Sledgehammers and Flies

I love CNN, but ENOUGH already with the frigging touch-screen machine. Did they really need to use it to tell the story of the balloon-boy incident? Maybe it’s useful for elections. I suppose if I had spent a gazillion dollars on such a device, I’d be compelled to use it, too. But are you really going to watch CNN because they have a touch screen and can interview holograms?

I guess I’m getting old. When it rains, the weather coverage on some of the major-market stations gives me a headache. All that zooming in and out to tell me that it’s raining right down on my neighborhood. When I was in Florida a few years ago during an approaching hurricane, the TV stations didn’t just have satellite views; they could slice and dice the clouds sideways. But they still couldn’t forecast intensity correctly – the hurricane fizzled out before it reached Miami. The headache was the same, though.

I saw one of my favorite high-tech TV devices more than 40 years ago. The female weathercaster in Hartford, Conn. used to write the information in chalk on a clear plastic screen in front of her. But because (or so I was told) the station could reverse the polarity of the TV picture so the viewer could read what she was writing, I was really impressed by that girl’s ability to write backwards. The fact that her wedding ring was on the wrong hand kind of gave it away, but still…

In the really old days, the weather people used Magic Markers or something similar. There was a weathercaster at the station I worked for in Washington, D.C. who would begin his show by saying “Getting oriented,” and drawing a big circle on the map around the Washington area. That was on the 6 o’clock news. After the show was over, the weathercaster would go out and have his usual well-lubricated dinner. So when the 11 p.m. news rolled around and he said “Getting oriented,” he was successful at drawing the circle around Washington only about 60 percent of the time, hitting Richmond or Charlotte instead.

But at least he was the one with the headache.