About the weather
This weekend The Chief and his new friend V came to visit us. Apparently you can get cheap flights to Chi-town in January. They did the Mag Mile thing and got so cold, they were saying things like, "Let's check out this store!" and ducking into Walgreen's.
On Saturday we all went to a party thrown by one of Colliculus's colleagues. Someone was trying to explain the term "Californication" as the disillusionment that happens to people when they move to LA and their dreams are dashed. The Chief said, "I always thought it meant titty-fucking." The room emptied in less than 20 seconds.
Anyway, about the weather, I feel like some explanation is in order. First and most importantly, Chicago is NOT called the Windy City because it is windy. There's
plenty of debate about why it's called that, but meteorologists will tell you that there is no more wind here than anyplace else. Normally meteorologists are full of crap, but this time I'll back them up. If anything, there might've been more wind on the East Coast, and I'm quite sure Kansas and places like that are windier.
A more sophisticated myth is that we get lots of snow due to the lake effect. First of all, we don't. People here are just as upset about 4 inches of snow as they were in Baltimore, because mostly it just flurries. Second, lake effect snow generally blows east. The prevailing westerlies do their thing, they get to a lake and pick up moisture, then they dump it on the unfortunate residents of western Michigan or upstate New York. Kalamazoo, eat your heart out.
Regarding the belief that it's
ckin-cold here . . . OK, I'd like to argue with this one in the interest of promoting tourism, but I guess there's no point. Right now, weather.com says it's 4 degrees. The Chief said it was so cold, it felt like cold from another planet.
I don't actually mind that it gets so cold. It's supposed to be cold in January. My beef is entirely with the month of April. In Maryland, April is sort of a mixed bag of nice, unseasonably horrid, and in-between days. Here, it all just sucks, and any unexpected blizzards get pushed back to May.
One additional myth that I myself promulgated last winter is that Chicagoans are hard-core about the weather. Disappointingly, that only goes so far. On Friday, a bunch of my coworkers were trying to share cabs and saying things like, "I'm not going out this weekend in this" and "You think I'm going on
public transportation tonight??" Others have assured me that this sentiment is not universal.
