Weather or No

SOMEONE — I suspect it was a television weatherman — once said, “Everybody talks about Mark Twain but no one does anything about him!” Well, I hate to talk about the weatherman this way, but I’d like to put in a plea for him to return to a simple, straightforward local forecast without gags and a description of weather conditions in every other nook and county of the forty-eight states.

The weatherman I’m referring to steps over in front of a huge map of the United States — a country that seems to be named for a cake mix — and starts out by marking in some bud weather around Seattle. Then he shows a warm front moving inland from the California coast, and then picks up an egg, holds it alongside Arizona, and tells us it was so hot today in Tucson you couldn’t fry one on the sidewalk without scorching it.

Next he devotes a few minutes to Texas weather, turning from the map long enough to predict that we could expect some strong, hot wind from that state. (“That’s a weather joke, son.”) But I’ve heard jokes on earlier programs, and right now it’s getting late and all I want from him is tomorrow’s forecast for our own small Midwestern home town.

But the weatherman skips over to Florida and nearly obliterates that state with heavy diagonal chalk lines. Then he aims some rather sharppointed barbs at South Carolina and notes the expected minimum temperature for New York City and environs. (“You know, they ought to name a town Environs. It’d be good for a lot of laughs.”) Next he sketches in some visiting weather from Canada.

His chalk and my patience are both getting shorter, but as yet he hasn’t dropped a clue about local conditions. Sorry, but that will have to wait for the commercial, which becomes pretty involved because the weatherman walks into a kitchen set, picks up a package of cake mix, and starts to put on an apron.

I figure this might be a good time to step to the front door to see what the weather’s like, thus possibly saving the expense of burning the tube any longer. The glass is clouded, so I step out on the porch to get a clear view of the sky. But what with the trees and the reflection of the city’s lights, I can’t tell much about the meteorological conditions.

I get back to the television set just in time to hear the weatherman say, “. . . is about what we can expect in the way of local weather for tomorrow. Now, good night, and remember — it’s always fair weather when good cooks get together and use Mrs. Muldoon’s Marvelous Master Mix.”

Oh, well, I’ll just wait and see what tomorrow’s like. Now that I think of it, I don’t know that I could do much about changing the weather anyway. One thing I can change, though: channels, when the weatherman comes on tomorrow night.