The Salad Days

(Photo of Paul Douglas)


The following is a quote from the Minneapolis Star Tribune's own Paul Douglas:

"Snow. Noun. Frozen precipitation in the form of white or translucent hexagonal ice crystals that fall in soft, white flakes. That’s a gentle reminder for Twin Cities residents, who have seen precious little of the “white stuff” in recent years."

True, I have only lived here coming up on two years, but I seem to remember getting hit with about 20-30 inches ofsnow in February over the course of only a few days. Weathermen drive me nuts, wherever I have lived (though Chicago's Tom Skilling seemed of a pretty even keel). They get overly dramatic when we do see a storm, and any day that is warmer than normal necessitates some sort of speech on the looming extinction of the polar bears. I like snow. I especially love it this time of year. He wrote this today because we are supposed to get a good snow storm this weekend. Last year, December was pretty brown, and we had to hear the complaining and the apocalyptic cries of global warming. Now, this is not meant to be a post questioning the legitimacy of the global warming theory, something I do not pretend to know anything about. It is meant to be a statement on the fact that when your whole job is weather, you start to sound silly. I certainly cannot forget snow when I had to turn my Ford Taurus into a snowplow simply so I could drive home from work last February.

This phenomenon is not unique to the midwest. The local "storm watches" in Southern California always reminded me more of a Saturday Night Live sketch than a weather report. Weathermen need to remember that weather is unpredictable. Here in Minnesota, where the weather is fascinating and varies a lot, that should be even more the case. But alas, the drama persists, and poor Paul Douglas is left to ring his hands and try to remind fellow Minnesotans what snow is, when I'm sure none of them need to be reminded.