NYC: All Airports still closed, @MTA still suspended, Travel ban in NYC is still in effect. pic.twitter.com/kUW2tEUmqO

— NYC Scanner (@NYScanner) January 27, 2015

As you run to the window this morning, you will see that a world-class blizzard attempted and failed to destroy New York City overnight. It is now off brutalizing Boston, which is something we can all get behind.

Snowfall totals hit up to ten inches in Queens last night but were much lower in other parts of the New York. The city may get a few inches or a bit more than a few inches today, but no one cares. Now people are pissed at our emergency preparedness. Even the New York Times is getting in on the graph-snarking action. (To be fair, most people were extra-pissed because Facebook, Tinder and some other dumb stuff went down for a bit last night.) And now you can just stay at home and be pissed! Because we won’t find out about transportation options until 8 a.m., when that putz Andrew Cuomo starts yapping from his snow-bunker. And then you can prop yourself up in bed and watch all the pundits take it out on our poor dumb mayor.

It seems worth pointing out that 53 people in New York State still died in Hurricane Sandy, after a huge preparedness blitz. The death total from last night will, at least, likely approach zero. But people are mad. Like NY1’s Pat Kiernan! So mad, for a Canadian!

Of course he’s capable, he’s Canadian. But everyone else would have died trying to cross the East River on an ice floe.

So what happened? Here’s what happened.

Two divergent blizzard forecasts for New York City emerged over the past 36 hours. One was quite dire. That originated from the National Weather Service’s New York office — that’s what we call The Government Weather around here — and they’re pretty good at what they do. It also seems relevant that another huge player in this field, the Weather Channel, whose forecast was not particularly dire, has essentially made their website into an editorial spam farm over the last year. (Likely a very successful one, too!) And while that ALL IN PAGEVIEWS WHOOO online approach may not have any effect whatsoever on their actual practice of meteorology, for the rest of us the Weather Channel certainly looks like an unreliable weather narrator. We tend to ignore them.

Last night America’s weather boyfriend Eric Holthaus, obviously on team National Weather Service, and who in fact made his name with Hurricane Sandy (and his refusal to pollute the world by using airplanes) was about to go stab some of those hosers from the Weather Channel, who’d been predicting those much lower snow amounts from the get-go.

Seriously, @weatherchannel, I’m writing up a debunk right now of your NYC forecast. Very curious as to your reasoning for low totals.

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) January 27, 2015

Oh but then.

Latest from @NWSNewYorkNY: NYC dropped from blizzard warning, another 6–10″ of snow today. 12–20″ total. pic.twitter.com/1SiR26ZLbT

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) January 27, 2015

Then Holthaus actually had to apologize to the Weather Channel — a hard pill to swallow.

Apologies to @weatherchannel! For NYC, looks like this storm will end up somewhere closer to their 12–18″ than NWS/@Slate’s 20–30″.

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) January 27, 2015

At which point the National Weather Service New York office stabbed him in the back.

@EricHolthaus we have lowered amounts and only expecting another 2 to 4 inches today in the city.

— NWS New York NY (@NWSNewYorkNY) January 27, 2015

Dang.

And so now, all that’s left is for people to be mean about meteorology. So why didn’t we get the big weather? Well, New York City is magical. But mostly, sheer luck: Long Island had tons of snow and 50 mph winds. It literally just didn’t dump snow on us, and then it roiled on up the coast.

@EricHolthaus LOL LOL How did they get a one day forecast so wrong?

— Penthouse Sidebar (@drfessel) January 27, 2015

Because predicting snow is a prediction?

Anyway, now you can just blow by the obvious next steps, which will be painful. De Blasio, blah blah, Cuomo, blah blah, the MTA, etc. Who cares. Just stay home and hug your cats and or children for a couple extra hours. YES, sure, some of you will have upsetting real-world implications. (Hourly workers don’t get snow days, and the like.) The rest of you can hush. But you won’t.

@jeffjarvis I guess the same people you’d blame if they hadn’t and the storm had been as predicted.

— Annette Baesel (@abaesel2) January 27, 2015

I do have one final thought however. Let’s ban cars in New York City!

