My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

It was April, and I was heading for Cleveland. Packing for April is tricky—could be cold, could be hot. I needed a weather report. Normally, I don’t bother with weather reports, because I employ my own personal scientific weather reporting system. This consists of a) opening the bedroom window, and b) sticking my arm out and waving it around. It’s important to wave it around, so as to get a proper air sample and to keep the neighbors wondering.

This is a roundabout way of explaining why I spent my Tuesday evening watching The Weather Channel. I thought—silly me—that this would be a channel showing nothing but weather reports. I tuned in to find a TV show in progress, called “Storm Stories.” Today’s storm story involved a bus driver in Florida, about to drive over a causeway just as a tornado was headed his way. “By the time Hugo got to the causeway…” intoned the narrator darkly. I turned to Ed. “Is Hugo the bus driver or the storm?”

“It’s not a hurricane,” said Ed. “It’s a tornado.”

“They don’t name tornadoes?”

Ed sighed.

Right about then, just as the drama was reaching its peak, the show cut away to a scene inside the Miami Weather Bureau. A guy named Dave was using a diagram with large red H’s and giant moving arrows to explain all about “sucking updrafts.” We kept waiting for them to broadcast images of the bus being sucked into the updraft and twirled around like a hamburger wrapper, but this was not to be. The Weather Channel does drama like other channels do weather. That is to say, something of an afterthought.

Then, because several minutes had passed without one, they showed a map of the United States, with shifting dryer lint superimposed on it. There’s a rule on The Weather Channel: Five minutes is too long to wait for a map of the United States with dryer lint on it. The lint corresponded to some sort of system, or “front,” that was incomprehensible to anyone outside of Weather Service employ. After 30 years of watching fronts move in off the ocean or down from Canada or what have you, I’ve figured out what it means: It means something cold and wet is going to start falling from the sky, and if it’s already falling from the sky, it’s going to stop. Why can’t forecasters just say this?

Next up was “Evening Edition,” which featured two hosts sitting at a credenza, stacking and restacking papers. They did not look like Dave, or any other weather bureau meteorologist. They looked like people who wanted to be on TV news, but did something horribly wrong and were being punished.

“In our top story, a heat wave in New York City…” It appeared that “Evening Edition” didn’t tell you the weather; it showed you. The screen featured a shot of people eating ice-cream cones on a Manhattan street. I tried to imagine what the stock-market report would be like if the financial channels took this approach: One shot after another of “suits” exchanging BMWs for Toyotas?

I gave up on The Weather Channel and went ahead and packed. I packed for a heat wave in Cleveland, and I packed for a blizzard. I packed boots and flip-flops and tank tops and a parka. I packed so many layers that I could no longer bring anything to read, which was fine, because I’d need those six hours in flight to berate myself for overpacking. Then I began to worry about what the airport security guard would think when he looked in my bag: “You say you’re going to Cleveland, ma’am? It’s 90˚ there. What’s the parka for?”

“Well, sir, if you watched The Weather Channel, you would know that several historic Midwest blizzards have actually happened during heat waves. You see, when a front, or ‘system,’ moves in and the dew point is very high, large red H’s and arrows begin to appear in the sky…”

I called my friend in Cleveland. “Do me a favor. Go stick your arm out the window.”