My dislike of cold weather has been well documented here on this blog as well as on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, in angry letters to Al Gore about the climate not warming as fast as he said it would, and once in a while by me yelling at the sky in my backyard. At home I don’t use the word winter. Instead I refer to the cold months as the devil’s season.
My wife says that I am dramatic when it comes to the cold. I’m willing to keep an open mind, but I don’t think I’m dramatic,,,,,, I just think that low temperatures are inherently evil. The truly dramatic people when it comes to weather are your local meteorologists. They’ve turned the nightly weather report into a parody of itself. It’s almost as if the weather people got jealous of the regular news anchors who got to report real news. Stories full of life and death and real human drama. They thought, “We can make weather just as exciting as everything else.” And they were off to the races.
Now we have all kinds of ridiculous weather terminology. It can no longer be said, “Atmospheric conditions are going to make the moon look abnormally large early this evening.” NO. Now we have to say, “Hey everyone, there’s going to be a SUPERMOON tonight! Tell your friends!” We also have this new phenomenon whenever there is a cold snap. Instead of saying “Temperatures are going to dip along with the jet stream”, we have to call it a POLAR VORTEX. Everything is a SUPERSTORM or a MEGABREEZE or an EXTREME DRIZZLE. It’s all kind of absurd.
In addition to real, measurable weather statistics, we also have completely made up things like “wind chill” and “real feel temperature.” My wife likes the wind chill “stat.” I tend to be old school I guess. If you give me a temperature and a wind speed, I can pretty much guess what kind of jacket I’ll need. I guess other people like “wind chill” reports too because we are always assaulted with new made up weather metrics. It wouldn’t surprise me if I heard something like this tonight. “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we are going to add a new stat to the weather report. It will help us describe to you how it feels outside so you will never have to leave your cozy living room. Imagine if you will, that you were outside, soaking wet, and completely naked. Well if that were the case, the current temperature would feel like negative one hundred and twenty three degrees. We are going to call this the “Nude Feel” temperature and we will be bringing it to you nightly. You’re welcome. Watch for the Supermoon tonight.”
I just looked at the ten day forecast and despite what the groundhog says, I see no end to the devil’s season. By the way, next Tuesday the Nude Feel temperature will be negative eighty seven.
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