As a Canadian living in Brooklyn, it never ceases to amaze me how frantic the Northeast coast of the US becomes whenever there is the slightest suggestion that there might be weather. The kind of panic I'm talking about is exemplified fantastically as "Winter Storm Juno" (otherwise known in Canada as "a bunch of snow", a "blizzard" or, if that doesn't seem epic enough, a "whiteout") descends on the city. Yesterday, knowing that we were going to get the first serious snowfall of the year, and not caring very much about all the hullabaloo, I innocently went to my local grocery store to grab some bread. I was shocked to find people lined up around the entire inside perimeter (I would guess about 100, maybe more) waiting to purchase groceries. For the life of me, I don't understand this reaction to a blizzard. It's as if people (not all obviously, but many) will take any excuse their given to pretend it's the apocalypse. I just hope that these people are normally really intense preppers, and that this sickness hasn't infected the general population. But I think it has. I was reading reports of grocery stores all around the city sold out of food. And the blizzard is expected to last, wait for it, *two days*. Do people really not have two days worth of food in their homes?

Besides that, I'm also fascinated with America's unrelenting need to brand everything, and in doing so, blow it immensely out of proportion. Even weather reports are now PR spin and marketing. I don't think I've experienced a storm in NYC that hasn't been named, weather it's "Winter Storm Juno" or an "Arctic Vortex" or a "Nor'easter". I can reliably get a huge laugh out of my Canadian friends when I tell them about how New Yorkers freak out about the "Arctic Vortex", and then explain that it resulted in temperatures of about -5C (~23F) and everyone was afraid to go outside.

Not only that, but the city preemptively has started shutting down municipal services. When I was living in Canada, the only way you'd get a snow day is if the bus literally could not make it to your house, and you'd only find out about school being cancelled by listening to the radio at 7AM the day of. To cancel school, or close the parks, *in advance* was unheard of. But here in NYC, they're calling for emergency vehicles to stay off the roads, they're closing the parks, shutting down transit, NYU is shutting down. I guess if the people of NYC want an apocalypse, the mayor's office is doing its best to mimic the situation.

What ends up happening then is a self-fulfilling prophecy: because everyone is so scared and everything is already shut down, no matter how middling the weather, it feels as though the city is under attack. No one goes anywhere, and everyone is stocked up on bottled water and MREs.

If anyone can explain why there's such a discrepancy between how weather is handled in Canada, literally 5 kms from the US border (I could see the US from my house when I was on the roof) and about 80 kms from BUffalo, and how it's handled in NYC, it would be much appreciated. Meanwhile, I'm going to go build some barricades and clean my shotgun.

** Apologies in advance if Juno ends up being a disaster. But frankly, given all the bullshit about weather that I hear when I'm in NYC, it's hard to take any of this stuff seriously.