Adventures
Snowpocalypse Aftermath – two days later
It is a bright sunny day here in Chicago, with people still digging out from the Snowpocalypse blizzard on Tuesday.
Those snow forts were built by twenty and thirty-somethings and not small children.
All the sidewalks are warrens of little canals dug into two to three feet of Global Warming.
It is all rather pretty, actually.
More Chicago 2011 Snowpocalypse Photos
All day today, Chicagoans have been digging out from the blizzard last night.
There were 900 cars stuck on Lakeshore Drive, one of our freeways.
Reports have come in of people coming out of the skyscrapers adjacent to this traffic mess and handing out food and water to motorists…some of whom were trapped for 12 hours in their cars.
I spent the day with my boyfriend Justin helping his neighbors dig out their street. The city plowed the main streets, but the side streets are all closed off still.
Have you ever experienced “Thunder Snow”?
As a male child of the 80s, when someone starts talking about “Thunder Snow”, I immediately think it’s some kind of polar-based vehicle for half-man/half-jungle cat superheroes to tool around on in a cartoon.
But, last night my boyfriend Justin and I had dinner with friends at Ping Pong in Boystown, which has floor to ceiling windows the entire length of the Chinese restaurant. It was the perfect place to watch the snow swirl around in the blizzard…where we caught a glimpse of the two bursts of “Thunder Snow” Chicago experienced.
I had never heard of this phenomenon, but I witnessed it while sharing some orange chicken, kung pao beef, and other goodies, where I learned that it’s lightning and thunder that happens during a massive snow storm. The lightning actually gets projected across the white canvas of snow, causing everything around to glow purple and pink for a few seconds.
It was eerie and amazing, like special effects in a movie or cartoon.
Magical.
EW.com has a video up of a local Chicago news reporter experiencing “Thunder Snow” for the first time as well. He has the same reaction I imagine someone from the distant past would have upon spotting an airplane for the first time. He didn’t quite shout, “Beware! It’s a DRAGON!”, but he came pretty damn close.
Snowpocalypse 2011 photos
Abandoned cars on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago near Boystown
NBC Chicago ran this shot above, of cars abandoned on Lakeshore Drive. Like in a horror movie. Those cars are all empty. FOR MILES. Tow trucks are now working to tow them away. ONE AT A TIME.
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I don’t know how well you can see just how much snow got dumped on us here in Chicago, but I tried to use the cars to show scale.
This is what the world outside Justin’s apartment looks like.
I have only seen two people out all morning, and they looked like they should have been on Hoth hunting Wampa monsters.
It is seriously surreal how much Global Warming there is all over the ground right now.
Please save us, Cap & Tax!
Snowpocalypse 2011 — the blizzard that really came
Chicago is literally buried under tons of Global Warming today.
Last night, Boystown looked like a ghost town, with most of the bars and restaurants closed, including places that don’t even close on Christmas or Thanksgiving. Here and there, a few people could be spotted trying to make their way down the streets — they were bent and nearly broken by the cold and weight of the snow, pushed left and right by the wind as they struggled to make their way forward. They looked like zombies in a horror movie shambling about.
What’s most interesting to me today is how no one I knew believed all of this snow was really coming.
That’s because no one I know trusts the Media, especially the sensationalist local news, and the weatherologists thereof, that repeatedly cry BLIZZARD OF THE CENTURY! in advance of approaching storms that normally leave about as deep a dusting as Ally Sheedy’s dandruff in The Breakfast Club.
Because the local news is so terrible, and needs to ring as much panic and doomsday scenario over every story it produces (SQUIRREL INVASION IN GRANT PARK! CRIME SPREE CRIPPLES LAKEVIEW! LOCAL STUDENTS TRAPPED IN FAILING SCHOOL!), people seem to apply an 80/20 rule to whatever the local newscasters say, especially regarding the weather, which is reported on as a sort of masochistic meteorological porn.
I often think of Kathleen Turner reading the phone book and somehow making it sound dirty whenever I catch the local Chicago stations reporting on tomorrow’s weather, because something that should be dry and factual gets punctuated with nonstop exclamation marks in the Media’s effort to captivate viewers…but 80% of the time those dire warnings and doomsday predictions don’t come true.
