The Weather Channel Names Winter Storms?

I make fun of The Weather Channel often enough. It's not like I seek them out to ridicule them—they do it to themselves, like now. TWC has taken it on itself to begin naming winter storms.

I'm not certain at all when TWC decided to name every flurry this winter. I became aware when a Nor'Easter came into New England after the most recent hurricane, and TWC called it “Athena”.

Really? Athena?

I dismissed it. After all, it was just once, and, well, those New Yorkers are pretty self-involved, so naming their most recent tragedy seems OK—These are the same people who root for the Yankees. These are the same folks who called the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center “ground zero”--9-11 was an act of war and simply awful, but wasn't really quite the same as a nuclear blast, but, well, it was New York. I understand.

When I turned on TWC this morning to get my local forecast, I saw that an winter snowstorm in Utah has been named “Brutus”. Uh-Oh.

So I went to TWC's website and found their explanation. Here it is, copied directly from their site:

“Naming winter storms will raise awareness, which will lead to more pro-active efforts to plan ahead, resulting in less impact on the public overall.”

Tom Niziol

Uh-Oh. Squared. TWC has quite a self image, no? I am completely aware that TWC is controlled by NBC which is controlled by GE, and they actually believe that they are the single most important entity in the galaxy, but really now..........

Here's the complete run-down of TWC's naming agenda for this winter:

Athena

Brutus

Caesar

Draco

Euclid

Freyr

Gandolf

Helen

Iago

Jove

Kahn

Luna

Magnus

Nemo

Orko

Plato

Q

Rocky

Saturn

Triton

Ukko

Virgil

Walda

Xerxes

Yogi

Zeus

The National Weather Service, a voice of sanity here, has prohibited it's employees from using TWC's naming convention.

I'm just hoping that TWC gets all the way down to “W” so they can say “Where's Walda?”.