Locals fumed over the headline.
“Snow wimps: Seattle is shut down by first real snow of the season,” read a Wednesday blog post in the Los Angeles Times’ Nation Now section.
Being called a wimp is bad enough, but what made it worse was that it came from LA, a place where the biggest weather danger is easily overcome with sunscreen.
“Why ya gotta hate?” @SEASteph1327 tweeted in response to the LA Times post. “Jealous we’re still happier?”
Kim Murphy, the Times reporter who wrote the story, was quick to respond.
“I don’t hate! I moved here didn’t I?” she tweeted back.
That’s right – the one who taunted us is one of us.
Murphy lives on Bainbridge Island and serves as the Times’ Northwest correspondent.
In her post, she called Seattle a “clueless” city that “always marches unarmed in its infrequent battles with snow.”
The region’s snow wimps do so, Murphy wrote, in “politically correct small cars” that spend the morning “sliding ineffectually.”
Then, with their wimpy cars quietly gathering snowflakes, snow wimps quickly forget all about being productive at work. They retreat into snow wimp pursuits, like sledding, coffee drinking and book reading.
Murphy was a guest on KUOW this morning for a discussion about her snow wimp topic.
She complained about being “severely abused” by the region’s snow wimps after her post went up.
Fortunately for Murphy, snow wimp abuse is limited to icy emails.
“I can’t tell you how much hate mail I’ve received,” she told KUOW host David Hyde.
Apparently, the snow wimps have had an impact.
Murphy softened her stance, saying she wrote the post when the snowfall was relatively light. Now that a few inches have settled in, we have cause for wimping out.
“Today is a very serious situation,” she said. “It’s with freezing rain and ice and snow on ice …. it’s just been really bad. Everybody’s allowed to be a wimp when it’s like that.”
