Nurse the Hate: Hate Snow

There was once a time when rugged Midwestern residents stoically battled the elements without pretense or fanfare. Nobody complained because what good could come of that? In the winter, you got snow. That's what happens in the winter. If the Gods dropped a foot of snow while you slept, you calmly picked up your shovel and got to work clearing it out of the way. Not any more...

You would think that clouds of cyanide gas were being dropped from airplanes the way people reacted this weekend to the weather. I stopped at a grocery store on Friday afternoon as the projected 12-16 inches of snow began falling. All I wanted was an apple and a sandwich, and I was totally unprepared for the bad craziness I stepped into. Old women were on the brink of fist fights over cans of tomato soup. Terrified eyes of soccer moms scanned the quickly thinning shelves looking for the last box of strawberry pop tarts to keep their wailing child satiated as they prepared to ride out "Death Storm 2008". Shelves were picked clean as local residents braced themselves for the worst. All rules of the road were suspended as old men drove through stop signs, and macho suburbanites drove as fast as possible to justify their giant four wheel drive SUVs.

On television, all local stations broke into programming every 15 minutes attempting to dream up new ways of saying "We're going to get a foot and a half of snow over the next 24 hours". Impressive terms like "accu-track" and "dual doppler" really seem cutting edge until you realize they don't mean anything. Each station tries to outdo the other in presenting the one actual sentence of information in new and spectacular fashion. Everyone is urged "NOT TO LEAVE YOUR HOMES!!!!" Like a Rube, I listened and stayed in virtual lock down in my bunker.

Stuck inside all day, I was forced to gamble wildly on college basketball and boxing while drinking heroic quantities of red wine and pale ale. It started out innocently enough with a small wager on Stanford to "keep the game interesting", and quickly snowballed into white knuckling it on Princeton +7.5 against Cornell. I bet on Cleveland State, Rhode Island, Duke, and was moments away from losing a small fortune on Juan Diaz when he got his ass kicked by a journeyman in a Don King production in Cancun. I would like to point out, I don't really know anything about any of those teams, games, conferences, or match ups. It got so bad in the afternoon, that I was trying to figure out why the line on the Butler/U of Illinois-Chicago Horizon League semi final was dropping like a stone. Things had clearly gotten out of hand...

When was it exactly that we became such pussies about extreme weather? It must have been sometime around when that term "Alberta Clipper" first started getting tossed around. (Side note: I think "Alberta Clipper" came around the same time as "high ankle sprain". Has anyone had just an "ankle sprain" since the advent of the "high ankle sprain" term? Suddenly, everyone is a fucking amateur Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine. Example: "Oh, Daniel Gibson will be out at least 6 weeks minimum. I saw how he came down on it. He's got a high ankle sprain.) The bottom line is that change has to start somewhere. Me? I'm going retro with my attitude towards weather. Will it put me in incredible danger? Maybe. But, at least I won't be gambling on Ivy League basketball.