Today is Sunday, February 1 and there are only 13 days left until Valentine’s Day.  Why haven’t you gotten your card for your sweetheart, yet?  Are you waiting until closer to the day so that the choices are fewer, making it easier to pick a card?  Today we remember the birthdays of Charles J Sax, Clark Gable, and Laura Dern.  On this day in 1709 British sailor Alexander Selkirk was rescued after being marooned on a desert island for five years; his story becoming the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”, in 1862 Julia Howe published the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and in 1949 RCA released the first single record ever (45 rpm).  In Malaysia it is Federal Territory Holiday, in Nicaragua it is Air Force Day and in the US it is National Freedom Day.

Time for a cautionary tale entitled – The Big Storm That Couldn’t

It was a time of great despair.  “The snow storm is coming!  The snow storm is coming!”  all the forecasters warned, Chicken Little-like.  They displayed computer models showing how the snow would come in and the temperature would drop and the winds would pick up and we would have a blizzard of massive proportions.  This storm was so bad that it was given a name – Nemo

As an aside, why do we feel it necessary to give storms a name?  Does it make them scarier if they have a name?  Do we really need to be more scared than we normally would be by a blizzard?  Just wondering.

Back to our tale.  Throughout the weekend Nemo was all that anyone could talk about.  We were anticipating up to two feet of snow.  People were rushing to buy generators, snow blowers, ice melt (one guy I saw bought 21 bags of it at our local supermarket), snow shovels and the requisite milk, bread and toilet paper.  We all hunkered down and waited for the “storm of the century” which I thought had come when Sandy came through, but apparently not.  It was coming, it could not be avoided and we were in for a rough one.

The initial snow came on Monday as predicted.  We were to get a couple inches and then the blizzard would hit later in the day.  Blizzard warnings were in effect until midnight, Tuesday.  Throughout Monday, government officials warned of the dangers, announced the closing of offices, roads, mass transit and intoned in serious voices that people should stay home.  We received reverse 911 calls from our town warning us to get our cars off the streets, not to travel unless it is an extreme emergency and to check on the elderly.  With that in mind, I pulled our cars into the driveway, made no plans to go out and the lovely Elaine and I asked each other if we were okay every so often.

As the day progressed, things still seemed to be on track for total snow devastation.  The weather prognosticators, with the latest scientific equipment and experts, continued to issue dire warnings and prepared to give us the on-the-spot updates by having some 8 to 10 reporters out in the field telling us it was dangerous and we should stay indoors.  As another aside, I want to be a weather reporter so that I can go out into storms, impervious to their dangers, to tell everyone else not to do what I am doing. 

 But I digress … After several days of warnings, predictions, storm tracks and naming the storm, all was set.  Snowmegeddon was coming and we just had to be  prepared and hope for the best.

I started to suspect that something was amiss around midnight when I looked outside and could still see the outlines of my sidewalk.  All I could think was that there was going to be one hell of a snowfall in the next few hours to give us the two feet we were supposed to get.  I figured that it was going to come down so hard that we would be able to hear it.  I decided to go to bed so that I would be well rested and ready for the cleanup when I could finally get out of the house.  Imagine my surprise when I woke to find that we had gotten only about four inches.  Oops!

As a result of this blizzard that wasn’t, there were a lot of issues that came up.  For example, our newspaper, which was apparently put together early and without anyone actually looking out the window, had a front page that trumpeted “SHUTDOWN – NJ grinds to halt as powerful winter storm strikes.”  Again, oops!  The article spoke about us preparing to dig out from “what may be one of the largest storms ever to hit the region.”  We were expecting winds blowing at near-hurricane strength.   NJ Transit was going to start shutting down around 10 PM and they could not predict when service would resume.  An additional problem was that all the storm devastation stories for Wednesday did not materialize and now they had to scramble to fill the pages .

Some of the stories were pertinent anyway, like the one that talked about the guy in charge of Newark’s snow removal people.  For the most part, the stories just didn’t have the gravity that they would have had if we got what was predicted.  I thought this piece from the National Weather Service was interesting.  They said, “The storm developed about 90 miles east of previous forecasts and departed more quickly.  Forecasters said sinking air, or subsidence(really, subsidence?) – a reaction to steeply rising air in heavy snow bands to the east – effectively halted the heaviest precipitation in its westward march to New Jersey.”  In other words – OOPS!  The worst part is that all those forecasters still have their jobs.  Imagine what would have happened to you where you work if you had made that kind of mistake.

And so, boys and girls, what can we take away from this tale?  We learned that predicting weather is a crap shoot.  We can look at all the computer generated models and watch the radar screen and talk to all the experts, but ultimately the weather is going to do what it wants.  Bottom line is that Grandma’s bunions are as effective as anything else when it comes to predicting the weather.

This week our fact tells us that humans and dolphins are the only animals known to have sex for pleasure.  What other reason is there?  I always thought children were our punishment for enjoying sex.