While we were on vacation one things we got to hear a lot about was the terrible “blizzard” that was heading towards the midwest.  Since we were nowhere near it, we sat and observed through various means what happened.

On television things were appropriately dramatic, with a lot of “worst storm”, terrible things going to happen, dogs and cats living together- mass hysteria…  Nationally, people were preparing for what the Mayans had foretold.

In Social Media we had a number of professional and amateur meteorologists taking a stab at predictions.  I was a bit concerned (for Hemi) but figured he should be fine.  As real reports came in I think many people realized that there were more than one definition of the word “blizzard”   Technically- it was a blizzard since there was a specifically defined amount of snow falling while the wind was blowing at a specific speed, or a yummy ice cream confection at Dairy Queen.  For those who deal with pop culture though a blizzard has something to do with massive amounts of snow and tornadoes and yeti… lots of yeti.  This didn’t seem to have any of this and by the time we got home I was out of $25 for asking the neighborhood kids to shovel my driveways that had mostly melted.

While meteorologists are getting better at predicting, it is our romantic notions of things (like the blizzard of 1978) that causes panic and french toast runs.