Joel Achen has the scoop:
Snow has finally revealed its true stripes. It's just ice. A couple of days ago we had "snow" that fell in highly granular form, and the deep freeze has turned it into something with the texture of marble. It still looks like snow, but you'd need a pickaxe to make a hole big enough to accomodate a golf tee. The only way I got my car unstuck was by using my flamethrower. (As you know, I have a permit to carry a concealed flamethrower.)
And so we know snow for what it really is and what it has always been. No form of frozen water has ever had such a good run of favorable publicity. All that Currier & Ives nonsense. Disingenuousness among precipitates has dogged our lives since time immemorial (think of all the "showers" that were actually rain, and the "mist" that was actually fog), but we've been particularly vulnerable to the romanticization of snow. It's just ice, people.
It's all fun and games, but this is completely intolerable. My car is currently impaled on some impromptu icebank that's left my back wheels sticking into the alley (I need a flamethrower too!), the ground looks light and fluffy but is actually diamond-hard and dangerously slick, and I'm cold. If something doesn't change, I'm totally withdrawing my support for DC's new mayor Adrian Fenty. I want protection, dammit!
