Reading Ken Goldstein's comments on the central place still played in our lives by weather reminds me of something I want to get off my chest. I live in Kansas, so perhaps this is a local phenomenon, but it seems to me that in their insane quest to differentiate themselves by acquiring increasingly sophisticated weather equipment, the local news stations have collectively gone off the deep end. I was watching one of my favorite television shows the other night, one of those programs where the female characters all have the names of sorority girls and wear shirts that terminate two inches above their pants lines, and I realized how much less enjoyable the show is when I can't see the exposed midriffs that are clearly integral to plot development.

I came about this realization because plastered over fully one-fifth of my screen was a large county map of the state of Kansas, with a big red dot 600 miles to the northwest tracking -- I am not making this up -- a thunderstorm warning. Across the bottom ran this continual ticker tape parade of information about this apparently vicious but elusive thunderstorm, which was reputedly on the verge of giving any number of milo farms on the Colorado border a good soaking.

What's worse, whenever there's real weather, even if it's in Nebraska, the breathless weather announcer will break into my program every three minutes to remind me that his crack team, with their new High-Performance, Double-Infrared, Super-Duper Quadruple Doppler Tracker, is on the case. I live in Kansas, for crying out loud. You can see the weather coming ten miles away. I certainly don't need to know about a tornado that may or may not materialize. It's not like I have horses to set loose, or a barn to batten down, such that I really need some advance preparation time. And the people who do have those responsibilities, I'm quite sure, are not watching "Friends." What's more, there's a tornado alarm every thirty feet in Kansas. I know, because they test the things every clear Monday afternoon during tornado season; the sound is something akin to what I imagine the second coming will be like. Which reminds me: we should probably all thank the good Lord that churches don't have their own tracking systems to keep us up to date on all the Jesus and Mary sightings they receive.

And the only reason we are afflicted with this barrage of Weather Updates, Weather Warnings, Weather Rumors, and various and sundry other Weather Analyses, is because local stations, after a frenzy of mutually-assured financial destruction, woke up from their spending binge to discover that they have weather equipment that puts NASA to shame, which means they must -- come hell, high water, or just a mild sprinkle in Brazil, use it for God's sake. They certainly have to give those fat, overly happy weathermen something to do, otherwise they just hang around the break room all day, eating doughnuts and hitting on the interns. Which reminds me: no matter where you live, your local weatherman is much like our latest ex-President -- you don't really trust him, but you find yourself listening to him anyway.

The solution, of course, is for local stations to donate all of this equipment to those Third World villages we are reading about every week, which are always getting hit by a monsoon or something and losing 70% of their inhabitants, all because there's only one working television in the place, and it's tuned to "Baywatch." Surely there's some tax write-off for the stations that do so; they'd be doing the world some good, and, be honest, how often is that true of local news stations anymore?

Most important, I'd be able to see the bottom half of my screen again. For most actors, this really is their better half.