Looking forward to snow

Well, with back-to-school out of the way, and the first of September looming large, we now turn our attention to the two things that people in Baltimore love to do as fall approaches. One of them, of course, is wondering if Joe Flacco is really good enough to continue in his job as quarterback of the Ravens, since all he's done in 5 seasons here is to win at least one playoff game each year, start all 80 games played since he got here, and win the Superbowl last year.

And the other is fretting about the impending winter weather. Sure, it's still in the upper 80s, but we know that any day now, the "mercury will plummet," as headline writers like to say, and we will be "blanketed" with "the white stuff."  For those of you reading this in Arizona, that means it's gonna get cold and we will have snow.

Except that I bought that Rav4 over two years ago, and it is supposed to go into 4-wheel drive when driving on snowy or icy roads, and we haven't had a decent snowfall here since Hector was a pup.  For all I know, the 4-wheel drive on the car is purely mythical,  spoken of but never seen,  like an intelligent, objective report on FOX News.

This does not deter us from worrying about the snow. Here's the latest "prediction" from the Farmer's Almanac, which places Maryland right in the middle of the "Cold, wet and white" zone.

This always reminds me of that scene in "Doc Hollywood" in which Michael J. Fox plays a physician who has been to medical school in the last 50 years and tells an old country doctor that, "you can't treat that with Coca-Cola or Bisquick.We're gonna have to use real medicine this time." These almanacs were written in April, printed in July, probably, and how they foresee the weather for this still-unseen winter is just a matter of guessing.  Meanwhile, professional meteorologists learn the science of their field and still warn that they can't be certain of any prediction more than a day or so in advance.

In other words, if I say that next January 13 will be snowy, I might be right.  Or not.  But if I'm publishing almanacs, and you spent you're money on mine, it really doesn't matter, does it?