My walk over to @NY1 without a single private car or delivery truck on the streets. pic.twitter.com/Z5tOSNV6kO

— Pat Kiernan (@patkiernan) January 27, 2015

And a few other stray thoughts.

You guys totally should have voted for the guy who always knows what the weather is going to be ahead of time.

— Ryan Avent (@ryanavent) January 27, 2015

Dear everyone who blasted De Blasio for not freaking out about last winter’s snowstorm: Happy?

— Daniel Radosh (@danielradosh) January 27, 2015

Of course, never forget, it’s a great day to troll.

@JCats2013 John, you’re a BILLIONAIRE you don’t have to go to work. Take the day off buddy!!!! 🙂

— The Awl (@Awl) January 27, 2015

At about 4:30 in the afternoon, I stood outside my Brooklyn neighborhood’s Key Foods, as well as its fancy yuppie grocery store, and asked people what they bought to prepare for Winter Storm Juno. This is what they told me.

Gabriel, 35

Just staple items, you know, milk, eggs, well not milk, but eggs, bread. Just stuff to make us warm, not even like survival stuff. Just stuff to make hot food, you know, chili, soup, nothing fancy.

John, 64

I’m just buying regular groceries because I already stocked up. I’m just getting like extra stuff, like I ran out of tissues, and, what else do I got, I got some ground beef, beer, orange juice, lettuce, ice cream.

Jeannette, 30, and Afa, 39

Well, we did buy a bottle of water. But mostly vegetables, and salmon, something to make a nice meal. Mainly staples.

Sarah, 43

Just a lot of junk. That’s the funness of the storm, because you get to be inside, so I got like chips and salsa, fun stuff. Total junk that I wouldn’t normally buy.

Doug, 29, and Liz, 31

We bought stuff to make chili and tacos. And then we got some eggs, for breakfast. Snacks, popcorn, chips, salsa, but nothing crazy. Like we didn’t buy water. We’re not freaking out. Cider, to drink and be warm, and wine, but not from here.

Rich, 28, and Flora-Lynn, 30

Oooh, we were very unprepared. Some Bloody Mary mix, we thought that’d be good. Some meat. Essentials, lots of meat, lots of snacks, some juice. I don’t know why we didn’t prepare for this. The Bloody Mary mix is a new thing.

Udoka, 37

I bought snow bibs, for my kids, so we can go sledding tomorrow. I got some cherries, I got some strawberries, I got some other fruits, and that’s it.

Unknown, ?

I actually work in a press office, so I can’t speak to any specific brands.

Parrish, 44

Fruity Pebbles, pasta, Diet Coke, Haagen-Dazs ice cream bars, and, uh, pasta sauce. Now I’m gonna go get a bottle of scotch.

Sushma, 25

I just bought water, bread, eggs.

Megan, 23

Toilet paper, bread, eggs, sugar cubes, cereal. That’s pretty much it. Pretty much normal stuff that I should have done over the weekend and I just didn’t, but, you know. It’s nice to have just in case.

Lisa, 49

Bread, milk, eggs, juice. Just the essentials.

Bridget, 36

I’m not really preparing for the storm as much as for my two-year-old. Just like eggs and stuff. But there’s a whole line of people in there that are pretty frenzied. Looks like a lot of alcohol and, you know, canned goods.

Chris, 23, and Andrea, 24

Chris: “Wine. Two bottles of wine. She got a six-pack of beer. I am responsible and I got groceries. [Andrea chimes in “I bought groceries too, but more for after the storm.”] Gonna go across the street and get some Pop-Tarts. Pop-Tarts are for storm time. But besides that, no. Storm time was mostly alcohol.”

Andrea: “We didn’t get non-perishable food or anything.” [I say, “So, no water then?”] “Oh, should we have gotten water? We have wine.”

