The storm-trackin', no-waitin', on-the-10s masters of meteorological mayhem, just out there wieldin' their Dopplers. Watching them now, as winter approaches, is like hosting Mother Bates' bridge club. Forecasts keep fallin' on my head.

        One hit me the other morning, in between an ad for dog food and another for Cincinnati Councilman John Cranley. (Does that guy look like Beaver Cleaver, or what?)

        The weatherman, Buresh or Horstmeyer or Hedrick or one of the other half-million Doppler-ites at Channel 12, looked gravely into the camera and spoke of “severe” weather coming to the Tristate.

        Oh, no. What could it be?

        Biblical floods, twisters from Oz, canned hams?

        Nope. Wind and rain.

        Gonna be wet. Gonna be windy.

Here comes the weather!

        I mention this now, because we are entering the time of year when the weather does all sorts of weather-related things, such as snow. Very soon, we will have our prime-time TV watching ruined by special reports, crawls of words across the bottom of the screen announcing all the doomed counties (Brown County gets hit so much, I'm surprised it's still there) and, worst of all, that permanent, indecipherable Rorschach Test up in the left hand corner.

        What is that thing?

        Occasionally, the crawl will be heralded by three beeps, or five, which obliterate anything Homer Simpson is trying to say. If you're watching a game, the Rorschach blob covers up minor statistics, such as who's winning.

        None of this would be so bad if the weather were something we could fix. I mean, if you hear at 6 that a snowstorm is coming at 9, what are you supposed to do? Move?

        And if you're listening to the radio, why do you need to hear a weather update every 10 minutes? Does sunny and warm at noon become Hurricane Agnes at 12:10?

Trouble in the Great Plains

        If it's already raining really, really hard, why do we need the crawl on the bottom of the screen telling us to be alert for flash floods? Thanks very much, I'll stop scanning the horizon for sandstorms now.

        My neighbor, Snider, had his house flooded a few months back, on a night when the rain fell sideways. All the Dopplers in creation could not have saved his family room. If the forecasters want to be useful, tell us about the upcoming June flood in January. We could build a dam or something.

        As it stands, weather is the most overrated part of the news. Nothing against weather people, but why do they need five minutes to tell us what the temperature's going to be tomorrow?

        Is it just me, or is the weather around the rest of the country somewhat abstract to what you personally are trying to accomplish? “A Canadian high will swoop down into northern Minnesota and the Great Plains tonight, bringing up to a foot of additional snow to already hard-hit Brainerd.”

        Fascinating.

        As for the accuracy of the breathless accounts, don't get me started. Pokey Reese has a higher lifetime batting average, and he doesn't have Doppler.

        One of the local forecasters now has triple Doppler.

        I'll bet he's a big hit at parties.

        Contact Paul Daugherty by phone: 768-8454; fax: 768-8330; e-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com.

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