Good Morning Internet

Oh hell no.

We just finally started to thaw out from the Snow­poca­lypses! (Snow­poca­lypsi? Snow­poca­lypso?) And now they’re pre­dict­ing some­thing in the Bal­ti­more area called a “snow hur­ri­cane”, which sounds as ter­ri­fy­ing as it does silly.

Tonight, I did what I did dur­ing the last snow­fall and checked in with Foot’s Fore­cast (a site that really needs its own iPhone app, if only for my own per­sonal con­ve­nience). Fore­caster Foot and his weather posse (if they don’t call them­selves that, they should) are really good at deliv­er­ing the facts with just the right about of humor, and forego the sen­sa­tion­al­ism in which our local TV affil­i­ates seem to indulge. (Exam­ple: “IT IS STILL SNOWING DEATH FLAKES FROM CLOUDS OF DOOM, WITH A BLIZZARD FROM SATAN’S FREEZER ON THE WAY, AND THIS TIME IT’S COMING AFTER YOUR CHILDREN. More after these mes­sages.” I’m paraphrasing.)

The bot­tom line of the fore­cast is this: Bal­ti­more might catch the south­ern­most tip of this next storm which has the poten­tial to be pretty severe north and east of the city. We might catch some­where in the neigh­bor­hood of five inches, but nobody really knows for cer­tain right now. The National Weather Ser­vice issued a Win­ter Storm Watch that starts tomor­row night and extends to Thurs­day night.

Com­pared to what we just went through, five inches of snow doesn’t seem like much.

Accord­ing to AccuWeather.com, New Jer­sey, Penn­syl­va­nia, and New York bet­ter hold on tight:

Stay tuned, folks. This just got real-er. Again.

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I’m back home and it feels great. I’m stocked up on food, movies, books, and a lit­tle Scot­tish friend who will keep me warm (pic­tured above). In the past hour, the snow’s pace has really picked up and it’s stick­ing to every­thing. Foot’s Fore­cast has issued this new warning:

Some pro­fes­sional fore­cast­ers believe mod­els may be under-estimating strength of the sur­face low, and as such, NWS offices may have to issue addi­tional Bliz­zard Warn­ings. Details before the 5:00 PM news. If your prepa­ra­tions are not complete, step away from the com­puter and go do that now.

Right now I’m sit­ting on my couch with the blinds open watch­ing it snow. Its beau­ti­ful. I love the way my neigh­bor­hood looks in this kind of weather. Maybe I’ll head out for an adven­ture later on, espe­cially if it involves an impromptu tweetup at Frazier’s.

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My last post to this site was way back on Jan­u­ary 8th, when we received a pos­i­tively adorable two inches of snow.

I am so stoked for the storm we have on tap. Accord­ing to the lat­est num­bers from Foot’s Fore­cast, we could see 26 to 34 inches by the time this whole thing is fin­ished tomor­row night. Here’s my favorite part:

SATURDAY Heavy snow con­tin­ues overnight and into the day across much of the Mid-Atlantic south of the PA/NY bor­der, accu­mu­lat­ing 3–4″ per hour in some loca­tions for 4 or more hours. Thun­der­snow, light­ning and gusty winds are pos­si­ble. Coastal winds increase to gale force as the sec­ondary low wraps up along the North Car­olina coast while mov­ing slowly northeast.

Did you read that? Thun­der­snow! THUNDERSNOW!

Nat­u­rally, every­body is flip­ping out and over-shopping. I stopped by my local Super Fresh last night around 11:00 pm to pick up some half-and-half (I need my cof­fee if I’m going to be stuck in my apart­ment all week­end).  I fig­ured the crazy rush would be over, and I’d be in and out with no problem.

Wrong. There were more peo­ple than shop­ping carts, and the check­out line (which was more of a mob) stretched all the way across the store to the entrance. Peo­ple had their carts loaded as if they were stock­pil­ing food for a two-week lock­down in their lead-lined zombie-proof bunkers. So I decided to come back in the morning.

When I returned around 6:00 this morn­ing, Super Fresh was essen­tially cleaned out. There was no meat, no milk, few eggs, barely any veg­eta­bles, and no bread.

I guess my neigh­bors are plan­ning to eat a lot of meat this week­end. I over­heard one employee say, “I have never ever seen this before. We have noth­ing in the back.” Every­one work­ing there looked shell-shocked and exhausted.

Are peo­ple really plan­ning on eat­ing that much food over what essen­tially could be a three-day week­end? I sup­pose, since the Super Bowl is on Sun­day, peo­ple wanted to stock up on food for the grill and/or crock pot. But still, all the meat? All of it?

For con­tin­u­ing cov­er­age, be sure to keep an eye on my Flickr set, Super Bowl Snow­pocolypse 2010: The Snowen­ing, and of course, up-to-the-minute-ish con­tin­u­ing cov­er­age right here on The Gavin Show.

So, the real ques­tion is, who’s ready for take this thun­der­snow­poca­lypse party to Frazier’s tonight?