Photo by MTSOfan

★★★ There was something near-springlike about the brightish sun and the heavy drip from the scaffolds. The north was blue, the southern sky white and more whitening. Snow aging to slush lay in the planting beds around the trees or where a tree should have been. The three-year-old held the scooter handlebars with bare hands. A stranger girl scootered up behind him and announced she was giving chase. A boy came through the playground gate wearing a knit Seahawks hat and carrying a football. Hard unround snowballs went flying here or there. The three-year-old steered close to the line of scrimmage on the blacktop, then went off to crash into the plow-formed snowbanks by the fence over and over. He dragged a lump of snow under the footboard, nearly losing control when it broke free, then went and got another lump. Eventually he pitched over the handles into a slush puddle and asked for his mittens. “I smashed the snow,” he said. A referee might have scored it differently, especially after the snow had scored another knockdown or two.

Everyone seems to agree that the middle class, the most hallowed constituency in America, is shrinking. The New York Times has the data to prove it. But our golden age of data journalism abhors ambiguity; in order to show us the data, while the Times wrestles ever so gently with the amorphous notions of who, exactly is middle class — households making between thirty-five thousand and a hundred thousand dollars, it turns out — it avoids the ontological issue, or to put it in the preferred language of our times, “Why are sources of wanting to be middle class?”

The Times almost stumbles upon an answer by relating both the tale of John D’Amanda, who “earned about $30,000 a year running a window-washing service in Oakland, Calif” — below its thirty-five-thousand-dollar cut-off, but was apparently middle class enough to recount his slide into a minimum-wage job at McDonald’s — and by wryly noting that “many Americans in households making more than $100,000 consider themselves middle class, particularly those living in expensive regions like the Northeast and Pacific Coast, they have substantially more money than most people.”

“Middle class” is the primary signifier of class normalcy in America, which is why a household of four barely surviving on thirty-five thousand dollars a year can be lumped in with a household of one living lavishly off of a hundred thousand dollars a year. And they both want to be lumped together, because they want to be normal. This is why “the middle class” as a concept is so slippery: It performs wholly opposing functions, both aspiration and deprecation, depending on where on the spectrum one resides. (It’s also why the “middle class” seems to fit so seamessly in the center of fully oppositional rhetoric from both the Democratic and Republican parties.)

A better definition of the middle class — in case we want one? idk, the Times certainly does — might rely on context rather than strict dollar amounts:

“I would consider middle class to be people who can live comfortably on what they earn, can pay their bills, can set aside something to save for retirement and for kids in college and can have vacations and entertainment,” said Christine L. Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, a left-leaning research and advocacy group.

So, how much does it take to be middle class in San Francisco these days?

Photo by Daniel Lobo

A photo posted by SNOW (@snowshelleyjackson) on Jan 25, 2015 at 2:16pm PST

A photo posted by SNOW (@snowshelleyjackson) on Jan 25, 2015 at 2:17pm PST

A photo posted by SNOW (@snowshelleyjackson) on Jan 25, 2015 at 2:17pm PST

A photo posted by SNOW (@snowshelleyjackson) on Jan 26, 2015 at 6:31am PST

and so on….

by Awl Sponsors

Brought to you by Toyota.

1. Your Dad Was Always There for You
After waking up early, clocking in 10 hours at work and driving home in traffic, your dad still found the time to talk to you about your day and help you with your science fair project. Your dad was always there through thick and thin.

2) Your Dad Taught You the Value of Hard Work
Your dad taught you that any job worth starting is worth finishing. Work hard and never give up — it builds character and always pays off in the end.

3) Your Dad Taught You How to Grill the Perfect Hamburger
Finally — after 15 years of practice — you can finally grill up a perfect hot dog or hamburger. But it still won’t ever taste quite as good as your dad’s.

4) Your Dad Taught You the Important Things in Life, Told You Hard Truths and Always Looked Out for You
Your dad taught you how to be selfless and respectful to others — even when they didn’t agree with you. He’s also responsible for half of everything important you’ll ever know about classic rock, raising a family and making sacrifices for the people you love.

Check out the video below honoring dads everywhere. Honor your dad. Tweet us photos of him using #OneBoldChoice to join our big game celebration.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

good news, i’m officially the kind of guy who buys his cat a robot

 — @robdubbin

Rob! So what happened here?

Like anyone afflicted with toxoplasmosis, I care about my cat. His name is Fernando. We share a one-bedroom place, and I felt like he was getting bored with his small arsenal of feather wands and self-articulating lasers. He used to do these huge, four-foot X-Games backflips going after the feather thing, but those kind of stopped once he realized climbing up a chair would give him most of the benefits of jumping.

