Dumb And Dumber

If I learned one thing from election night it is that political forecasters are amazingly terrible at their jobs. Basically, they proved that people shouldn't bother to collect polling data, because the pundits pay no attention to it and just tell the people watching what they want to hear. If someone has an opinion which doesn't fit that particular station's narrative, than they are shouted down and told they are wrong. Well, you can't argue with math. For example, back in 2008 former baseball statistician Nate Silver of the New York Times applied a mathematical formula to all the polling data collected and subsequently went on to correctly predict how 49 of the 50 states would vote. For this he was called a nerd and ignored by the people on the 24 hour cable news networks. A few days before the election he said it was looking very good for the President, so naturally Fox News pundits started to question his sexuality. As it turns out this time he not only correctly predicted all 50 states, but he did it to within a few percentage points. Yet, the guys who were loudly saying Romney would not only win, but win big will continue to collect large checks and exposed to a national audience who believe what they say. Honestly, they should be weathermen.

On the heels of Superstorm Sandy, late last week the North East got word another storm was headed our way, scheduled to arrive last night. But, since sequels rarely live up to the originals, any storm following Sandy was going to get about as much attention as the guy who hit the second-most homeruns (19) in 1920 when Babe Ruth was hitting 54. The threat of a meager Nor'easter was not going to get people excited, myself included. As soon as they said there was no threat of a storm surge and no sustained high winds, I stopped paying attention. What's a little more rain and the occasional gust of wind, especially when most of the trees lost their leaves last week? There was a passing mention of the possibility of snow, but that was only supposed to be up north in New Hampshire and since a lot of people up there rely on snow for their businesses I thought they would be happy about it. By Monday I had almost forgotten it was coming. The storm was supposed to get to my neck of the woods over night, so when I woke up this morning to find that it wasn't even raining I thought it was just another case of weathermen getting it wrong. At least, that was my feeling right up until I started seeing snowflakes. Turns out they got in wrong, but in a way I wasn't prepared for.

I think we are all familiar with the fives stages of dealing with a loss. Well, when it comes to the first snowfall of the year there are just two stages: denial and angry acceptance, with denial taking much longer. At first I was like, "That's not snow. It's just... puffy rain?" Then, when I could no longer deny what my eyes were telling me it became, "Ok, that is snow. But at least it's melting immediately." However, when I came out later to find snow starting to accumulate on grassy areas I switched over to, "That's fine. At least it hasn't started piling up on the roads yet." By the time I got home it was sticking on the roads and my radio was filled with reports of accidents, because every winter it appears that people have spent their summers forgetting about how to drive when there is snow on the ground. Considering the towns in this area were just as unprepared as the rest of us they hadn't had a chance to treat any of the roads, which just made it worse. After a few hours my car was pretty much covered by snow as well. At that point, all I could do was accept it - we won't be having a repeat of the mild winter we had last year.

Currently, there is about three inches of snow on the ground outside my house. Now, instead of wondering if I was going to have to mow the lawn one more time, I'm left to debate whether or not I need to break out the shovels and ice melt way ahead of schedule. Supposedly I could just leave it alone because we're going to warm back up this weekend and this was just a freak occurrence like last Halloween's snow. Of course, that leaves me back to believing the weathermen and listening to them now would feel rather foolish. You're only going to let someone give you bad directions for so long before you take their map away. Not only were they wrong about when the storm was going to get here they were way wrong about what kind of precipitation it was going to be. I'm very willing to forgive them for getting snow totals wrong because they can't control things like wind drifts, but they should at least be able to tell me if snow is even coming. At some point shouldn't there be some level of accountability? At least when the political pundits are wrong it won't screw up my plans for the next day.