I started paying a lot of attention to the weather forecasts once the winter rainy season started here, because I ride my bike to work. I got into the habit of turning on the TV to channel 2 in the mornings while I got ready for work, the theory being that I would know whether to pack my rain gear, or perhaps in the event of a major rainstorm even forego bike riding for that day and just take the Muni streetcar to work. Bike riding has been a truly educational experience for me; for example, although I live in a famously hilly city, I had always considered my own neighborhood to be rather flat. I quickly learned how wrong I was; on a bike, you become intimately aware of every minute gradation of slope, and those slopes you didn't even know existed as you effortless guided your internal combustion machine over them become disagreeably noticeable when you pedal. As it turns out, the first mile and a half of my morning bike commute is uphill. Oh well, live and learn.
I also gleaned another important lesson from bicycling, and this gets back my daily ritual of watching the morning news broadcast. I learned that weather forecasters are the minions of Satan. I realize that this statement could be construed as offensive, and therefore I apologize to any minions of Satan who might be reading this who don't want to be compared with weather forecasters. But I believe it is true. I realize that people have always griped about forecasters ever since the first cave woman back in 100,000 BC, wearing carefully coifed hair, stood before a tribe of Neanderthals and held a tree branch which she pointed at a map of Ice Age Europe while she stated categorically that the Ice Age would never end and Neanderthals would rule the world. I know that people always gripe about weather forecasts, but I never remember the forecasts being so bad, so unreliable, until I moved to the west coast.
The official explanation for why west coast forecasters are so bad is that there is no one living to the west of the west coast, and therefore there are no ground observations from the west, and since the weather comes from the west, forecasters just don't have the complete data about the oncoming weather that they have in more easterly parts of North America. Satellite photos, we are told, don't provide the complete picture that ground observations can give. That doesn't explain why the forecasters never admit that they don't really know what is going to happen, and instead make bold predictions that bicyclists use to base decisions on, only for them to be poured on a mile from the office on their way to work, which I might add in my case is about 30 minutes from my house, which means that forecasters can only predict 30 minutes into the future, if they are lucky. But I'm not bitter or anything.
My own opinion about why west coast forecasters are so bad is that they only do their job four to six months out of the year. That makes them rusty and incompetent. During the rest of the year, the non-rainy season, the forecast for San Francisco is exactly the same every day--morning coastal fog, afternoon clearing, highs in the 60s on the coast, 90s inland. I believe that meteorologists just phone in their forecasts from some tropical island and then go back to sipping on their margaritas and laughing at us. I have actually seen five-day forecasts in the newspaper, where they would actually vary a word or two to make it sound like the forecast for day 2 was somehow different from that of, say, day 4; one day would say morning clouds, then sun, and the other would say overcast early, then sunny, as if somehow they were fooling us that they were giving us a different forecast for each day. But I'm not bitter or anything.
You might ask why I bother to watch the morning forecast at all. I think part of it is that I try to look for whatever germ of truth might lie in those nearly useless predictions. I think part of it is that I have to justify the $250 expense I made in purchasing a new TV recently, and the only way I could justify that expense was by occasionally actually watching TV. I had not bought a TV in years, and I was shocked to find out that every single one on the market now is black It doesn't matter what brand you buy, they're all the same color When did this happen? My previous TV was silver. You can't get silver TVs anymore. This is what happens when you allow decades to pass between making major consumer purchases--decisions are made without you being consulted. I was very appalled, but what choice did I have? You can buy telephones or calculators that come in iMac colors, but TVs don't even come in TV colors anymore. So I bought a black TV.
And there it was that morning, the black TV, in my living room. I was eating my breakfast, waiting for a forecast I wouldn't trust, when, as I mentioned, I saw the story about Tonya Harding, who is an ice skater and who doesn't play professional hockey, but perhaps ought to consider taking up the sport. And then I saw another story in the same broadcast about Marty McSorely, a professional hockey player who is now in big trouble for swinging a stick at somebody's head while skating. McSorely has played hockey for many years, during which time he got paid a lot of money for assuming the role of enforcer, although another affectionate hockey term that has been applied to him is goon. I'm not sure, but I think that goon is a Canadian word, which means something along the lines of one who makes peace with one's enemies and who believes in reconciliation as the path to enlightenment.
Fortunately, the NHL, which doesn't like violence in hockey games (please, restrain your laughter), is cracking down on McSorely The next time I go to a hockey game and watch a fight break out, and the paying fans are cheering loudly at the fight, and the referees are just standing there and watching the melee for a while instead of immediately trying to break it up, because after all the cheering fans deserve to get their money's worth, and because the NHL knows what sells tickets, I'll remember Marty McSorely. At least he doesn't even live in Portland, so I guess he doesn't have an excuse.
It wasn't raining that morning when I left the house. The forecast called for morning fog, maybe a little drizzle, and clearing in the afternoon. I attacked my rain cape to my bike rack, just in case. Halfway to work, it started to drizzle. No problem, I thought. But then the drizzle turned to rain, hard rain. I stopped at Van Ness Avenue and put on my cape. It continued to rain the rest of the way into work. Surprise, surprise, the forecasters got it wrong again. I can only hope that it doesn't keep raining like that the rest of the winter, or I might start throwing hubcaps around, just like Tonya Harding.