He was getting a little lazy, and I wanted to get him back some edge, you know? Fernando was a rescue but not like a mean-streets rescue; someone had left him and his littermates in the basement of a nice Upper East Side building before calling the Upper East Side of animal shelters. It wouldn’t shock me to learn they’d nursed him on tiny bottles of almond-butter smoothie, like the protagonist of a children’s book sold exclusively at Barneys.

Anyway I’d heard about Sphero, a (you guessed it) spherical toy robot that rolls where you tell it to with your iPhone. I liked Sphero for Fernando because its creators had made a promo video of spooked cats casting side-eye as it rolled past them — and when a cat is properly suspicious of something, it takes over their brain and leaves them incapable of creating their own mischief. Which seemed, at the time, like more than enough reason to spend $120 on a robot for my cat.

The first time Fernando saw his Sphero light up, he cocked his head a full 45 degrees, which I’d never seen him do before. He pawed at it a couple times, shrunk back when it moved, then batted it HARD against the wall. I was pretty excited, it was every bit of the cat-versus-robot dystopian struggle I’d dreamed of conscripting my pet into.

Once I got the hang of navigation — the app is pretty clever, you calibrate the sphere to orient it towards you, then swipe in the direction you want it to go — he liked chasing it under things and especially liked bolting after it when I’d make it leave the room. He could not abide the idea of it going somewhere without him, less out of affection than fear it would plot against him.

In short: This was a rousing success, for about a month, until Fernando got sick of it. Now it mostly lies dormant on its charging cradle, so I’m grateful Sphero does not yet feel human emotions.

Would you recommend this thing to other folks who have cats? And, if so, do you have any advice or suggestions to share?

It’s worth a shot. You can do more than just move the thing around, and it comes with little behavioral “programs” that make it dance, sprint into walls, change colors, etc. All of which flipped Fernando’s world the first time he saw them, then a little less the second time, with returns continuing to diminish until he would just strut by Sphero to rub his butt on my pants.

I’m hesitant to write it off entirely, though — Sphero has what appears to be a robust, programmable API that grants full control over its many internal sensors, motors, and functions, so there’s hope yet that someone will find a way to turn it into the kind of nuisance my cat can’t stop caring about.

I’d also definitely recommend it to anyone who, like me, had considered a second cat; this is better, there’s less disgusting wet food to handle and it won’t double the animal waste collecting in a box in your house.

Lesson learned (if any)?

Fernando’s backflips have nothing on the mental gymnastics I will perform to rationalize buying a robot.

Just one more thing.

Cats aside, Sphero is tremendously entertaining to humans. There were times I would try to nail some trick — peeking out from under the couch, or transitioning from full speed into the weird jitterbug it does when you press the button with the crab icon (?) — only to realize Fernando had been in another room for several minutes playing with a single Lego. So there’s definitely a reading of this where it’s more like he got the robot for me.

Join the Tell Us More Street Team today! Have you spotted a tweet or some other web thing that you think would make for a perfect Tell Us More column? Get in touch through the Tell Us More tip line.

About a minute of restrained pop punk: just long enough for light mood-altering purposes, but not long enough to trigger the realization that this is, if you’re honest with yourself, music for teenagers.

The scene last night:

It was not pretty.

“We don’t have lettuce — all we have is spinach and kale” is something I heard a hot dad say last night in the Gowanus Whole Foods regarding the state of his groceries. Hurry, hot dad, the blizzard is here! You’ll just have to make do!

They were out of the frozen pizza slices that cost $4.95!!!

I guess not everyone remembered to check their blizzard privilege.

I think we’re all on the same page though right.

Everyone on the east coast be safe with the storm coming

— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) January 26, 2015

by The Concessionist

Dear Concessionist,

One of my friends is elitist. I don’t have very many close friends, and she’s only recently become one of them; still, I love her and trust her like any of my older friends. She’s a native uptown New Yorker who went to a prep school and later an Ivy League college. She’s really smart and hard working. She has a great job that I know she got only by making use of her own credentials. We met over four years ago now — we’re in our mid-twenties — and now we see each other at least every two weeks. We live in different neighborhoods, so it feels like we hang out frequently.

