Thanks, Mayor De Blasio, for creating panic in your city, proclaiming that the sky is literally falling and the city will undergo the worst blizzard in the past thousand years.
Good God, man, it’s only snow.
On the other hand, those of you who insist on squeezing yourselves into Demorat-run Herring Enclaves, good for you. Keep it up. More Lebensraum for me.
BZ
P.S.
Live shot just outside Whole Foods in NYC.
BZ, how can you be so cruel. Only snow? ONLY snow? This is much more than frozen water. This the fury of raw untamed nature forcing puny man (and woman and transgendered) to cower in terror, holed up in burrows (and boroughs) confronted by a force greater than obama, listening to relentless howling winds of biblical force assault windows and doors and watching as the snow piles against them trapping the occupants inside. Helplessly they watch as the wind driven snow, slowly forced through hitherto unknown cracks and spaces, forms small yet ever increasing mounds of white frozen death in their houses and apartments until suddenly the lights go o u t and cold darkness d e s c e n d s..
On the other hand, the shopkeepers are making out like bandits so DiBlasio’s tax revenues will increase…
Abigail, are you in that hovel known as NEW
YORK
CITY
?
BZ
Nope. Not even on the same continent but in a small village near the Slovenian border where, fingers crossed it will continue, winter has been relatively kind to us. ( Hope I don’t regret saying that. My biggest fear is that we will get a really big storm and the power will go out for days as it did several years ago. Although I have lovely tile stoves which can heat the house nicely and can cope with oil lamps, etc., I admit I have become spoiled by central heating and need it for my attached outbuilding. My dream is to have a standby generator, something which seems to be virtually unheard of in this country.)
Seeing headlines like this: ‘Storm Fails To Live Up To Predictions In Some Areas As National Weather Service Meteorologist Apologizes’
does not help either. Although this storm seems to have not been as bad for NYC, I’ve read that in S. New Hampshire it is snowing at a good clip of 3 inches per hour with high winds.
I dunno. It just seems to me that more and more events (natural and manmade) are exaggerated, hyperbole is used, drama is emphasized, people are whipped up into a kind of frenzy when instead a calm, level headed approach is needed. What will happen when people get tired of it and start to dismiss warnings much like the boy who cried wolf.
I always wonder. Just what do people do with 10 gallons of milk and 20 loaves of bread?
Fact is, I lived in NYC during the “Lindsey Storm” of 1969 and I was also in college in the Midwest during the crippling “Blizzard of ’78”. During the latter, traffic was all but impossible. The college town even called in The National Guard with tanks and heavy equipment to deal with the mountainous snow. As that storm wound down, it was then that I first learned a lesson. I trekked through deep snow and huge drifts to a nearby grocery store. There it was. At the entrance of the store were two trucks. A BREAD TRUCK AND A MILK TRUCK!
During a more recent blizzard, where traffic was also all but impossible, I watched the news. A reporter stood at the intersection of a normally very busy intersection of two major roads. NO TRAFFIC. As the reporter stood in white out conditions with snow deeper than her knees, suddenly she stopped and said – “I see headlights coming in the distance. This is the first vehicle we have seen since we got here. It is probably a snow plow”
Well, it WASN’T a snow plow. IT WAS A DAIRY TRUCK!
So the lesson is two-fold. First is that streets would probably be cleared more rapidly if bread trucks and dairy trucks had plows on them. Second, let all the panicked hoarders buy all the bread and milk. That way as the storm winds down, I can go back and get FRESHER bread and milk!
As for me – I’ll stock up on snacks, junk food and beer – they have far longer shelf life!
BX, poor guy, you had to live under the worst mayors of all. My apologies.
At least, with milk and bread, you could make some really good French Toast.
Oh wait. Not unless you had syrup.
BZ
Here is a post script to my message above:
I was up all night and I watched coverage of the “HISTORIC STORM”. Keeping in mind your blog post and all those people sitting at home with more bread and milk than Pennsylvania Dutch Country has, it soon became apparent that this storm DID begin tracking further out to sea. NOT UNANTICIPATED, only that the hysterical media and WORST, The “Weather” Channel (FOREVER destroyed after NBC took over that station) began hyping and hash-tagging the crap out of it (marketing and advertising dollars outweigh the needs of science and responsible reporting). They even named it (NOT approved by The National Weather Service, the ONLY entity that can officially name storms and issue warnings – yet they do it anyway. Just like they did with Sandy which was NOT a named system when it made landfall). Anyway, The Weather Channel had their reporters stationed all over the place. The ONLY one that saw action was one who was right on the beach in Massachusetts. While he was buffeted by high winds and white-out snow, Jim Canotre looked so sad a mere 3 miles inland where only moderate snow and unimpressive winds barely blew. Worse were those reporting from NYC where the wind was hardly noticeable and barely 6 inches of snow fell. I watched as they stood in snow barely covering their shoes and walked into plowed snow banks or drifts they had to search to find so it would look more dramatic. One even resorted to standing far from the camera in a drift so it would look like he was in poor visibility and in very deep snow. All the same, TWC is still all jerked-up that more could be on the way….look at the radar guys – it is moving away with only a brush with Maine to go.
SO – about all those loaves of bread and milk. Thousands of flights canceled. Businesses that had to close because authorities paid too much attention to the hype instead of OTHER calm, level-headed scientific entities who DID show possible computer models that put most of the weather further out to sea.
I don’t know if hyperlinks are permitted in comments. Suffice to say, one of the early headlines I saw (and you can bet there will be many more) – Daily Mail: “Manhattan is transformed into a PLAYGROUND with New Yorkers enjoying snowball fights and taking selfies in the deserted streets after storm Juno fails to arrive as predicted at 11pm”.
Yes, your comment about the mayor is true. What I wonder is that Mayor Lindsay WAS one of the worst (although without him, the “art of graffiti” would NEVER had had the chance to flourish so unabated in the subways). While the ’69 blizzard damaged his public image because of his INACTION, will DiBlasio be damaged because of his OVERREACTION?
These are the guys, BTW, who are in love with AGW and will do anything to ensure it. Yeah right. Can’t look out the window and make an accurate prediction, I’m gonna trust ’em with AGW?
I still like French Toast.
BZ
Agreed on the AGW topic. When NBC acquired TWC, it proceeded to fire some of the familiar faces they had – I’ll bet because they did not fit in with their new agenda and image. One person many were sad to see let go was Nicole Mitchell….excuse me…MAJOR Nicole Mitchell. Figure that one out. What better person to have on their roster than and actual officer of the Air Force who is a member of their elite Hurricane Hunters. She is also a meteorologist. Of course she is very, very easy on the eyes. She did sue TWC. Some of the meteorologists that were let go, went over to Accuweather, who I wish would start their OWN weather channel. Those who stayed with TWC, evolved to fit in with NBC’s image by shaving their heads ala Al Roker and Matt low-T Lauer.
I wonder how the good folks in Buffalo handled the media hype of this storm. Even if it WOULD have lived up to all the hype and dumped 3 feet of snow, it still would have been less than HALF of the seven feet of snow that the Buffalo area got from that single lake-effect event earlier this season.
Yeah – French toast IS good. I always wonder – along with the milk and bread does THE BACON sell out as well?