It’s Just Weather! (Update)

• Posted on 23rd January 2016
• in New York City
• by Ben

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Unlike my usual blog pieces this is not a celebrity story, a film production story nor a love story. It’s weather; a bit of snow.

Why do we anthropomorphize weather?

You hear it every time there’s a storm: The angry wind, the vicious rain, the fierce snow and on and on.

It’s weather for crissake, not your asshole neighbor or a schoolyard bully. It’s just weather. Meteorological conditions do not have emotions. They can be powerful, intense, damaging, frightening, disastrous and so forth but never are they angry or vicious.

Anger and viciousness are human (anthropomorphic) conditions; emotional states. Yet the fashion models that serve as our local TV stations’ “meteorologists” always, with no known exceptions, apply these all too human characteristics to any kind of severe weather conditions.

So here we are in January 2016 in New York (for those of you who are geographically challenged, a northern city) and it’s snowing. If you’ve been watching the local TV news you’d think that the End-Of-The-World-As-We-Know-It was on hand. Even our Newspaper of Record, the vaunted New York Times bears the headline:

Dire Warnings Along the East Coast as the Snow Piles Up

Five to ten inches of snow in January rates a “dire warning”? Gimme a break. At five o’clock yesterday (22^nd) there was a line to get into the grocery store which was out of whole milk quarts. We seem to be turning into a bunch of weather wimps.

Hello! It’s January. It’s snowing. This is big news?

In December of 2010 we got twenty inches. That was snow.

This “storm” is no Big Deal in the Big Apple. Get out your boots and parka and take a walk in the park. In two days it’ll all be gone.

23 January 2016 NYC

If you’re looking for a celebrity story, a film production story or a love story click here.

 UPDATE THE NEXT DAY

I was wrong. I admit it. This turned out to be, at 26.8 inches, the second biggest NYC snowfall (by 0.01 inches) in recorded history.

When I’m wrong, I’m wrong.

Tags: Snow Storm in NYC