Weather

I get annoyed about the way weather people report the weather on television. This annoyance has been building for years, but like Mark Twain’s famous saying that everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it, I complain but I don’t do anything about it.

Doing something would probably mean writing a letter to the TV station asking the weather people to change their ways. Or more precisely, asking them to stop hogging the camera. In fact, get out of the picture all together!

In the old days of television, weather reporting was done by a person at the edge of the TV screen, holding a long stick and pointing to the map where certain weather anomalies were taking place or might take place. It was a fine system, simple and direct. You always knew where the weather was!

Modern weather people stand in front of a map with myriad symbols representing clouds, rain, snow, flood, sun, wind, humidity, heat index, jet stream, highs, lows, temperature and warnings. They speak in a rapid gun fire weather jargon while drawing on the electronic map and adding more lines to the scribbles and never moving from the best camera angle.

They are always standing in front of the weather I want to look at! If I want to see the weather at the border of Texas and Louisiana, the weather person is either standing in front of that portion of the map, or the map cuts off at Houston. If I want to see the weather in southern California, the map stops with Colorado as the most western state.

Give me Radar Weather. At least with the sweep hand centered near ones location you can see where the weather is!