America too high on weather

Three weeks ago, something happened. I’m not sure if anyone noticed it, in that it vanished… Three weeks ago, something happened. I’m not sure if anyone noticed it, in that it vanished as quickly and inexplicably as it appeared, much like Joe Biden’s presidential campaign after he praised how clean and articulate Barack Obama is.

This event wasn’t a slightly racist-sounding comment, or Ann Coulter speaking – unless that sentence is too much of a redundancy to exist. The event I’m talking about was the brief life and death of spring.

Ah, spring! Do you remember it? Those three days when it wasn’t snowing, raining, in the 40s or 30s for a high and for once, just once, that absurd girl’s decision to wear flip-flops made sense? And then it vanished, leaving us with crappy weather, miserable afternoons where it’s far too cold to do anything and the absurd girl who is still wearing flip-flops.

At the time, I was feeling none too happy about the potential stretch of sunny weather – well, kind of sunny; this is still Pittsburgh after all. We’ll take brightly overcast as an unexpected bonus. As I walked around the Cathedral, I noticed a disturbing trend, which, like spring, is also an annual occurrence, but unlike spring, is far more annoying: couples. Everywhere.

I have no beef with couples, being part of one myself, but I do have a problem with the sorts of couples one sees in the spring. They’re an aggressive, sugary bunch, predisposed to holding hands and making out on benches, while always possessing a dazed, infatuated look which renders them susceptible to jaywalking at inopportune moments whilst texting their beloved who is, no doubt, holed up in a lecture hall, dreaming of the eyes of the one who is absent.

These sorts of people turn springtime into sad time. I want to see robins and grass growing and crickets. Instead I see teenagers and 20-somethings with lust in their hearts and then the robins catch West Nile and die, and all I can do is wait for summer, where I’ll be able to start complaining about how I don’t like to wear shorts.

This year, however, it isn’t the West Nile killing the robins; it’s the fact that it is absolutely freezing out because the weather has decided to go totally cuckoo Bellevue time crazy. I blame it all on the weatherman.

Yes, that’s right! You heard me. I want the weatherman’s – or weatherwoman’s – head on a stick. This is lousy. This isn’t April. This isn’t even March. This feels like November. And it’s all the fault of those pompous animals who go on the news every night, repeatedly interrupting any sort of flow the anchors have managed to establish, with their charts and their cutesy computer graphics that show the sun with a little smiley face and the wind having little icicles on it.

No more will I suffer the indignity of weather people apologizing for a dreary forecast. If these people really have no control over the weather – as they claim – why do they get so much airtime? In fact, why are we so obsessed with the weather in general?

Everywhere we go, it’s weather, weather, weather! You turn on your computer in the morning, it tells you the weather. You pick up the paper, it tells you the weather. You go outside, you’re in the weather. You turn on the television, it won’t shut up about the weather. Stop talking about the weather! If it’s going to rain, please inform me of that. If the afternoon temperature is going to be extremely different in an impossible-to-predict way, yes, by all means, inform me of that. But stop demanding so much of my time to do so.

Weather is an all-consuming industry where people are getting paid to talk about whether or not it’s windy outside. We could be doing better things with our time. For example, there’s that horrible song “Where were you (when the world stopped turning)” that contains a lyric, “I don’t know the difference between Iraq and Iran.”

I would like to propose that the weather forecast gives up its time on the nightly news across America and a new figure will be introduced: the “geo-political person.” This person will then proceed to explain to everyone, in very simple terms, where places like Iraq and Iran are, and why it’s important to know where they are, particularly since we’ll probably be invading the other one any day now.

Maybe when America learns, across the board, in every state – that means you too, Alabama – the basic facts of the world, we’ll give them their lousy 10-minute forecast.

And I hope that this hasn’t bothered or offended anyone, but I just felt like I had to say it. Weather or not you agree with me is, of course, a different story.

Ridicule me for this, my last column, at kjs34@pitt.edu.