STORM TRACKER

Here it is Friday again. And rain again. It is April, of course, so we should expect the showers to bring all those flowers. Rain is predicted for this afternoon and for another two days, into Monday morning. That's fine for me, because I've got the magazine's May issue in the proof process. It's definitely an indoor job. 

Seeing as how it's a weekday, and weekdays mean lots of almost useless new hours on the TV, there's sure to be a storm tracker out on the roads in and around Charlotte.

Would someone please explain to me the need for the local TV news programs to have a storm tracker when it rains? Or even during a major hurricane? It would seem to me that this would be as useful as using chopsticks to eat ice cream. Watching someone riding around in a van and reporting in on the rain, and often the lack thereof, is just plain useless.

Some TV stations go to great lengths to get out there in the storm.

If you are at home, you don’t usually need to know what’s happening on the main roads. If you’re on the road in your car, I hope you don’t have a TV. If you’ve got the TV station playing on your iPhone, you’re stupid. Turn it off and pay attention to the driving.

I do remember when you could depend on the weather report coming in at about twenty minutes past the hour. One report, nice and neat, and not too much time spent with forgettable information like degree days or moonrise and moonset. Today there are at least two weather reports on per half-hour segment.

I do realize that the local stations have to fill in with something. There isn’t all that much news out there, and what there is is usually a lot of criminal activity that we don’t need to know about. TMI. TMUI – Too Much Useless Information.

The curmudgeon has spoken.