Everything should be great between us, but I struggle sometimes because she’s kind of an asshole about class. For instance, most of our acquaintances (common or not) live in Brooklyn. I find myself in the borough almost every weekend to hang out. She won’t go to Brooklyn, ever, under any circumstance. I’m not sure when was the last time she went. Maybe Smorgasburg in 2013? There have been over 20 house parties in the past two years that she’s been invited to but refused to attend. A couple of times I’ve co-hosted said parties. Still, nothing. Bushwick, Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, not even Clinton Hill she’ll do. When people ask me about it, I often say she works really hard and is a huge trek for her to come all the way from Tribeca to Utica Ave., even though I made an even longer trip from East Harlem.

The party thing above is kind of petty, but it’s her most repeated offense. Her lifestyle is questionable on Marxist grounds in other ways. She won’t live in a building without a doorman, or a bunch of other amenities. She won’t date people who didn’t go to “good schools,” which I’m pretty sure means “an Ivy League institution, save Cornell.” She is a member of private clubs in the city. She will judge you for wearing vintage clothes.

I brought this to her attention when it exploded, and she “kind of [saw] her point.”

She just doesn’t get it.

At the same time, she mustn’t abide by these rules 100% because I wear second-hand clothes, use the subway regularly, and, like, make under 40K, yet she calls me her friend. This makes it all the odder when I detect hints of elitism in her behavior. I call her out on it constantly, too, but she always replies with something along the lines of “that’s just who I am,” which, let’s ignore for the moment.

I’ve grown to love her but I’m not sure I can continue to call a friend someone who seems to be so out of tune with her (our) reality. What do you think?

A Friend In Deed

Dear Friend,

Your friend is absolutely identifiable to you, to herself, and to everyone on the avenue. She is queen of The Manhattan Snoots. Molly Ringwald with a rainbow of Birkins. I dig it. She is alien to you. But she totally and fully gets herself, and she is not ever going to take the G train with you. You would not want her to take the G train with you. You would be embarrassed, and she wouldn’t care. She knows what she likes.

Plus she grew up here, so her tastes and identity have cemented with a rigidity unknown elsewhere in the world except Paris, Tokyo, Singapore and possibly Beirut. She is utterly clear about this.

This is all quite central to who she is. These are not secrets. And… for some reason, you keep bringing all this up with her? This seems really rude! I mean, I’m glad someone’s ragging on her about not stepping on the necks of poor people on her way to the safety deposit box packed with conflict diamonds, but… is that really our job as actual friends?

Why is she putting up with this? And what are you getting out of it? And then why, when she says “yes, that’s who I am, enough already” are you persisting in picking at her and picking at her? That’s not a friendly thing for a friend to do. Even if you’re actually Brooklyn’s consensus-elected social justice sheriff, give yourself the night off once in a while.

Friends are, at a bare minimum, supposed to say “Yo, that is racist” when white friends say something racist. Definitely we are supposed to speak up when people start ranting about the One World Zionist Government. But actual friends are not supposed to be running after each other nipping at their heels for their behavior. Yes, it’s hard when someone says “I only date people from good schools” because, I know, it is so LOL-worthy. But you know already that the LOL is on them.

There’s a bigger question underneath here about whose New York we all live in. In many senses, the rich people were here first. New York may have belonged briefly to The People at a couple of junctures, but it most certainly does not now. Between the rental and the vacancy rates dangles the truth about #deBlasiosNewYork. It should not be a surprise that you and I aren’t coming up on top, pal. Upper middle class or actually straight-up rich people have been either entering or returning to neighborhoods their sort haven’t seen in decades, if not a century. The rest of us are just trashy froth on the sea of this great movement of real estate investment facilitated by deliciously low interest rates.

