Weather ladies

April showers bring May flowers. Except in the case of the Pacific Northwest, where April showers are a precursor to May showers and sometimes torrential downpours. You just never know. The weather lady on the TV last night said yesterday was like March. So I got that wrong. March showers (and January and February showers, for that matter) beget April showers and May showers and probably June showers too. Who knows?

While we’re talking about TV weather ladies, I have a confession to make: My #1 source for weather is the nightly news. It’s also my #2 through #9. I make a habit of watching the weather every weeknight at 6:18 on my local station. The local news comes on at 6, but you’d have to be a real hero to watch it. It’s the same top stories every night on this particular station. Either 1) a shooting and/or a murder that happened earlier that day, or if not today, then yesterday, and 2) the homeless situation in Seattle. Altogether, not great news, so I choose not to watch it and get in a funk. People say, why don’t I watch one of the other stations where the news varies. And I could, but their weather, to use the vernacular, sucks. It was the same when I lived in New Orleans: The weather, with weather lady Margaret Orr, was great. Well, not so much that the weather was great — because it either was or it wasn’t — it was the presentation of the weather that was great. The news, not so much. On Margaret’s station, instead of shootings and homelessness, the #1 and #2 stories were shootings and government corruption. I love a good government corruption story, but seriously, you’re a hero if you can sit through that every night without drowning in sorrow over what the world has come to.

Their weather, though, is something else. Their graphics are the best, and what I just realized is that both the New Orleans and the Seattle stations are CBS affiliates, and so their graphics (not to mention their top two news stories) must be down to CBS dictum. I am a visual learner, and so must be the VP of Weather at CBS. We both enjoy all the colors for this and that, the arrows swirling about, and Hs and Ls drifting across the screen. I eat it up every night.

And you know, through it all, the weather ladies never go crazy about the temperature or the wind or the rain, or anything. It’s all just weather to them. They’ve seen it all before and there’s no need to get hysterical. Which seems like a good way to be. Don’t worry, be happy.

The weather’s going to happen one way or the other, and there’s nothing I can do to not make it happen, so I don’t worry, I be happy. I read the other day that Antarctica has gained an abundance of ice around its edges. I’ve never once thought I’d like to visit Antarctica, primarily because I don’t like cold — and that extra ice sounds extra cold. I suspect they don’t have a CBS affiliate in Antarctica, likely because there are no shootings or homeless or corrupt governments to report on, but if they did have a station there, I bet the weather ladies would be cool as cucumbers. More ice, less ice, it’s just the weather. Yep, that good ol’ climate changing on us again.

For our listening pleasure this morning, Sam Cooke …