Apparently snow-machine technology has become so cheap that family-sized devices are now available for $525 to $2,400. The upshot is the creation of a new class of snow geeks -- parents obsessed with, in snowless-but-cold winters, generating improbably huge piles of snow beside their houses for the wee ones to cavort upon. There's a surreal little piece by Penelope Green in today's New York Times describing the culture:

Those who make snow are proud of their powder. They speak passionately about its stacking qualities (it is denser than snow that starts out in a cloud) and bandy about terms like nucleation and wet bulb temperature. Forums like snowguns.com, which has over 3,700 members, show a subculture as much into the process of snowmaking as the result of it. There are discussions about how to build your own rope tow and lengthy back-and-forths about the attributes of various snow wand nozzles.

My favorite quote in the article is from one of the fathers: "When real snow falls, Mr. Young said, 'my daughter thinks I made it.'"