{"id":211,"date":"2013-03-06T21:52:33","date_gmt":"2013-03-06T21:52:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/?p=211"},"modified":"2013-03-06T21:52:33","modified_gmt":"2013-03-06T21:52:33","slug":"all-talk-%e2%80%94-no-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/?p=211","title":{"rendered":"All Talk \u2014 No Do"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I went to bed last night, all the weather forecasters were predicting a snowfall of historic proportions. When I got up this morning, we had snow on the ground and it was snowing, but it was only of &#8220;historic proportions&#8221; because it was the largest snowfall this year. I guess it&#8217;s easy to criticize and make fun of weather forecasters but they&#8217;re wrong so often it kind of takes all the sport out of it.<\/p>\n<p>They say everybody talks about the weather but no one does anything about it. That&#8217;s true \u2014 but I&#8217;m not sure how you&#8217;d <em>do<\/em> anything about it. Weather forecasters don&#8217;t do anything about the weather, but\u00a0 they talk a lot about it \u2014 the problem is that the talk is mostly wrong.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve noticed that no matter how the forecast turns out, there&#8217;s always another forecaster who &#8220;knew it would&#8221; but the forecaster who &#8220;knew it would happen that way&#8221; never told anyone about it beforehand. I&#8217;ve also noticed that heavy snow generally ends once a winter storm warning is issued.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve always wondered a few things about the weather that have never been answered to my satisfaction. For instance\u2026.<br \/>\nDoes a tornado have to be bigger around than whatever its picking up? If our body temperature is normally 98.6 degrees, how come when it&#8217;s 98 degrees outside everyone complains because its hot? If you see a heat wave, should you wave back? (I just made that up.) If heat rises, shouldn&#8217;t hell be cold? When you see the weather report and its says &#8220;partly cloudy&#8221; and you see another that says &#8220;partly sunny&#8221; \u2014 what&#8217;s the difference?<\/p>\n<p>The problem with weather forecasting is that it&#8217;s right just often enough that you can&#8217;t completely ignore it but wrong so much that you can&#8217;t rely on it. Some years ago I had what turned out to be the best indicator of weather that I&#8217;ve ever seen \u2014 it was an Old Indian Weather Rock. It basically consisted of three sticks stuck in the ground and tied at a point forming a triangle \u2014 from that point a rock was suspended in the middle of the triangle by a leather strap. If the rock was wet, it was raining; if the rock was dry, it wasn&#8217;t raining; if the rock was white on top, it was snowing; if the rock was swinging, it was windy; if you couldn&#8217;t see the rock, it was foggy; if the rock was gone, it was a tornado. Amazingly enough, the rock was almost never wrong. If I ever find another one, I&#8217;m going to get it.<\/p>\n<p>So since our historic snowstorm has ended, here&#8217;s the forecast for tonight: Dark. Probably some widely scattered light by morning\u2026..<br \/>\n\u201430\u2014<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I went to bed last night, all the weather forecasters were predicting a snowfall of historic proportions. When I got up this morning, we had snow on the ground and it was snowing, but it was only of &#8220;historic &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/?p=211\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions\/212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}