okay, i know i already posted today but this opinion piece is hilarious

The storm before the storm (taken from the washington post)

Waiting for the Big One. Again. This might make the Snowpocalypse of Dec. 19 look like a dusting. It's going to be like a Roland Emmerich movie. There will be so much snow that it will destabilize the earth's crust. Hidden volcanoes will erupt in once-tranquil neighborhoods. There will be devastation followed by obliteration.

I stand guard on my front walk with shovel in hand. I want to meet the storm head-on. No level of frozen precipitation or wind can drive me indoors. Later, when it's all over, I want neighbors to walk by my house and say, "Wow, what a nice snowman they made!" and then suddenly realize: IT'S JOEL.

Bring it on.

Already this morning I have made the Safeway run. It's getting frantic and desperate there -- I believe the technical term is Hobbesian -- particularly in the produce section. People are feeling the fierce urgency of snow. You see shopping carts go up on two wheels while taking sharp corners.

The milk is gone. The eggs are gone. The fresh meat is gone, except for a couple of strange, unlabeled bags of mystery chicken. There are still a few root vegetables. You find yourself hunting and gathering -- poking through corners and crevices of the store, looking underneath things, and eyeballing covetously the contents of other people's carts.

At some point you find yourself lunging for that last turnip.

"Mine!" you scream, but too late. A speedy mom has grabbed it. You have no choice but to drop her -- hurling yourself horizontally at her knees the way they taught you in football. So now she's down, but the turnip is rolling across the store, and a guy who must have played minor league baseball fields it cleanly and puts it in his cart. But he's been greedy; his cart is so jammed with 200 pounds of canned food and cat litter that he's no match for your Spartan steed, and you overtake him in the soda aisle and do the full Indiana Jones leap onto the side of his cart and grab the turnip back. You slip and barely hang on to the bottom of the cart, he's dragging you, but you sink your teeth into his ankle and maintain the death-chomp until he finally relents.

This is shopping in Washington prior to a big snow. Is it insane? A little. But the important thing is that I got my turnip and I'm going to make some really good turnip soup while the snow falls. And man, I'd kill for some fresh greens to go in it.

That's just an expression, by the way.