So, when the SNOWPOCALYPSE really does hit a city like Chicago, we’re actually taken by surprise, because the Media’s cried BLIZZARD! so often in the past that people disregard whatever they say completely. I can’t even count the number of emails and texts I got from friends saying “I didn’t think it would snow this bad” or “I know they said it would be a blizzard, but I didn’t believe them”.
I 100% didn’t believe them either. When I woke up this morning my boyfriend Justin was standing by the window with his mouth agape, stunned by the snow that had fallen all night. Huge dunes of white have buried whole cars. The wind’s swirling and pushing the accumulation across the street like the whole neighborhood was plucked up in the middle of the night and deposited in Antarctica. If you aren’t a penguin or some sort of Yeti-esqque Himalayan abominable something or another, you just shouldn’t leave your home for a few days.
Seriously.
Do you feel this way about your own local news wherever you live?
Are they as sensational, and do they try to make every broadcast as exciting and MUST-SEE! as possible by crying BLIZZARD! when there is none, so that when a blizzard actually comes the net effect is that people ignored the warnings as if there hadn’t been a news broadcast at all…since trust in what the local media says is just so low?
Have you, too, ever been caught off guard by something that really ended up happening because you just thought the media was exaggerating again?
New HillBuzz header for the new site — comments appreciated
What do you think of the new header?
The new HillBuzz.org site will launch sometime in February, once we’re able to transfer all the data and archive the three years’ worth of content on the site over to our new dedicated servers.
The content and mission will remain the same, but things will look a little different, with information easier to use. The main goal of the new site will be to provide better Action Items for regular people to get involved in small ways that will aggregate together to form major headaches for the Left…and to be a user-focused “Choose Your Own Adventure” resource of information and ideas that other conservative sites are not.
I am a huge fan of AnneCoulter.com, MichelleMalkin.com, TammyBruce.com, Redstate.com, RealClearPolitics, and Ace of Spades, but none of these sites are easy to use as resources for information. They all do a great job keeping tabs on the day’s news and current events, but they aren’t geared towards people who want to get involved and put pressure on both the Left and Cocktail Party GOP establishment that will throw both of them off their game and give Americans the chance to take back our government.
HillBuzz.org is a little site that was founded in February 2008 as a resources and information source for Hillary Clinton’s campaign volunteers here in Chicago — and it evolved into something much more than that as all of us who’ve been part of the site evolved in the years since we started. The mission’s never changed, though. It’s always been to be a thorn (or stinger) in the side of those who want to harm America, for whatever reason. Be they on the Left, or in the GOP go-along-to-get-along Cocktail Party establishment.
I remember the day my friends came to me and pressured me to start up a little Hillary website for our campaign volunteers. I did not want to do it, because I knew how much time it would take, and I also knew how relentlessly and mercilessly the Obama campaign went after anyone who personally tried to stop him from doing whatever it was he wanted to do to America. I agreed to lead this effort, which started on Blogspot, and my friend Joaquin set that first bare-bones site up, looking up from the computer to ask me what he should name it. I told him to call it HillBuzz, and not something with a Hillary 2008 in the title, because if HRC didn’t win the nomination and the presidency and Obama made it to the White House I knew there’d be a lot more work to be done that would carry forward long after the 2008 campaign was over.
I am a very stubborn person who does not like to be told what to do, by anyone, and certainly not by hatemail…so in the two years since the 2008 campaign ended, I’ve resisted changing our masthead banner largely because of all the nasty emails I get demanding I do so. ”Take Hillary off your site!”. “You shouldn’t have Hillary’s picture up!”. ”Do this! Do that! Blah Blah!”.
My boyfriend Justin is someone who has an irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton. I just can’t understand that, because HRC has been kinder to me than just about anyone I have ever known. She is a terrific woman, and during the 2008 campaign I got to know her to some degree, having seen her once a week for a stretch of a few months. Imagine having that sort of encounter with someone from history you always admired.
So, this site will always have a special place for Hillary Clinton on it, and will always be kind to her and celebrate her many achievements in life. But HRC is clearly not our primary focus any longer. In 2012, we will support Governor Sarah Palin for President. Between now and then, we’ll do our level best to make sure the things that were done to Hillary Clinton in 2008 are not repeated against the Governor’s campaign in 2011 and 2012. It’s a role we can play, in deja vu, since we’ve been there and done that already.
