Here's the view to the left from the balcony in front of my apartment...
It is a snowtastic day in Bloomington, Indiana today, much to the shock and awe of Southern belle Ian Vandewalker. It began to snow just as Vandewalker arrived home after walking from campus. The snowticable precipitation has continued for over four hours now, with no signs of stopping. Ever. Vandewalker, ever the intrepid parody journalist, grabbed his digital camera and jammed it onto the "snow" setting. A few pictures from the balcony and a walk down the street taught the young beach bum quite a bit about this snowerrific winter phenomenon. "I have a lot of winter snowledge to learn," wrote Vandewalker in a journal entry dated early this afternoon. "For instance, snow goes in your face and it's like little, fluffy, cold pieces of snow hitting your face over and over again. When it gets in your eyes and sticks to your eyelashes, that's really annoying, no matter what Julie Andrews says." Vandewalker walked around contemplating taking pictures but was too worried the snow might destroy his camera. He ended up standing on the corner at the bottom of the hill watching the cars slide through the stop sign uncontrollably. "I don't think I'm going to drive anywhere until the Spring thaw," he wrote. "I hope that comes soon. I guess it'll probably be a couple of weeks at least."
"Snow has good points and bad points, I guess," Vandewalker wrote. "On the one hand, I can pretend I'm in all my favorite winter movies, like Home Alone, Groundhog Day, The Empire Strikes Back, and Home Alone II. The falling snow itself is a disorienting vortex and looking directly into it causes a sensation that I can pretend is what it feels like during time travel or the transformation into my mutant cat-dragon avatar. On the other hand, snow is really just frozen water that's very cold and it gets on everything and makes it cold and slippery." Vandewalker has had to come face to face with some hard truths from his childhood today. "In Florida, there is no snow. But we did crafts in school during the winter that were snow-related. I can remember folding and cutting pieces of white paper to make six-sided crystalline forms several inches across. I see now that those crafts had nothing to do with snow at all. They were probably made up by someone who knew as much about snow as I do: NOTHING. Snow is really just little crumbly, shapeless little crumbles. It's not pretty at all close up. That whole line about no two snowflakes being alike is about as cool a thing to say as no two clumps of wet sand are alike. Big freakin' deal." Vandewalker's diary entry continues in this manner for several pages.
Here's the view to the left from the balcony in front of my apartment...
...and here's the view to the right. Notice the snow in both photographs.
Here's a stump that is covered in snow. Those white flecks throughout the image are not some kind of weird interference or a malfunction in my camera, they are actual snow actually falling through the actual air to land on the ground and other horizontal surfaces and form the white buildup you see in the background. Seriously. (!)
Pinky took the opportunity to get some schoolwork done. What a good cat.
The influential wordmonger and jokesmith Ian Vandewalker had this to say about Mad's recent parody: "As a parodist myself, I felt it was my duty to make a parody of Mad's parody of the parody newspaper, The Onion, but I quickly got too confused. Besides, I'd much rather make jokes like that about my own material. Then it doesn't seem so mean. And I know it'll be funny to at least one person."