I was watching the weatherman on the news tonight and it dawned on me, he is full of shit!

With all the fancy tools available these days it would seem that they should be able to tell us the temperature and weather conditions down to an accuracy of 1 inch. For example, at the stop sign on Beach blvd and Parental home road the temperature is 71.23 and the humidity is 78.34% and the barometric pressure is 900 millibars and falling. Now at the stop sign on beach blvd and Foster (one block away) the temperature is 72.18 and the humidity is 71.65% and the barometric pressure is 900.02 millibars and falling. With the gobs of fancy gadgetry they show us on the news cast there should be no reason that they can not provide that level of detail in that granular a fashion. Come on Man! The graphics that are displayed are phenomenal, they show northeast Florida in amazing detail. I can see it in real time from a satellite, it will then zoom in to see the landscape, almost a creepy 3D that they may actual be able to look at the front door on a house, like you can my house using Google earth. They have all manner of other graphics zooming in and out. Things flying in showing me that I will have scattered showers in one flying block, another tells me that we will be experiencing chilly wind on Wednesday and yet another is telling me that we will have heavy rain on Friday.

I sometimes wonder if our guy is some bizarre automaton, secretly controlled by the machine creating and displaying these graphics. He tells me that if I combine the temperature and the wind tomorrow compared to today and he thinks it is going to feel about 30 degrees colder. Yes, I had to listen to that about 10 times to get the wording down, that is what he said. Why not just say that I think it may be so hot tomorrow that your skin may melt. I think a lot of things but as a weatherman I would think we could get more than what he thinks. Why does he have to say all that to say take a jacket tomorrow it is going to be a bit cooler. With the millions of dollars of very technical gadgets he has at his disposal he “thinks” it is going to be cooler tomorrow. If that guy were working for me he damn sure better come off sounding more intelligent than that. “I think” my ass! Immediately following that he tells us that another soaking rain event “looks to be on the way come Friday”. No I have not been trained in the meteorological field but I can look on the internet in no less than 4.8 trillion places to see a satellite shot of the southeastern United States and tell those clouds that are coming this way, those damn things will be here soon. The only resources I have available to me are a piece of crap computer running Vista and IE version 8.0.6001.18865.

He showed us the visual satellite from this morning that showed all the fog that was here this morning. Now anyone who lives in Jacksonville and peeked outside today knows it was foggy, again no need for millions of dollars in gadgetry and a well dressed weatherman to tell me that. I have the two eyeballs in my head and even with the glasses I wear, I could tell it was foggy this morning, and I did not have the luxury of a view from space. CRAZY! A stalled front in the gulf of Mexico is, I am told, significant for us on Thursdays night. He never really explained why but with his high tech graphics I could clearly see the line of clouds moving this way. Is it important that some front is stalled someplace. Who cares why, tell me when I need to bring an umbrella or a coat. I sometimes think they are purposely trying to dazzle us with the equivalent of electronic bullshit. He goes on to tell us of a gulf of Mexico low pressure system and how he told us about that happening during a el Niño year, which this is he reminds us again. Again, not sure what that has to do with telling me what the weather is here in Jacksonville. I also learned that the signature of an event developing in the gulf, is that despite the fact we have the front heading our way the heavier showers and thunderstorms are out over the northwest Gulf of Mexico.

Weatherman, what are we going to do with them? I am not sure how the local stations can afford all the gadgetry and the well-dressed weatherman. I use the term weatherman but I have on numerous occasions heard this guy correct someone when they called him a weatherman. He is of course a meteorologist. I suppose he deserves to be called a meteorologist, he has a Bachelor of Science degree in Meteorology. He is also a member of the American Meteorological Society and carries that groups important seal of approval. How important is it that he carries that groups seal of approval? I wonder sometimes how hard it is for him to keep up with all the gadgetry. Sometimes I bet he hates having to learn some new gadget that tells him some new piece of information about the weather. I wonder if he longs for the days when in his profession he was called a weatherman and he just told us what was going on, with the weather, where we were at. That was before the days of Doppler radar systems and computerized graphic systems that produce these stellar pictures for us to look at. I bet he does. I am not picking on this guy in particular, they are all full of it and I just wonder if they realize that we all know it as well, I know they know it.