A Blank Page, An Empty Mind, and This is What You Get

Greetings again from California, where the big news this week is a big wad of high pressure that has parked itself over the Great Basin and is now smothering the state under a blanket of hot, dusty, smoggy, smelly air. That's not a big deal if you live in L.A. or the Central Valley or anyplace where people have had the foresight and good sense to equip themselves with air conditioning, but here in the Bay Area where we forego artifical air conditioning and count instead on cool banks of Pacific fog to roll in each night and bring us relief, things have been pretty miserable. Particularly here in the South Bay where natural air currents push the noxious fumes produced up north into the bowl of the Santa Clara Valley, collecting themselves into a thick, smoggy goo.

Which brings me to this one, somewhat related question. Why is it , I ask, that out of all the people on the local newscast, only the weatherperson is allowed to hedge and lie? The reporters and anchors aren't allowed to lie. They can't get up there and say that a building's on fire or the mayor held a news conference without at least some pictures to back them up. The sports person can't get up there and say the score was around 7 to 5 or that the A's might be in first place. They've got have the numbers. They've got to know the score. But the weatherperson...

The weatherperson can get up there and lie through his or her teeth and no one says anything about it. And they do it all the time.

"The temperature today in San Jose was 95 degrees."

Bull! I don't know what thermometer he's looking at but mine is reading closer to 101.

"Expect highs in the low 90's".

Are you kidding me? It was already 80 degrees when I walked out of the house this morning. Are you talking 90 degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius?

These weatherpeople, I tell ya'. They give these five day forecasts like they're wizards or sorcerers or something, and then they can't even get the temperatures right. And everybody just plays along like that's the way it's supposed to be. "Don't blame me, I'm only the messenger", they say. "I just report the weather, I don't make it." Oh yeah, well I think you're lying. How do I know you don't make the weather? I mean, I just have to take your word for it, don't I? For all I know this whole weather thing could be part of big conspiracy. Part of the War on Terror or something. First they're telling you that Iraq has all these WMD's, and then they're telling you they can't do anything about the weather. Hmmph, that's what I say.

Whatever happened to the good ol' days? Remember that? Remember when you could trust the weather report? Remember way back when the weatherperson used to stand up next to a big piece of plexiglass or something like that and draw the weather for the audience with a big grease pen. Remember that? They used to draw those funny looking lines with little pennants hanging from 'em and tell you all about the high pressure and the low pressure, and even though you couldn't make heads or tails of any of it and all the little strings of flags looked more like something you'd see at a used car lot than the weather, the weatherperson had more credibility back then. He seemed so scientific, and you just knew that he had to go to college in order to understand all those squiggly lines and pennants.

Now days, of course, everything is different. Computer graphics have arrived in the newsroom and now we get to look at satellite photos and radar images and cute little pictures that highly paid weather professionals working on $10,000 computer workstations spend countless billable hours putting together. Let's see, there's that picture of the cloud with all the little drops of rain falling down. That means it's going to rain. And there's that cute one of the sun peeking out from behind a cloud. That means partly cloudy. Oh, and there's that bright orange and red picture of the sun with the word "HOT" drawn in big yellow letters that means that it's gonna be another scorcher tomorrow. I guess it's an improvement over the squiggly lines. It's clearer anyways, but do you think they've gone too far? Do they really need to talk to us like we're a bunch of kindergartners? Personally, I'd rather get my weather from some whacko weather scientist than from Captain Kangaroo. "Hey Mr. Green Jeans, c'mon over here and tell the kids what's on tap for their holiday weekend."

Oh, I'm just kidding. We love our weatherpeople, but I do have one more question. We all know that when you fill a balloon with hot air the balloon becomes lighter and it rises. So how come when the air in the atmosphere heats up it sinks into heavy high pressure ridges? You know what I'm saying. Hot air in a balloon rises, but in a high pressure area the air gets hot and sinks. Doesn't that seem backwards?

Hah! Didn't think of that did you Mr. Weatherperson.