Toddler sad because snow: the viral snowpocalypse crying baby photo

News networks are scrambling to "curate" the best blizzard photos and Nemo videos and blurry vines from "citizen journalists," but here's the only crowdsourced analysis of #zomgsupersnowstormpocalypse2013 you really need. That's @jeremy_boston's adorable little girl.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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http://twitter.com/anonotwit anonotwit

We only got about half of that, but I agree completely.
franko

you eastern crybabies need to send that snow to us in the west, where we appreciate it and need it. i’m tired of the drought.
pwenzel

It used to be like that in Minnesota, but we haven’t had any kick ass blizzards in a few years.
bzishi

Please stop calling it Nemo. The Weather Channel decided that they, not the National Weather Service, have the authority to name winter storms. It is a sleazy ratings grab and it is only going to cause more confusion in the long run.
- http://twitter.com/jere7my jere7my
  
  I don’t quite grok why this bothers people. Anybody can name anything; if it catches on, it catches on. Nemo isn’t “official,” okay, sure. It’s still a convenient hashtag. I could name a wildfire Herkimer Freem; if people start talking about #herkimerfreem on Twitter, that doesn’t float anybody’s onions.
  - bzishi
    
    It is the disjointed message that is the problem. The National Weather Service is responsible for public safety, not the Weather Channel. The Weather Channel can do whatever interpretation they want on normal weather, but they need to adhere the the National Weather Service’s message, almost verbatim, when it comes to severe weather. Any confusion during a severe weather event can lead to deaths. Previous to the Weather Channel’s stunt, there was a clear method of relating severe weather to the public. Now it is disjointed and confusing. One channel or webpage will talk about the local effects of a winter storm while another will talk about the broad effects of superstorm ‘Nemo’. The message for severe weather needs to be coordinated and concise. Anything that disrupts a clear and coordinated message is going to be harmful. Perhaps winter storms should be named, perhaps not. But the Weather Channel doesn’t have the right to do it without the consensus of weather officials across the country. They are just doing it as a ratings stunt. They panic the public across a broad range about a ‘named’ winter storm, and like the boy who cried wolf, there will consequences in the future when the public thinks that the Weather Channel is overrating storms (since a catastrophe didn’t occur in their local area). The National Weather Service tries not to panic the public unnecessarily so that they will react appropriately when an actual local effect of a severe winter storm is imminent.
    - http://twitter.com/jere7my jere7my
      
      I’m sorry, but that makes not a lick of sense to me. People are going to call these storms something, whether it’s Snowpocalypse or Snowmageddon or Nemo or The Blizzard of 2013 or Jon Snow. There’s no stopping that. If the NWS doesn’t want to give winter storms official names, unofficial names will appear. If TWC doesn’t do it, some wag on Twitter will. Nemo is as good a name as any.
      
      If named storms that don’t live up to expectations are “crying wolf”, then the NWS is as guilty as anyone else when a hurricane or a named tropical depression peters out instead of ripping up the coastline (which happens all the time). If names cause panic, then the NWS should also be careful about naming storms that aren’t likely to be catastrophic. And the idea that any TV channel is going to adhere to the NWS’s talking points “almost verbatim” is ridiculous, name or not. Time travel back to Friday in Boston and you’ll see every local station and every national news station talking about this storm, and whether they called it Nemo or not the messaging was already disjointed. That might be a problem, but it has nothing to do with the name.
      
      Right now, I’m looking out my window at my neighbors hard at work on day 2 of shoveling. Public transportation in Boston is still out. I’m personally quite glad that this storm had a convenient tag that enables us to talk about it on social media, to get news on closings and outages and the storm’s progress. To commiserate. For all you or I know, having the hashtag #nemo available saved lives, because it made crowd-sourced information-gathering easy.
- marilove
  
  Ooooh, get a sense of humor! I don’t know how storms named after Disney and Hobbit characters are going to cause confusion.
  - Leonard Andrew Spencer
    
    Is it named after the fish? Since it wasn’t given an official name, it could be named after the polish/indian submariner ie “No One”
    - marilove
      
      Yes. It’s named after the fish.
http://profiles.google.com/spockosemail Mr. Spocko

Xeni. I LOVE the way you use quotes around “curate” I don’t know when I got sick of that word, probably after the 3rd time it was just by someone who didn’t work in a museum. “You “curated” it? Is that anything like picked out? Or selected? GMAFB.
For a long time companies didn’t own a bunch of companies, they had a “portfolio” Really you own 13 companies and you have a “Portfolio?” what are you a fraking artist? Can you put your companies in a big black book, unzip them and let me flip through them? No? Then you don’t have a portfolio of companies.”

Oh and bzishi. I didn’t NOT know that the Weather Channel named it. I wonder if it was approved by Disney? Because they copyright everything. One way to get them to stop it is for Disney to sue the shit out them. That might stop ‘em from doing that.
- L_Mariachi
  
  You can’t copyright a name.
  - http://profiles.google.com/spockosemail Mr. Spocko
    
    Yeah, well that never stopped Disney from suing or threatening to sue someone over what they call their copyrighted work.
    Trust me, I know.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/technology/15radio.html
  - http://twitter.com/jere7my jere7my
    
    Certainly not a name from Verne. Or Homer.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  “Curation” sounds nicer than “content farming”.
  - http://www.facebook.com/victor.jimenezmerino Víctor Jiménez Merino
    
    Or “image hoarding”.
marilove

And this I why I live in the freakin’ desert.

It’s almost 7:30 am and we’re going through a “mini cold front”. It’s 42 degrees out. I am considering a brisk walk to Safeway for breakfast fixins.

My grandmother lives in Grand Forks, ND, and finds the hubbub over some silly snow pretty hilarious. But, the Arizona native that I am, if I saw something like that, I’d be crying, too.
welcomeabored

My dog gets the same expression on his face when I tell him *he* can go outside, but he has to leave his chew toy indoors.
chgoliz

At that age, she’s probably crying for one of two reasons:

- it’s unexpectedly cold to the touch; or
- it’s blocking/covering what she knows is usually an open area.

Basically, snow is new and frightening to her because she has no remembered experience with it yet. We forget what it’s like to have each new thing/experience go through a safe-or-dangerous check before being incorporated into our limited world view. We are not born “blank slates”, but we do have to program our pre-installed software through real life experience, and that takes time.

I’ll bet she was laughing shortly after this photo, once she was put in a snowsuit and brought outside to play with family members.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  I’ll bet she was laughing shortly after this photo, once she was put in a snowsuit and brought outside to play with family members.
  
  The door frames in the house in which I grew up still have the claw marks from me trying not to go out into that stuff.
  - chgoliz
    
    That’s how I react to 90+ temperatures. Good thing we’re able to live in the appropriate climate for each of us.
Barrie Sutcliffe

Cute!
Xeni I have to thank you also for subtly dissing the now overused term “curating.” At least when it comes to blogging. I know curators, and they dig in archives, have long dialogues with artists and historians, and generally put a shitload of hard work into any project that is in need of their expertise, which invariably ends up in museums, galleries, science centers, etc. They click and share links too, but that is a small part of a much more complex job.
brucearthurs

Poor kid. Biggest snowcone ever, and no syrup.