I had been planning to see Black Panther today (Tuesday being discount day at the two multiplexes closest to me), but have not yet set foot outside my front door.
Why not? Because I was the victim of propaganda perpetrated by the local news media.
You see, we’re having Interesting Weather here in Darkest Suburbia, and the forecasters have been prophesying Snow of Doom for the last several days, insisting that there would be several inches on the ground before Tuesday afternoon was over.
Now in the higher elevations (500 feet or so, where I lived when I was growing up), this prophecy came true. And in the eastern parts of the Portland area, near the Cascade foothills, the parks and yards are mostly white (per the news footage). Likewise for southwest Washington, which is farther north and more directly in the path of the relevant weather front. So there is more than enough snow footage, of both the traffic-snarling kind and the kids-having-fun kind, to satisfy the TV news teams’ need for Expanded! Weather! Alert! Coverage!
Except, that is, for here in the southwest regions of Darkest Suburbia. Here, there were a couple of flurries Sunday afternoon, a brief whiff of snow night before last, and a briefer whiff very early this morning. But as I type this, at not quite half past four in the afternoon, here’s the view from my window:
2/20/2018 – Late afternoon in Darkest Suburbia. There are supposed to be 3″ of snow here, per last night’s weathercasts….
It should be noted here that my local school district sent everyone home (in stages) between about 10 am and 1 pm, on the expectation of this same snowpocalypse, which entirely failed to materialize in all but the most northern edges of the district before normal school-closing hours. It is an article of faith in greater Portlandia that at the sign of the first snowflake, everyone in the metropolitan area (a) takes to the roads in order to get home before disaster strikes, and (b) forgets how to drive in the snow once it actually starts falling. Also, when there was an actual snowpocalypse last year, the schools did not send kids home till after the weather had started to go white, and everyone complained that they hadn’t been sufficiently prescient. (Yes, this is pretty much a no-win for the schools; they are ever doomed to be either too cautious or too slow to react, because we just can’t predict snow predictably enough. And everyone blames the schools rather than the weathercasters, even though it’s the weathercasters who are almost always off by a few crucial hours.)
[pause, check view out window]
And now we have rain.
Odds are I could still go try to catch a Black Panther screening…except that the weathercasters are still firmly prophesying several inches of snow once the temperatures drop (any half hour or so now, per the latest forecast), so getting home could be a difficult proposition. That is, if one believes the weathercasters.
sigh
Ah, well, there’s always tomorrow. Unless, of course, there’s a snowpocalypse overnight….
