Weather Inflation

Fat Sweatin’ Guy is Right

I saw on TV the other night that Americans are beginning to become upset about “Heat Indexes.”  That’s ok by me, b/c I’ve long since been annoyed abt “wind chills.”

It really is very annoying when you just want to know what it’s like out and media keep insisting upon all kinds of terrifying new descriptions that in the end are meant only to draw more people back to them.

It does bug me.  And it bugs the fat man, too, Rush.  He says “the government” is telling him he’s so uncomfortable now.  Hell to be Rush, no doubt about it. 

I live out in Western Canada where “wind chills” have remained somewhat, thank goodness, irrelevant.  And we do have winds out here.  But back east, where it is moist and not necessarily any more windy, you simply cannot tell the temperature, b/c competing media factions are so anxious to tell you how cold it is, that you never could tell how really cold it is. 

People--and there are millions of them--who would say, well, why don’t you just go outside and figure out what it’s like, miss the point.  Too many people have no clue what it’s like to be outside the weather.  Many people live in basements; they work in offices; they work in warehouses all night; they commute on various forms of public transit; they sit in cars, clueless as to what goes on around them; they care about their children who cannot be in cars, or houses. These people, who live outside the mainstream media feed, need to have a fairly accurate sense of just what the temperature actually is, not what it is to vamping sponsored media.  Media have got to develop a sense of social responsibility—media such as, well, Rush’s, can lead the way, by offering actual and accurate forecasts, rather than just trying to amp up fakecasts that they think will bring them more advertising.   It’s a serious issue.  You can’t just misrepresent what the weather is like for money when real lives depend on it.  Is this so hard to understand?

Rush? 

zr