Tweetstorm warning issued

Next time we almost have a snowstorm here, I’m going to live-tweet it.

That way we’ll at least have a tweetstorm even if we don’t get any snow.

I didn’t do that over the weekend because I hadn’t introduced a joke-tweet session, and you don’t want to start sending out a bunch of crazy tweets late at night in the midst of a near emergency. People would talk about you, and say you’re crazy, you’ve lost touch with reality, and you’re unfit to be president.

We could all have fun tweeting southern snow panic. We could tweet about which offices already have shut down because of the weather, even though it’s only raining, and what we see residents expecting to be refugees huddled in their homes for up to a day are ransacking the Piggly Wiggly of. (“Wow! That is A LOT of contraceptive!”)

I posted one joke Tweet to Facebook Friday night, and let it go. But as Saturday and Sunday passed and the temperature didn’t bounce back into the 60s or 70s like usual, I kept thinking of more.

Like we needed a name for our near snowstorm, for example. No one called this “Snowmageddon” or “Snowpocalypse” or “Snownado” or whatever, but ABC News did call it a “monster storm.”

It reminded me of an old “WKRP” episode in which newsman Les Nessman doesn’t realize the “B” key isn’t working on the teletype and live on-air reports a “monster lizzard” is ravaging the East Coast.

What do you call a snowstorm that doesn’t happen? “Snowmygosh,” maybe, or “SnowMyGod” or maybe SMG for short.

But we have near-snowstorms almost every winter here, so we’d need to note the year, like SMG17.

By the time Sunday came, I had a whole set of stupid weather tweets I never tweeted, nor checked to see if they were 140 characters.

That would all be a huge waste of time if I didn’t use them in a column, like this:

• Found Government Center nearly empty Fri. as workers fled anticipated weather disaster like zombie apocalypse.
• Dishonest media doesn’t remind Americans to make “snow day” run to liquor store. Sad.
• Went out in cold rain to feed horses. Fingers numb, unusable. Amputation likely. #frostbite.
• Refrigerator died. Weather delays new one’s delivery. Using coolers and bagged ice. Fear road ice will preclude driving to store to buy ice.
• Out of firewood, facing darkness, cold, oblivion. Or getting out of recliner, going outside and getting more firewood. #dilemma.
• Tarp covering firewood’s torn. Wood wet. What next? Famine, disease, war, vampires, wild dogs. Who knows?
• Vowing not to come in from cold shouting profanity this time. #neighborhoodwatch.
• Holy @#$%! It’s cold as %&*$ out there! #oops.
• Dishonest media reporters on TV risk their lives on icy roads to go live by icy roads telling people not to risk their lives on icy roads. #sad.
• “You should tango across the stage,” wife drowsily says watching “To Kill a Mockingbird” on Netflix before dozing back off. #WTF?
• Antsy dogs demanding attention like they know they’ll be eaten first if we resort to cannibalism. #donnerparty.
• Georgia advises motorists black ice makes driving hazardous. Uptown advises visitors vanilla ice from Planet Pops is like “declaring a flavor emergency in your mouth.”
• Out of vodka. Fear what the Russians will demand in return for more.
• Above-ground bypass pipes Water Works using in Historic District froze and popped. New fountains, outdoor ice rink here.
• City moves “frozen corpse pickup” from regular schedule to Wednesday make-up day.

This story was originally published January 8, 2017 at 12:17 PM with the headline "Tweetstorm warning issued."