Do you hate the weather weenies?

I'm talking about those idiots on TV and radio. I'm talking about the clowns who think they have to work in practice for their stand-up routine while they're supposed to be giving you facts.

I'm talking about the assholes who come on at the start of the news and say something like, "Nice weather for today, but is there a threat of death from the sky tomorrow? Details later in the broadcast."

I'm talking about the jerks who come on your radio and talk about how you should 'enjoy the weather today, because it's going to turn extremely cold next week' and worry the crap out of you. Until you find out that it's expected to be a bit colder than the average for this time of year. And that's it.

I hate these people.

There's a meteorologist here named Gary England. Overall he seems to be quite competent, but he has a tendency to do the above. What really used to tick me off was Spike the Weather Pig. He got a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig for a pet and gave it the above name. Now, I can see having a little blurb about it, but it didn't stop there. He'd come on to /supposedly/ do the weather report, and start off spending a few minutes showing pictures/video of Spike. In the spring/summer, when the sky looks certain ways and the air has a certain feel to it, people around here turn on the weather to find out if God's vacuum cleaner is about to lower a hose down on their neighborhood. One day when the conditions looked, shall we say, not good, I turned on the TV to see what was happening. No, I don't have cable or satellite for the Weather Channel. So I turned on channel 9 just as his report came on, and he spent the first few minutes with crap about that damn pig!

I'm wondering if we can expect the high winds, hail and maybe tornados the sky leads me to expect, and this idiot is spending time showing pictures of his PIG! He finally got to what I actually needed to hear- yes, the sky might indeed fall on us through tonight- but when it was over I was still steamed.

It was after this that I told a friend that the next time he pulled this crap, I was going to kidnap the pig and mail Gary a slab of ribs with a note: Stop showing Spike when you're supposed to be talking about the weather, or the pig gets it. Happily, right after that the pig stopped showing up; someone told me that it'd grown so big he had to send it to the family farm to live. So I was saved from becoming a pignapper.

But I'm still pissed at the weather weenies.