisher, Bloomsbury, crashing after a shock profits warning that wiped £73 million off the company’s value. Bloomsbury blamed poor retail sales during the run-up to Christmas. According to the American Library Association, Rowling’s Harry Potter series topped the list of the “most-challenged” books in the 21st century with the highest number of written complaints to US schools and libraries asking for them to be removed. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck only made #4 on that particular Top 10 of shame. J. K. Rowling teamed up with fellow authors Stephen King and John Irving over August 1st and 2nd at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall for a benefit appearance in aid of The Haven Foundation and Doctors Without Borders. The trio read from their work and answered questions in front of the 6,000-strong audiences. In Stephen King’s novel Cell, which the author dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero, people using their cell phones were turned into rampaging zombies by a mysterious electronic virus known as the Pulse. With 1.8 million copies in circulation in America, Scribner promoted the book with downloadable ringtones featuring King’s voice and a mass text-messaging campaign. The first two chapters were excerpted in the January 27th issue of Entertainment Weekly, and when the book was released in the UK in February, The Times newspaper included an extract from the novel in the format of a newsprint supplement. Snow Men. Why can’t the snowman get any respect? By Bob Eckstein’s count, of the approximately 500 books with the word “snowman” in the title, 488 are either for children or about drug dealers. Of the some eight million pieces of art on record at the Royal Library in The Hague, only two contain images of a snowman. Consumer capitalism has pressed the snowman into service as a pitchman for everything from anti-dandruff shampoo to laxatives to tampons. Feminist professors have publicly denounced him as a fat white male who lolls on the lawn “while the woman of the house is inside toiling.” In Switzerland, there is even a national holiday dedicated to blowing him up. In THE HISTORY OF THE SNOWMAN: From the Ice Age to the Flea Market (Simon Spotlight, $14.95) , Eckstein aims to rectify this injustice. The snowman, he writes, is far more than the sum of his stacked snowballs (three in most places, but two in Japan). Or rather, it’s his very emptiness that makes him so full. “The snowman might be different to everyone, but most importantly, he is nobody to everybody,” Eckstein writes. “We can all relate to him. He’s the last man picked on the team. He is Everyman.” For reasons that remain obscure, Eckstein tells this Everyman story in reverse chronological order, from “The White Trash Years: 1975-2000” to “The Ice Age,” stopping along the way to consider early American snowmen, the snowball in late Renaissance Italy, and “Belgian Expressionism,” which came into full flower in the harsh winter of 1511 when the people of Brussels spontaneously filled the city with often raunchy and politically charged snow sculptures. Like the snowman himself, Eckstein’s book is about 80 percent air. The intriguing facts and illustrations are honeycombed with pockets of gaseous philosophizing. After pages of groaners and mock profundities, it’s a relief to find a gallery of classic snowman cartoons and a subzero version of the party game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (did you know that George W. Bush is a “snowball’s throw” — actually, four — away from Frank Frazetta’s cartoon “Snowman”?). There’s also a Harper’s-style index offering some extremely useful information. (“Number of movies with ‘snowman’ in the title: 22. Number of those in which the snowman is the killer: 6.”) The Inuit, despite their supposed dozens of words for snow, may not have been great makers of snowmen, preferring instead to build their inuksuit (figures used to trick caribou or, more recently, to advertise banks or beer) out of stacked stones. But the snowman has proliferated since European settlement of the New World, though he hasn’t necessarily thrived. Surveying early popular postcards, Eckstein notes a “disturbing number” showing snowmen “pelted with snowballs by a gang of wayward youths, plowed by speeding sledders or pig-driven toboggans, bludgeoned by two-by-fours, stomped on by tots, held up at gunpoint by little girls, stabbed with brooms and posing in photo shoots with cats.” (As Bernard Mergen puts it in his incisive and delightful 1997 cultural history, “Snow in America,” the traditional top-hatted snowman “is a symbol of authority to be attacked, and his destruction by sun and wind is welcomed.”) Is it any wonder that the poor fellow, so often illustrated clutching a bottle of whiskey, seems to have spent most days from the McKinley administration to the outbreak of World War II in a drunken stupor? Or that he was eventually driven to a life of crime, as in the 1996 horror flick “Jack Frost” (tagline: “He’s Chillin’ and Killin’), in which an antifreeze- proof psycho snowman rapes a shrieking starlet in the shower? These days, when he isn’t stalking coeds or being adopted as a mascot by crack-smoking rappers, the snowman can be found hanging around government buildings, lending a low-key nondenominational bonhomie to holiday displays. In the ’90s, a New Jersey court ruled that displays of crèches and menorahs were secular and therefore constitutional — as long as Frosty was included too. The court may be surprised to learn that the snowman’s past contains a whiff of anti-Semitism. Eckstein, without citing any clear art-historical authority, claims to have pinpointed the first known image of a snowman, in the margins of a 14th-century illuminated manuscript. He’s shown sitting by a stove with his back turned to a passage about the crucifixion. The snowman’s hat, Eckstein argues, is similar to those used to mark Jews as objects of contempt and ridicule in traditional scenes of Calvary. Readers may approach the end of Eckstein’s book dreading the news that the 21st-century snowman has stopped smoking, taken up Pilates and announced an Earth Day appearance with Leonardo DiCaprio. Instead, Eckstein concludes on a slushy, sentimental note. The biggest threat to today’s snowman, he lamely argues, isn’t global warming but “the extinction of our innocence,” as children become too burdened with iPods and attention-deficit disorder to go outside and play in the snow. If we don’t do something soon, Eckstein warns, we can forget Burl Ives and “Frosty the Snowman.” Cue up the menacing soundtrack to “Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman.” As Eckstein sums it up: “Feliz NaviDEAD.”