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Oh, Glenn Beck. This might be one of the most bril­liant things I’ve seen on the Daily Show. If you’ve never seen Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News, yes, this is what he’s really like. It makes me won­der, if Beck had a live stu­dio audi­ence, would it be this hilarious?

Maybe it will turn out that Beck has really been doing com­edy all this time, but it’s so advanced that our gen­er­a­tion sim­ply isn’t capa­ble of appre­ci­at­ing it. Decades, per­haps cen­turies, in the future, he’ll be lauded as a humorist vastly ahead of his time. Maybe it’s an act, a char­ac­ter who is a para­noid, angry, emo­tion­ally unsta­ble, vit­ri­olic tele­vi­sion show host with no clear area of exper­tise. Maybe that char­ac­ter will become the mold for all come­di­ans in the future. Maybe he’s pulling a fast one on us. Maybe there will be a moment in the dis­tant future when the peo­ple of the world will say in uni­son, “Ah, I get it!” and the result­ing laugh­ter will unify the planet in peace, ush­er­ing in a new era of rea­son, pros­per­ity, and happiness.

No, he prob­a­bly has very seri­ous emo­tional prob­lems. But just imagine!

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Here it is! I took my Kodak Zi6 with me all over DC on Tues­day and took as much crowd video as I could. Get­ting into Wash­ing­ton via Metro was sur­pris­ingly easy. Get­ting out of the National Mall after Pres­i­dent Obama’s inau­gural address was more dif­fi­cult. Roads were closed in prepa­ra­tion for the parade, and there was the added dif­fi­culty of a few mil­lion peo­ple all try­ing to head for the same one or two Metro sta­tions in the area that were open.

Much like Bal­ti­more, every­body in Wash­ing­ton was ener­gized. You could feel it the moment you stepped on the train. Peo­ple love Obama. And, as you see in the video, they’re not shy about vocal­iz­ing their opin­ions of Pres­i­dent Bush, either.

Again, the Zi6 was a trooper. I never had to change the bat­ter­ies once, and I shot all day in HD mode (30 frames per sec­ond). My 16GB SD card laughed as I recorded over 140 videos that added up to well over an hour’s worth of footage, with giga­bytes to spare. The dig­i­tal zoom was sur­pris­ingly sharp. When I used my Flip Ultra, I avoided touch­ing the zoom like the plague. But on this cam­era, it’s not bad. Sure, you’re not going to get any­thing as crisp as you would with an opti­cal zoom, but for a sub-$200 pocket-sized point-and-shoot video cam­era, it’s amazing.

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Last Sat­ur­day, then President-Elect Barack Obama made a whis­tle stop in Bal­ti­more, and tens of thou­sands of peo­ple waited all day in 17-degree weather to see him speak. I was one of them, and ended up wait­ing in line at about 9:00 am for his speech at 4:30 pm. But you know what? It was worth it. I ended up about 30 yards away from where he spoke, and the energy of the crowd was some­thing I’m really happy I got to expe­ri­ence. Bal­ti­more is over­whelm­ingly excited about our new President.

Even though the events of the day were widely tele­vised, I think the news chan­nels and net­works largely missed the spirit of what it felt like to be “on the ground”. So here’s my per­spec­tive on the day, con­densed to a lit­tle under 15 minutes.

I recorded the whole thing with the Kodak Zi6, and I have to say it was a beast! I brought a pocket full of extra AA bat­ter­ies but never had to use them. The recharge­able bat­ter­ies that came with the cam­era lasted all day, and then some. When I got home, I con­nected the cam­era to my TV with the included com­po­nent cables, and the qual­ity of the video was star­tlingly good.

Any wor­ries I had about the Zi6 being bulkier than my old Flip Ultra are gone. More than a few times I had to pat down my jacket pocket to make sure it was still there. It some­how man­ages to be very light­weight, yet also feel solid in my hand. It’s got a good solid grip to it which I much pre­fer over the glossy-bodied Flip. Even stand­ing out in the cold wear­ing two pairs of gloves, I felt like I had a firm grasp on it.

My Inau­gu­ra­tion Day video is up next, along with more thoughts on the Zi6. This cam­era goes every­where with me, now.

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That’s the video I took on the National Mall in DC at the moment Barack Obama took the oath of office. Nobody real­ized it would only be the first take! Hon­estly, I just thought there were weird audio things hap­pen­ing with the elab­o­rate sound sys­tem on the Mall. I didn’t real­ize that Jus­tice Roberts tripped up Obama with the oath.

Any­way, con­sider this a bit of a teaser. Sat­ur­day, I took a ton of video dur­ing Obama’s visit to Bal­ti­more with my Kodak Zi6. I have hours of footage from Inau­gu­ra­tion Day that I’ve just barely begun to go through. Tomor­row, I’m going to buy myself a Vimeo Plus account so I can get every­thing up in crisp, HD qual­ity. (Unless, of course, some­one wants to buy me one!)

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