I have honestly dreaded changing the masthead to one that does not include Hillary Clinton because I know the sort of mocking and abuse it’s going to generate via hatemail. ”Finally!”. “It’s about time!”. Etc. This site, and me personally, are attacked repeatedly in a hundred different ways for speaking up about things as we see them. The abuse I’ll take because I’ve changed the masthead will be personally tough for me to bear, because it’s not an abandonment of a person I like on a personal level…just a reflection that we’ve moved on since the 2008 campaign and are geared towards the future.
So, I’ve opened this thread for anyone who wants to be cruel and evil about this to do so here, and now, and get it out of your system. I’m dating a guy, whom I love very much, who just can’t help himself and takes nonstop smacks at HRC every time he sees her picture. It’s a disease he has. I love Justin, but he has Hillary Derangement Syndrome and there is just no helping him. So, I ignore it and keep doing what I am doing. I know I have to deal with this sort of thing from a lot of people who read this site, and I’ve accepted that.
I want the launch of the new site to be a really positive thing for all of us…and my best attempt to do everything I personally can to create something that could be a useful tool in the battle ahead, between now and 2012. The last thing I want is for the new site’s debut to be drowned in “You changed the masthead!” nonsense, so I want to get this out of the way today.
The masthead is changing. It was my decision. Everyone who wrote hateful emails demanding this change did not win. You didn’t break me. Instead, it was a natural decision for this moment in time, appreciating the reality that the little Hillary Clinton campaign site based in Boystown has evolved into something more, and this is the end result of that.
So, feel free to chime in on the redesign below. The site’s new web designer will read this thread, I’m sure, and will take your comments into consideration as we tweak the new site before its launch. This is an enormous and emotional change for me, and for all of us here behind the scenes at HB, so I hope you like the direction we’re going and understand it’s for the best in terms of how we can most effectively channel our time, energy, and resources towards 2012.
The goal is to defeat the Left and Obama in 2012. Whether you love HB, love me, or hate us both, that’s what we’re committed to so if that’s what you want, we are on the same side through the next presidential election at least. I love America more than I could ever tell you and will work every day between now and the next election to do all I can to save our country. I hope you continue that journey with us on our new site just a few weeks away.
HillBuzz Action Teams — start thinking about things you want to do when the new site launches next month
Click to embiggen
The spirit of the new HillBuzz.org site that’s coming is “Choose Your Own Adventure”.
I hope our little site lights a fire under the conservative blogosphere so that other sites stop being just places to go and read essays or chat in forums and become action centers where people trade ideas every day for how to really drive the Left crazy and throw Obama and Democrats off their games.
The new HB 3.0 site was built around the concept of ACTION TEAMS, so that everything we write and do will fit into one of the categories above, with a corresponding ACTION that can be taken after reading the post.
Sometimes, it will be a RED TEAM action, which means people should write to their elected officials about whatever it is that’s happening, or pen letters to the Editor to tell a wider audience about it.
Some items will involve MYSTERIES that need solving, either about Obama himself or all the other secretive things bad for America going on in this Administration. Something tells me this will be the busiest team of all for the next two years.
We’ll have CREATIVE things to do that are fun and oddball, intensive FUNDRAISING research into who, exactly, is funding the Left and how we can stop it, RESEARCH into all sorts of things the media doesn’t want regular people to know about, and things we can all do, together, to help Governor PALIN in her 2012 bid for the White House.
The number one thing I constantly hear from people is that they WANT to do something, but that they don’t know how to get involved or are afraid of putting themselves out there. Not everyone wants to or can go to a protest. Some people love to phone bank. Others are great at research. There are people who would write postcards out all day and mail them to everyone in Congress if they knew what to say and had directions how to proceed.
Our goal with the new site is to give conservatives the nudge and tools they need to become a massive grassroots army by 2012. We’ll be a little gay Mr. Miyagi here in Boystown, teaching conservatives everything they need to know about the Left and its tactics, so by 2012 the ACORN, Union, Black Panthers, and other thugs employed by Obama and the Democrats won’t know what hit them when they’re outnumbered 3:1 by conservatives who are not going to take any crap anymore…and now have the tools and techniques to counter the Alinsky Handbook.
It’s going to be a lot of hard work, but America is worth it.
As we wait for the new HillBuzz.org to launch in February, start thinking about areas you’d like to be active in…just a little a day…in ways that complement things you already do right now.
If you are reading this, then you are the Resistance…and these teams are designed to give you ways, from home, that you could help take down the Left and rescue America in your own individual way.
