Tonight, even the anchors on the L.A. newscasts were laughing at the people back East. Look at them! They're being silly on the ice! They're wearing these ridiculous woolen hats and mittens and heavy coats! How unfashionable!

Of course, this is a town that throws itself into a tizzy if the temperature drops below 55. I remember when I went to college and there were two people on my hall freshman year who came from Los Angeles. They put on winter coats in mid-September when the temperatures were in the 50s, and they kept asking me how I could walk around wearing only a sweater or sweatshirt. I frankly told them if they thought this was cold, they were in for a big shock.

My senior year in high school, we had a winter so cold that the temperature hovered around the zero point (that's Fahrenheit, not Celsius for all you metric people stopping by) for the better part of three months. I remember several mornings that I'd try to drive to school, but my breath would condense and frost on the inside of the windshield to the point where I had to pull off the road to use the ice scraper on the inside of the car. We had ice storms every weekend, and one morning, after my father had left, I pulled my car into the garage to melt the sheets of ice off it so I could drive it -- the resulting melting almost flooded our basement.

Because we lived in the middle of nowhere, the ice froze our power lines and we lost power several times -- a couple of times for several days in a row. Let me tell you that there is no caffeine jolt that can equal stepping from a freezing cold house (because the heat was electric and it was so cold in the house that we all slept in our winter jackets and hats and mittens and thermal underwear) into a freezing cold shower (because the water heater ran on electricity) and back out again to dry off, all to the faint glow of a flashlight propped up on the sink. There was nothing to do when the sun went down because we needed to conserve our batteries, so I couldn't read books or listen to the radio or watch the little portable TV, so we slept. And because it was so cold, we didn't sleep well and we woke up several times throughout the night. At least the food in the refrigerator didn't spoil -- it was cold enough in the house that we didn't have to worry about keeping the fridge and freezer doors shut to keep in the cold. On the downside, it meant we couldn't eat because things were either frozen solid and we had no way to heat them or they were raw and we had no way to cook them. There's only so many yogurts and bowls of cereal you can keep in the house before three people consume them all.

So, to the people here making fun of those back East who are suffering through one of the worst winters yet, I say: you fucking wimps, you have no idea what they're going through, you pansies who cry that it's getting cold when it's 50 degrees outside and bundle up in heavy coats and scarves. Given the amount of panic generated by a few drops of rain here in L.A., I think they'd have to declare a full-on state of emergency here if even a quarter-inch of snow fell.