Lifestyles

Renaissance Redneck: Easy, Jimbo!

By DAVID KITTREDGE
By David Kittredge

Mid-day Tuesday of this week I tuned into the Weather Channel to get an update on Tropical Storm Isaias, presuming that it was to hit my home area in New Hampshire in a mere few hours. As I was trying to discern what was being said by a weathercaster, my mind also tried to orient her statements with two weather maps being projected onto the television screen. All at once an abrasive blaring sound emitted from the TV prompting the viewer to click a button to see what the warning was about. When I clicked on the icon a verbal message was induced with the voice of meteorologist Jim Cantore explaining that there was a tornado warning in effect for the Sullivan County area until 9 p.m. in New Hampshire. I looked outside my slider window and there was hardly a leaf fluttering. As a matter of fact, the only thing fluttering was a viceroy butterfly because it wasn’t even raining.

Now we all know that Jim Cantore is known for his overstatements. I remember once when he referred to an impending Nor’easter in February 2002 as a “meteorological bomb.” Well we did have a snowstorm, but due to Cantore’s overzealous forecasting, the state of New Jersey shut down, for a few inches of snow, and later sued the Weather Channel for their grossly exaggerated predictions.

It has been noted that the most boring spot in America to be a weather anchor is in San Diego where most days of the year it is in the mid-seventies with blue skies. This is a wonderful environment to live in but is very boring situation for a TV meteorologist. Weathercasters look forward to inclement or even horrendous weather to report. Weather prognosticators get caught up in the excitement and then tend to exaggerate the impending bad weather, in hopes that the audience stays glued to their channel.

Now, I realize that there is an outside possibility of tornadic activity in Sullivan County, or even a bigger chance in the entirety of New Hampshire, but we must keep in mind that our Granite State is one of the least likely to have any type of natural disaster in the whole United States.

So Jimbo, we are wise to your antics, as you get caught up in storm predictions. I happened to turn on the Weather Channel just after midnight on Tuesday morning and there he was trying to stand upright somewhere on the coast of North Carolina, like a human anemometer, while 85 mph winds pummeled him as he struck the pose of a spasmodic, overextended ski jumper. We get it Jim; hurricanes have high winds. Jim and the rest of you forecasters, please stay inside and shoot your turbulent wind videos from the balcony of a high-rise building for your own safety. Viewers don’t need to see human anemometers being tossed about like rag dolls to prove that a hurricane is windy! Videos of flailing road signs or detached gas station portico roofs are enough to get your point across without endangering the lives of the umpteen weathercasters who feel that they have to venture out into any climatological catastrophes.

Jim, 20 years from now you will probably be out there shaking your newly purchased HurryCane walking stick at the windstorm, trying to rebuke it. I can imagine you yelling, “Take a powder, you dagnabbered tropical trollop!” or “Avast, you no good fer nuthin’ scallywag!”

I must admit that I don’t care to have hurricanes named after biblical figures, as in this case, where the Spanish-Latin derivative of the Hebrew name Isaiah could refer to the Prophet Isaiah. We don’t need to invoke the names of any biblical personalities in regard to any potential calamities, thank you very much!

It is Wednesday morning. Tropical Storm Isaias has blown through our state, one funnel cloud was reported in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, along with a number of thunderstorm down draft wind reports along the Connecticut River in Cheshire County. It was windy in Sullivan County, but there was no reported property damage. We merely had a summer rainstorm without any thunder or lightning. Our TORCON scale number was three in this county on Tuesday, meaning that there was a 30% chance of a tornado forming. That was the TORCON value for the whole southern half of the state and I suspect that because our state is so small that the number was merely used for the bottom half of our state as a generality.

According to the website, “The Tornado Project”, Sullivan County, N.H. has had only five tornadoes since 1950, with the last occurrence being in 1999. One tornado in 1962 was rated as F2 on the Fujita scale, which has a wind speed between 113-157 mph. Two tornados were registered as F1 (73-112 mph) and the other two were registered as F0 (40-72 mph). We had one recorded tornado in 1955, three tornados in the 1960s and as mentioned, one in 1999. On average that is one tornado every 14 years.

So, as we viewers are oversaturated with COVID-19 reports, images of social unrest and political bickering tainted with lies, we don’t need the added hysterical antics or the amplified opinions of the weather media tossed onto the pile.

By the way Jimbo, the vast majority of the American public over the age of 6 knows what snow looks like, so there really is no need for you to stand outside in a snow storm shoving a ruler into the accumulated flakes to show us that two inches of snow has fallen.

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