Check out this gorgeous photo of Boston from the air after the blizzard.
Via Reddit
I’ve got a long history of fawning over Market Basket, the grocery store around the corner from my house. It’s cheap, constantly crowded, and features a parking lot way too small for the number of people who want to go. There is always a police detail on site, and for the week around holidays, there are TWO police details on site. The floors are constantly sawdusted from wet breakage. The chaos in the aisles and check out area on the day before Thanksgiving and the days before Christmas is my spirit animal.
Market Basket is the perfect place to check out maniacal storm preparation, but today the road leading into the parking lot was shut for a street fair. The parking lot was more than half empty, and I’ve never seen the store so calm or quiet. Market Basket probably would done tremendous sales today, instead they probably won’t even make their average.
If the folks developing the Dark Sky weather prediction app have their way, you’ll no longer have the ability to misjudge the weather and get caught in a storm when you’re riding your bike to work last Thursday, the Tuesday before, and pretty much every time it rains I get stuck in a storm, and I’m fucking sick of it. Sorry. Anyway, how do they do it? Who knows! What’s the catch?
Well, the catch is that it only works over a short period of time: a half hour to an hour in the future. But, as it turns out, this timespan is crucially important. Our lives are filled with short-term outdoor activities: Travelling to and from work, walking the dog, lunch with friends, outdoor sports, etc.
Via Kottke
My street floods fairly regularly because we’re below the hills of Somerville so it’s no surprise, with Hurricane Irene and all, that my street would flood this weekend, too. That said, I expected it’d actually wait for the hurricane to get here to start. Irene is supposed to get here sometime tomorrow…
It was a hell of a day for a bike ride this morning. Though, in fairness, it felt more like 10° than -1°.
I live on Lake St and every couple years you find out why. We were away this weekend when our entire neighborhood flooded, stranding cars and trains. Here’s an awesome video by Paper Fortress Films showing the situation Saturday afternoon.
A couple years ago, I made this much less awesome video to show a flood.
Remember last week when I was telling you about how much the people of Somerville loves Tom Champion. And how they love him so much there’s a fan group on Facebook? Cosmo Catalano has remixed the latest snow emergency call into some bumping Tom Champion fanmusic. Just listen to it.
Somerville is a city that LOVES its snow emergencies. We’ve had a snow emergency for every snow storm this year, during which, you can only park on the odd side of the street. The City LOVES them. Sometimes, they call a snow emergency the morning of the day before a storm. We love our snow emergencies so much, there’s even a Facebook Group in appreciation of Tom Champion, the guy who records the snow emergency phone messages. This past week, we even had a cold emergency. There weren’t any parking restrictions, but Tom Champion didn’t want us going outside unnecessarily.
Except for a couple hours this afternoon, it’s been snowing ALL day, and yet no snow emergency. You’ll get’em next time, eh, Champs?
I’m calling it right now.
To: All you hardy New Englanders making noise about other New Englanders making noise about the snowstorm.
Look, people freak out about the weather. They freak out about the snow. They freak out about the cold. They freak out about the hot. They freak out about the rain. They freak out about the lack of rain. It’s not just weather either. Any event that is happening to a large group of people is going to cause some percent of that population to freak out. And you know what? Another percent of the population is going to stand on the side of the that group and they’re going to ridicule them for freaking out.
This is no loner acceptable behavior. It’s over. Right now. This has to end. It’s possible you didn’t know how many of your acquaintances freaked out about weather and such before Facebook Status Updates and Twitter, but you’ve seen television news, right? Who do you think the reporter on the side of the road in the parka and mittens was talking to? Who do you think was watching all that stock footage of plows and sanders rolling out of the DPW yard? This is how people are. People like getting worked up about things and getting fired up about them getting fired up isn’t going to make them not be fired up next time. Believe it. And you better know I’m serious if I’m using a euphemism that involves sharks. I hate sharks.
From: Me
Earlier this afternoon, a thunder storm rolled through Union Square, Somerville. I’m not sure what happened, but soon the street was flooded under about a foot of water. About an hour after it stopped raining, the water was gone.
Click on the picture to see a video of the scene.