Old People and Snow

I don't trust old people. It seems to me they're always lying about something or other, like stealing things from Walgreen's, the Holocaust, or breaking a hip. The other day I heard one of the blue hairs say "We always used to get this kind of snow when I was younger." That got me thinking, it is currently the middle of February and we have already had the most snowfall (around 80 inches) in Madison since they began keeping precipitation records over one hundred years ago. We have had so much snow that the National Weather Service has abandoned terms like "flurries" and "heavy snow" and they are now forecasting an "ass load" of snow for Sunday. If things get any worse they'll have to break out the little used "shit-ton-of-snow" term. I can just see the news casts now:

• Perky News Anchor: "...It took doctors three hours to remove the fence post and family members say that the family dog will never be the same. Now to Dave for the weather.

• The Weather Guy: "Thanks Katie, I bet thats the last time he'll go jogging with his guide dog!" (Katie laughs uncomfortably) "Well folks don't put away those shovels yet it looks like we've got more snow on the way."

• Perky News Anchor: "How much are we looking at Dave?"

• The Weather Guy: Pauses, gulps. "Er, well I'm afraid its going to be a lot."

• Perky News Anchor: "Come on now Dave we're not talking about an 'ass load' are we?"

• The Weather Guy: "Oh no Katie, I'm afraid its much worse than that...we're forecasting a shit-ton-of-snow."

• Perky News Anchor: Faints while onlookers throw feces in the general direction of the weather man.

• The Weather Guy: Curses the producer for having him do the weather in front of a live audience.

Anyway, I digress. I checked out the statewide average snowfall for Wisconsin from the State Climatology Office. I found this shitty graph that looks like a seismograph from a fat guy's house:

According to the graph, the average Wisconsin snowfall from 1891 to 2005 was 30.1 inches. If you were really anal you could go through and precisely measure on said shitty graph just how much snow we got every year during those 115 years. Yes I did it. What I found was that there was just one decade prior to 1960 that had above average snow fall. Thats right kids, gather 'round and I'll tell you about the horrible winter blizzards we had from 1930 to '39 when we were a whole 0.3 inches above the century long average. What a pile of donkey shit! Guess how many decades since 1960 have been above average? Every single one!

This may have been a long trip to get there but my point is this: the next time some geriatric prune or silver fox being held up by a walker tries to tell you about the horrible winters and how much snow that they used to have, you can say "Dammit old man, back in your day snowfall averaged about 28 inches, nowadays its over 33. You just got served!"

While he's trying to figure out what the hell you just said, tell him to pull down his goddamn pants from under his nipples.