I've been preparing for the oncoming Hurri^h^h^h^h^h Trop^h^h^h^h Thund^h^h^h^h rain since yesterday morning, after hearing and reading predictions of all the bad things which were going to happen when the whatever-the-hell-this-is came through.
I'm supposed to know better: hyping the weather report is a national sport among the B-list of blow-dried airheads who recite the AP's rip-n-read weather forecast for a (very very good) living. During the
1960's, their few minutes of point-and-prognosticate became a "happy talk" interval inserted between the count of Vietnam war dead and the oh-so-profitable commercial breaks that followed. For some strange reason, little has changed, even though Americans have been inured to constant trajedy because of the nine or ten wars we've had since Vietnam, and because we see more and more people being shot for not showing proper obeisance to those civil servants who carry guns.I understand that they have a certain amount of soap to sell, and that they're all hoping to claw their way up to a "National market" station or even one of the networks. I know these things because I once worked as a broadcast engineer, back when TV stations had to have engineers, and while unions were still able to represent those without a trust fund and a lobbyist to call on.
I could, I suppose, get used to the "forecaster" blathering along about the dire consequences of not buying the soap that his boss is selling instead of the soap that the other guys are selling. I just don't want to. I'm fed up with the constant, unending, insufferable torrent of fearmongering and fear-based marketing and fear-based electioneering that have taken up every megabyte of my Internet feed for the past four years, and I want the weather forecaster to tell me about the weather - and then shut up.
Bill