And what's with the tenths anyway? We're not on the metric system that uses a base of 10. We're on that non-scientific English measurement system. When there was thought that America was going to go metric, baseball started putting metric dimensions next to the standard foot dimensions on the outfield walls to prepare us for the 125 meter home run. It never took off. No park today sports a metric equivalent. Even Toronto's Rogers Centre quotes their dimensions using feet.
We know what the weather people are doing. They are trying to scare us. They are always trying to scare us. They give us "wind chill" factors to make us believe it is really colder than it is, that we are "survivors" if we go out in that weather and suffer through that wind chill factor watching the Jets or Giants play football.
I once knew a real estate agent who moved here from Sweden. He told me he had never heard of a "wind chill" number until he arrived in the United States. Living near the Arctic circle was enough to know how cold it was. They didn't need something else in Sweden to make therm fell colder.
I've lived in this New York region for nearly 70 years. We have had some bad weather. We have had some really cold weather. Some really hot weather. Historically, we have had some really big snowfalls, rainfalls, and some tremendous winds. But not often. And when we've had them, we've known about them. We didn't need someone telling us in tenths what things might be like. We were way past tenths when those bad weather days hit.
My buddy Russell Baker once wrote of a reporter he knew on The Baltimore Sun who, when asked to do a piece on the weather, turned in one sentence:"Every day we have some some weather, and yesterday was no exception." Mr. Baker claimed these were the greatest words written about weather that were never published.
When I sent Mr. Baker the link to my blog entry that recalled his nonplussed reporter friend, Mr. Baker responded. This was 2011, and he admired that I had gotten John L. Carr's quote so accurate. (The Times archive helped.)
Mr. Baker went on to fill in some follow up to Mr. Carr's career. He left the paper and got an executive position at General Motors in Buick's public relations division. Mr. Baker saw this as a sign that GM was in more trouble than even Ralph Nader wrote about, since anyone who knew anything about Mr. Carr's personality would realize he would make the worst p.r. man in history.
After GM eventually fired Mr. Carr, he related to Mr. Baker why they let him go. It seems there was a company plane he was expected to use to travel around the nation and promote GM to no end. He never checked the plane out of the hanger. He couldn't think there was anyplace that so important to be at that he had to get there in the company plane. (Obviously not a guy who would run for president, either.)
The lesson in the tale in that obviously weather people are GREAT p.r. people. They want us to buy something, namely their prediction and their worry. They should be vetted for conflict of interest in owning stock in dairies, bakeries, flashlights and batteries.
I became aware of this trend toward tenths when I spotted the weather map on the TV that my wife was watching. She immediately comes in the door from work (bless her heart) and gets Lonnie Quinn on. Lonnie, aside from looking good in a suit, is a glib, animated weather person who loves to tell us what to expect. Lonnie can get so excited and over the top that last year he predicted a New York City area snowfall so large, a "snowageddon," that the city nearly shut down as a precaution immediately following his broadcast. When nothing close to the catastrophe materialized, Lonnie still had a job. And is now telling us of accumulations that will be in tenths of an inch.
Lonnie, I spit bigger than that.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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