So what is this cool, vintage-clad, super-sensitive, rent-party-havin’ city of leisure-Marxists you think you live in? Hey, the subway costs ALMOST THREE DOLLARS NOW, whether you’re going to Ridgewood or the The Hotel on Rivington. I am sure that half your non-snobby 25-year-old pals are rent-subsidized by a force other than their own paychecks. Maybe you’re actually just living in a former slum, but all around you, the kids are just slumming it. You’re not dumb, you know this already.

On a slightly more shallow note, why do you hate nice things? I don’t really know what you have against doormen and private clubs. You KNOW how hard it is to get a fucking package delivered in this town. I’d kill to have a doorman. You know who would love a doorman to keep track of shit for them? Most poor people. Private clubs are so nice too, I love when people take me to a club and I get a very ridiculous mocktail and gaze upon all sorts of expensively sandblasted people I don’t care about and will never see again.

When was the last time you went somewhere snooty with Miss Snoots? Why aren’t you opening your horizons to the real money-laden freakshow of our city? Are you going to the enormous and unending galleries of Chelsea, our maddening auction houses, the great fabled stores of Madison Avenue, the silly boutiques of NoLIta? These are all TOTALLY FREE resources, where anyone can be educated on the very best in art, fashion, design and commerce. WHERE ELSE CAN YOU SEE $1100 JEANS? Don’t you want to know how and why they’re made? Why aren’t you going to parties and EATING FREE FOOD? That is the whole point of being 25 in New York City! And then, with a mind full of fresh ideas, you can go back to your Bushwick bedsit and boil some corn on your hotplate.

Because you have a tendency to be a bit of a pill. One little thing that’s really interesting here is that you’re making excuses for her not appearing in Brooklyn. “Oh, she couldn’t make it, she just works so hard you know.” Whaaat. You sound like a sexist 1940s cliché of an alcoholic’s wife! Why are you doing this? When I blow off a party because I don’t feel like dragging my ass to another borough or because I just don’t feel like it period the end, the last thing I want is someone making excuses for me. You know why I’m not at your party? I had something better to do. Maybe it was merging with the couch for 90 minutes because I just found out all of Friday is online. But I’m me, I’m intact as a human, and I can communicate regarding my presence or absence as I see fit, when I see fit.

I like you, and I realize I’ve just been ranking on you for ages here. YOU SEEM GREAT AND FUN AND NICE. (Even though I still sorta can’t decide if your letter is real or fake. I eventually decided I didn’t care, because it was so interesting.) Lemme leave you with a couple little obvious things:

1. It’s okay for people to be different. Not all my friends are marching in ideological lockstep with me! That would be really difficult to achieve. Plus the tribunals would get exhausting. What crime is too small to prosecute? And where does it stop? Do I have to cull my Tumblr followers? Do I have to block lots of people on Twitter who are miserable full-time victims? You know, the kind that is on the hourly hunt for offense and martyrdom, who are really just looking for people to scream at? Who have so terribly lost their way online that they don’t know what they’re even doing on the Internet anymore? Who have gone so thoroughly through the mirror in their pursuit of bullies that they have become that thing they hated? Oh right, yes, I do have to go block them all, good point, BRB.

2. SORRY, GOT DISTRACTED THERE. People change over time. They really do. I have seen really rigid friends soften, and vice versa. I can unblock those people I just went and blocked at any later date. They will change, you will change, I will change, she will change, who knows, maybe you’ll end up being a huge, rich, horrible Wall Street jerk. Kick me down a little something when that happens, okay? Meanwhile, chill.

3. There’s more to learn about what you like and care about. If I could ask one thing of you, it’d be to challenge yourself with a weekly expedition in discomfort. Discomfort is great! It’s like hunger, but it gets fixed by feeding your brain.

And if none of this advice works, then just remember this message from “Good Wife” actor Matt Czuchry:

Wherever you are, whoever you are, I want you to know you are an amazing and beautiful person. pic.twitter.com/JSYAM1k5h7

— Matt Czuchry (@CzuchryMatt) November 18, 2014

Ha ha, I know, the poor thing, he must be starving. Let’s go eat some food too.

The Concessionist is an adult human in New York City who is somewhat worn down and willing to make a good number of sacrifices for a peaceful life. Is it decision fatigue? Or just ennui? That’s probably a question for a psychiatrist. Anything else, ask me.