Category Archives: Rants

May 18, 2013

An Open Letter to Saint Louis Meteorologists

Weather-In-St.-Louis-City-Storm-Or-Tornado-280x210

Photo courtesy of xlurbanmedia.com

I’ve been watching St Louis meteorologists for years.  Rarely do I watch one of their news segments without getting verbally agitated by some of their glib, insensitive nonsense.  I’ve compiled a list of the biggest complaints I have.  If anyone, particularly our esteemed weather watchers, would like to comment, please do and I’ll give you top-billing.

1) What the hell is a normal temperature? In my lifetime, I’ve seen routine snows in Missouri to almost none at all. I’ve seen summers that didn’t start until late June to summers with temperatures that could melt your face off. To be glib, the earth was once covered in lava, and on the side of the coin, ice. (So much for temperature averages).  We routinely see magnetic reversal of the poles, and I fully expect Mother Earth to adapt with hotter summers or colder winters, or vice-versa, depending on where you live in the world. I might point out that there hasn’t been a normal temperature since 19-freaking-70. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/21/us-temperature-trends_n_2735036.html So why do you guys labor us with this normal weather crap? Speaking of…

2) If it’s not 70 degrees in St Louis, the weather is crap. We’re told this over and over again.  Do you guys know or have any idea how unbelievably depressing this is? I happen to love summer. Humidity, bring it on. That means a car ride with the windows down, fan in the window, driving to the country to look at the stars at night and if it gets too hot, swim in the pool or go to the lake or the river. But if I turn on the news to see if it’s going to rain, you know what I hear? Over and over and over and over again, all summer long, this: “Tune in when Keith Goodhair gives his forecast to find out when we’re finally going to get a break from all this heat”. O-M-G! I just want to drive to the studio and strangle someone. Same thing with the fall. We had a massive drought over the summer and we never heard the end of how hot it was and how badly we needed rain. We finally got some moisture in the early fall, 3 days straight of rain, were you guys happy?…no. Someone said: “Looks like Thursday will be the day all this rain finally moves out of the area and we get a beautiful day of 73″. You guys are never happy. Ever. Do you know that a bad mood is infectious? And it seems the only time I ever hear anything positive from St Louis meteorologists is if we’re somehow in that magic number of 70 degrees. It sucks.

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August 5, 2012

Six Hours Later

It’s funny the last post I wrote up about the Olympics, I was talking in general terms; things I’ve seen in past Olympics and felt I could expect in this Olympics.  Not only were all my predictions right, NBC buried the needle in failure.

My absolute favourite twitter hashtag of late is #NBCfail.  I’ve gone a little overboard with my comments but as they say, it’s easy to act when you’ve got great material.

So what the hell NBC?  How could a network who brought us Joey screw up this badly?

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July 28, 2012

The Olympics: Enhanced for your Enjoyment

I love the Olympics; it’s what sports should be: non-professional athletes who train without the sponsorship of their professional counterpart, and, for the most part, retains the dignity, humility, and respect for the games, for the fans, and for their fellow competitors.

What I don’t like about the Olympics is what the media does to the games.

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July 20, 2012

Tragedy: Aurora Colorado Shooting at the Dark Knight Rises Premier

Life imitates art.

Sadly there was a shooting in a theater in Aurora, Colorado at the screening of the Dark Knight Rises. The death count is too early to tell but there are countless injuries and probably at least a dozen or so casualties. It’s unbelievably sad.

The nerd in me wants to bring up the parallel of life versus art: how young Bruce Wayne was affected: leaving a theater, watched his parents die, became a force to fight evil, refused to use a gun or take a life.

It was just days ago when Rush Limbaugh was on his pulpit calling the Dark Knight Rises a liberal movie, with ties to the homophonic Bain Capital.

It’s easy to draw conclusions and vilify the other side when you’re outraged. When this happened in Arizona, there were calls to tone down the rhetoric but ultimately there was no, ha, smoking gun, to tie a lone lunatic’s motivations to something spoken on the radio or on TV.

Regardless of whether the Svengali affected one person or not, isn’t the issue that it’s on? If there is a hate machine active somewhere that is spouting lies, deception, and division, what does it take for us as a culture to turn it off?

Also, please tell me, how can you advertise yourself as a member of the “sanctity of life” camp when you advocate gun ownership for individual protection. Individual protection is a euphemism for killing. You’re advocating killing, which means death, which means murder. How does that work?

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July 15, 2012

Consistency, Politicians & The Media

“Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.” — Bernard Berenson

Most people change their minds all the time; from their weekend plans, to their dinner choices, to what kind of clothes to wear out of their house. Assuming you are an intelligent civic minded individual, when it comes to political issues, you weigh this against that, you decide based on your best information, and you align them with your own values.

Over time, however, values change, more information comes in, biases develop, and you change your mind.

If you want a go a step further, sometimes I can both like and dislike something, at the same time. Example: should cops have guns? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends.

A flexible mind is healthy; it shows an ability to be resourceful and thoughtful. For me, it reflects what I want in my politicians.

Unfortunately, modern politicians only believe in consistency.

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July 3, 2012

Record Temperatures in St Louis

It’s still hot in Saint Louis. Ever try living in a Ziploc bag with a heat lamp over your head? Yeah, still hotter.

Crutch of the St Louis Meteorologist

Speaking of the weather, when I want to find out just how hot it is outside, I turn to the St Louis NewsTeam. As I mentioned the other day, St Louis meteorologists always seem surprised it’s hot and as a result, they constantly lean on this thing called the bar graph. The bar graph is seemingly harmless: it shows you at a glance the forecast and 7 days worth of high and low temperatures. No problem. No problem until they start talking about “normal temperatures”.

“Normal temperatures” are how today’s high or low temperature stacks up against the average of every temperature in recorded history. But let’s go back. You step outside and the temperature is whatever it is. You think of it in terms of right now; consequently, you accept the weather, you enjoy being outside, and you move on with your day. But now here’s Mark Nicehair with the ST Louis NewsTeam telling you something like today is “unseasonably cold” or how today “isn’t the peak day of the week.”

Imagine if an insurance guy got on TV and said, “according to our actuarial tables, your mortality rate is normal this week, except for, and let’s look at our bar graph here — you can see Thursday is where your biggest chance of dying will occur, so be extra careful crossing that street or getting into that car”.

Depressing isn’t it?

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