The weather. Or, rather, the so-called news of the weather.
Our electronic press, (often referred to as the media) speaking for the National Weather Service, has announced a Winter Weather Advisory which national service, in turn, has just this year begun naming snowstorms after powerful characters in Greek Mythology. (Well, at least one.) And it is time to say, as they do in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas: Hold, enough!
Why?
Well, to begin with, though, as the adage goes, everybody talks about it — I certainly am writing about it — it is no longer true that no one does anything about it. The local news always does something about it. Something numbing to me, but obviously plenty frightening to the desperate souls crowding the supermarket’s narrow aisles to stock up on provisions for what may be, for all they know, the end of the world. And even local news as we know it.
With great excitement, local TV reports every snowstorm in the same monotonous, though thoroughly irritating, way. Time after time. Every time. To wit:
First the weatherman stands before his map, spews cities and temperatures, and predicts inches. He uses phrases like Polar Vortex, (though our snowstorms, unlike Santa, do not come from the North Pole. And a vortex is a spinning motion about a non-existent axis. A spinning snowstorm? A meteorological curve ball? Harder to hit than the fast ball? A tornado made of snow?)
Then cut to a “senior” New York City reporter, live! (senior, yes; dead, no) at the place where city trucks are being loaded with sand. He spews tons and hours, then his location and name. From there we shift to a live (and lively) young woman in a parka reporting from whence the Sanitation Department’s salt spreaders are being loaded with salt. Tons again, hours again. Location and name again. Next, on to a young man, standing in the narrow traffic vortex (well, he is something of a non-existent axis) at the Manhattan entrance to the Queens Midtown Tunnel. He is bare-headed and his hair is waving in the wind. He shouts to us that there is wind. Snow is falling all around, some of it is falling on him. He shouts that it is “really coming down.” The cars all around him are merging into the tunnel behind him. Traffic is slow and roads are slippery, he shouts. Then he identifies place and self and we return to the pastel studio where the anchor persons tell him to hurry in from the storm, and then one of them estimates what the city’s cost for dealing with the snow could be, as though this is a surprise expense. And back to the dapper, if slightly square, meteorologist who tells us he will tell us more in the next news broadcast.
I submit this is not news; it is olds. And tireds. We could use an advisory if we suddenly were to have summer weather in January, I guess, but according to the calendar it is winter and what other kind of weather do you expect? Advise me when autumn leaves start to fall in May. Advise me when hair is falling instead of rain. Finally, if you have spent even a single winter in, say, Vermont — and I’ve spent five there — a few inches of snow is not Herculean. In Vermont, it is feet and it will stay a long time and it will not be named for anyone famous. In Old New York, Winter Storm Agamemnon will be plowed and shoveled away tomorrow and gone without a trace in a week.
That ends my winter weather advisory.
