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?”.
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