Weather Channel Be Damned...

OK, the only thing the Weacha is harping on is the "tragic" hurricane - Dolly was a Cat 2, and the "terrible" damage in TX was laughable. "We only have one convenience store open on the island (San Padre), no electricty, and no water pressure," whined some big boy who hadn't missed too many meals. Wah. No WATER PRESSURE? You've an open store in which you can shop, you've got water that you can bathe in, even cook with, but there's no PRESSURE? Yer breakin my heart! Poor baby. In another shot, he'll probably be whining that he is out of propane for his grill; how in the WORLD can he heat anything to eat or water for his coffee? Then they showed the causeway - fully functional and undisturbed - as open again. But of course PrezBush declared 15 counties of his home state "major disaster areas" so they could get Federal help. I saw a little water in the streets, a few trees down, and - horrors! - a boat that was actually flung backwards on its trailer! EEEEK! One injury, no deaths reported so far; of course, some manly overweight idiot will go out and try to cut the tree that blocks his driveway and cut a power line... Wait for it.... Meanwhile, no one hears a peep anymore about the people who lost everything in the Iowa floods... their actual devastation is old news.

No, I knew when I moved here that we were in flyover country. The largest county in the US and we only have 6000 people. I didn't expect the WeaCha to pay any attention to us. All day long we have been getting some ass-kicking storms - the weather radio hasn't shut up. Tonight right after sunset the winds started slamming from the north - 60 mph according to the wind gauge, and that's constant, not gusts. Within 15 minutes we went from 81 degrees to 61 degrees; windows open, nice and cool, as thunder and lightning slammed all around us. Very little rain - but with those winds, the clouds over us were probably having their raindrops hit the ground thirty miles south! The radar on my computer shows a huge yellow and red ball of storms over and around us, and we are under a severe weather watch til 3 AM.

But the WeaCha is busy talking about the 'hurricane rainfall totals" - San Antonio, one of my old stompin grounds, was 11 inches behind average, but got so much rain today that they are now only 10 inches behind. Hunh? There's also really bad weather in the northeast; they might get an inch of rain tonight... Last week we got two inches in ONE HOUR!

I haven't liked the WeaCha since they decided that they were the authority on weather, all the while running hour-long programs during which they would not - WOULD NOT - show a real-time weather map, no matter who was under a severe weather warning, tornado warning, whatever. Then they decided that they were all about going green and climate change having such an evil impact and we all needed to go green - meanwhile Danny Lipford, their fixit guy, is sagely advising folks to double-dip their pretreated outdoor wood just to make it last. What? The pretreated wood is poisonous as hell, the chemicals they use contain things like cyanide and other metals - and he wants the "going green" viewers to use still more of this poison to make their lives easier? WTF? (I heard a rumor that the meteorologist who started the WeaCha is suing them - because he says the channel is pretending to be an authority on global-warming-as-caused-by-humans, and they are being gratuitous and unprofessional by presenting politically-motivated opinion as fact.)

Like I said, I don't mind living in a place that the WeaCha neglects; their interpretations of weather are as incompetent and condescending as are their self-congratulatory shows. But every once in awhile, I watch it - in the so-far-vain hope that Jim Cantore will be standing out on a pre-hurricane beach one more time, pontificating on "these people shouldn't be out here" while HE is - and getting himself nailed to the ground by flying debris. Sigh. Now THAT's a YouTube I'd put on MySpace. I never fail to tell everyone I meet that Jim Cantore is shorter than I am (5'3") - and although he is all about his shape and figure, he is nothing more than a banty rooster, who insists on being shot at angles that make him look taller and imposing.