by Barry Parham

Created on: January 17, 2011

Snowblind

(How to not become Jack Nicholson during a blizzard)

It was the biggest winter storm to hit the American South in over three decades. And by the time sunshine and sanity finally glanced back down on the Southern landscape, a national holiday had gone missing, forests of Sliced White Bread trees had been slash-harvested, and greedy grocers had permanently disfigured 18,000 milk cows.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah" is the typical meteorological analysis of the typical Southern male, when confronted with news of a pending winter emergency. Partly, this is due to winter weather over-forecasting, which happens every year. But Southerners have learned to expect such from TV Weather Pros, people with names like Tiff or Carmelottinola or Bink, who refer to rain as a "rain event," and who stand in front of weather maps, totally blocking our states, while the blue parts of their Weather Pro clothes blink in and out of existence.

Southerners are also a bit numb to weather warnings because we get endless alerts about tornados and hurricanes which, unlike blizzards, visit the South on a regular basis, often before breakfast. And after. And during.

But let's face it: guys just don't do a whole lot of complex thinking or long-term planning. Consider how guys communicate at life's three major milestones - Birth, Matrimony and Death:

First words: "Goo goo. Pull my finger."
Marriage: "Hold on ... she was how old?"
Last words: "Hey, y'all. Watch this!"

ETYMOLOGICAL SIDEBAR: We now know that "goo goo" is early guy human for "Any chips left?"

But as it turned out, this was a real (and a really bad) snowstorm, at least by our balmy Southern standards. Here's how serious the weather situation was here in upstate South Carolina: in order to provide a seamless, endless flow of weather updates, the local TV station pre-empted the mid-morning's "Live with Regis"!

It might've gotten ugly. Such radical re-programming could have caused a civil backlash. Attacks on the thoughtless TV station, that sort of thing. Hordes of torch-carrying, Mom-Jeans-wearing Moms, storming out of the suburbs, so furiously angry that they turn into grainy, black & white film. Or things could've turned politically violent, especially if any of those insane, raging Republicans and sharp-fanged Tea Party psychotics started to rumble. Next thing you know, they might start ... now, hang on to something ... they might start reading stuff out loud, even atavistic documents with outdated concepts,

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