Headcase - What’s the forecast?

Wayne is the ultimate weather geek. He watches the Weather Channel with the same interest adolescents watch MTV. When we are at our cableless place in the mountains and I’m on the Internet, I have to log onto weather.com every other hour. Whoa! They’ve dropped the forecasted high for next Thursday a degree! Think it’ll rain? The answer is always the same: maybe.

I don’t get it. If I want to know about the weather, I look out the window. I don’t trust forecasting, no matter how techy it gets. I well remember when my family lived near Philadelphia and Wally Kinan the Weatherman routinely announced — his face aglow with radar light — that a blizzard was on the way. My South Carolina mother would fly to the grocery store to empty the shelves. The blizzards never came and my mother accused Kinan of being a shill for the grocery industry.

And then there was Atlanta’s own Guy Sharp. Whenever it snowed, Sharp turned into a human siren, warning everyone to stay home and stay warm, infamously clucking, “It doesn’t look good for Atlanta.” Meanwhile, people noticed that conditions were never as bad as he described them. Eventually, Sharp admitted that he had exaggerated things to keep people from driving.

Yes, there’s something vaguely suspicious about people who want to make their living off the weather. Perhaps that gesture of pointing at a map with a big grin is what Pfc. Lynndie England was actually practicing when she pointed at the genitals of Iraqi prisoners. After all, the Pinup of Abu Ghraib told interviewers she was saving money to study meteorology.

You can imagine how attractive and how utterly revolting Wayne and I respectively found the idea of seeing the movie The Day After Tomorrow. You’ve read the reviews. It’s a disaster film about global warming — the ultimate weather geek’s movie. I don’t like disaster films, generally — especially ones without Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters — but a weather theme doubles my distaste.

Please don’t write me accusing me of being insensitive to the planet’s warming. I’ve written enough in this space slamming Dubya for his withdrawal from the Kyoto Accords. But I’d rather be frozen alive than sit through The Day After Tomorrow again. The only good parts were an impersonation of Dick Cheney and a funny scene of Americans illegally attempting to cross the border into warmer Mexico. And it was kind of cool to see people in Tokyo killed by giant hail instead of Godzilla. But, really, the worst part of the movie was that the main cast wasn’t frozen to death after the special effects were over, thus shortening the movie.

“Why do you make me watch movies like this?” I whispered to Wayne while a handful of people on screen burned books in the New York Public Library to keep warm as millions of off-camera others were turned into ice cream novelties.

“It’s weather! It’s about the weather,” he replied.

The one thing I do like about the weather biz is the language of describing it: isolated thunderstorms, snow showers, intermittent rain. And the weirdest form of expression that usually makes a reference to weather is haiku. The short Japanese poems of 17 syllables typically include at least one word associated with the season. To mark the occasion of seeing a dreadful movie about a new ice age, I have composed a few lines of the new form I call “disaster haiku.” The first is dedicated to the glaciers of Iraq:

Blue balls beneath palms --

?Pfc. Lynndie England

cold-cocks the White House

Here’s one dedicated to Wayne:

Icicle daggers

?stuck way deep inside your eyes:

I hate this movie.

And here’s a two-parter for Andisheh Nouraee, whom I’ve never met but who is apparently so envious of Wayne that, according to friends, he mentions him in every other column:

Short of things to say

?reminding us that he’s cool --

smiling Ennui-sheh

nnn

Popsicle penis

melts wit sc a gropie:

e’ll never be my bitc

ave a nice day and pt it to good se. Remember w at Mr. Rogers told Callisto of Zena: Warrior Princess: “ t’s a beatifl day in t e neig bor ood.” And remember er response: “A , it’s sc a pretty day for a bloodbat .” t doesn’t look good for Atlanta!

Cliff Bostock is in private practice. Reac im at *0*-525-*77* or at cliff.bostock@creativeloafing.com.