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February 13, 2007
Snow Business
Boston’s about to see it’s first real snow of the season, so naturally a majority of the citizenry has gone about the important business of soiling themselves.
Never fails. It’s even worse this time than normal, since barely a flake has fallen, leaving the local weathermen to sit in the corner, shaking like junkies in need of a fix, praying for a low-pressure to get all up in up grizzle and bury us up to our hizzle. So with this storm’s imminent arrival, our local meteorologists have whipped themselves up into a frenzy the likes of which I normally see only when passing past GodTV on the way to catch an episode of “Cash in the Attic” on BBC America.
Naturally, as per usual with these all-knowing seers of the jet-stream, they were flat-out wrong about how much snow Boston would get. What sounded from all reports like the next Blizzard of ’78 now looks more like less than a half-foot of snow. Child’s play. Didn’t stop them running lead stories like, “Tonight on Channel 5: We’re All Totally F#cked”, or “Holy Freakin’ Sh%t, it’s like ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ Without Jakey Here to Save Us!” or Dan Shaughnessy’s column, “Why This Storm is Due to Theo Epstein not Paying Larry Lucchino The Proper Amount of Respect he Should Have”
Instead, looks like the areas north and west will get socked, which, according to right-wing blogs, is God’s revenge upon Vermont for pioneering legal gay marriage. Still, have no fear, dear readers, Bostonians and their neighbors in the surrounding areas will undoubtedly treat these measley few inches as if they had never seen or dealt with snow before. Honestly, every first snow of the year brings out 500,000 reactions that resemble Tom Hanks in that old SNL skit, “Mr. Short Term Memory”. NO ONE deals well with the first snowfall, and consequently you have nearly half a million adults treating snow like kids treat the carpet when playing “don’t touch the carpet, it’s made of lava, and in the lava, there are giant snakes, and inside the snakes, you guessed it, more lava, so don’t step on the carpet, or you’re a dead lava-covered snake-eaten gooberface”.
But, you say, at least you’re equipped with public transportation, able to bring you into the city, bring you to and fro, and then take you home again. But you’re forgetting one important tidbit of information in this hypothesis, dear reader. And that’s the fact that all public transportation vehicles in Massachusetts are designed to work only on sunny days when the temperature is between 72 and 73 degrees. Anything else naturally sends the send into cataclysmic shockwaves of breakdowns, late arriving vehicles, and backups that make you wish the future of telecommuting was here and now. You’d think the trains, buses, and subways that make up our public transportation system could handle cold weather, but I’m better equipped to handle cold fusion. And here’s an FYI: I’m totally ill-equipped to handle cold fusion. I can barely handle the fact that I like Drew Barrymore’s Celebrity iTunes playlist, nevermind cold fusion.
As for how this all plays out…who knows. It’s not like we can trust even this latest weather report, which reminds me: at what other job can you be so consistently wrong and still keep your job? I mean, we’re talking upwards of a 30-40% failure rate here for the majority of these meteorologists. Could you eff up 40% of the time can keep your job? (I mean, if you WEREN’T a politician, naturally. Whole other scale there. It’s like comparing apples to a big pile o’ steamin’ crap there, as the cliché states.) I know I couldn’t. Must be nice. Imagine if you were a carpenter, and only managed to build 6 out of 10 walls correctly. You wouldn’t be a carpenter much longer, would you? Exactly. And yet Dick Albert’s been on Channel 5 for something like 56 years at this point. Unreal.
Could be worse, I guess. Dick Albert could be the one re-doing your bathroom. Least his damage is minimized where he is, overall.
Posted by Ryan McGee at February 13, 2007 08:37 PM