The delightful Alice gently takes me to task for dissing the local weather man. You should check out what she says, but here's a taste:

"Yep, it's annoying, until you're the one whose house is getting pounded. Then you'll want your local station to hype its mega-Doppler and all their bag of tricks. . . weather IS important in every market; that's why you see shivering reporters doing the 11pm news in front of the sand truck station when a foot of snow is forecast. Yes, it's a gratuitous liveshot; but weather affects EVERYONE, and I'd rather see that than the latest sweeps piece on Bras That Give You Cancer."

Talk about bad timing; I posted a rant on useless weather coverage the day after a terrible tornado devastated several states. It reminds me of that company in the early 1980's that chose to name its diet supplement "AIDS."

Alice is right -- weather is important (although let's not give cancer-causing bras short shrift). The problem, as I see it, is two-fold: first, news stations spend a lot of time telling us about thunderstorms and threats thereof, which are almost uniformly unhelpful except to that small contingent of people who may be watching television and trying to decide whether to take a drive.

Second, when there is severe weather, the stations don't simply keep us informed, they turn it into an event. Viewers don't need repetitive analyses of how the little countercyclical spinning thingy on the edge of the big red radar blob is an indication that this may be a twister, any more than we need the airline pilot to tell us that we're passing through 25,000 feet. Just tell us where the storm is every once in a while, color code it (blue for thunderstorm, red for tornado, etc.), and keep those graphics off of my starlets. Time is cruel enough to them as it is.