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Monday, April 19, 2004

TRANSFORMERS ON FIRE! 

James Lileks talks about the weather (we actually have weather here, unlike Los Angeles, and the inoffensiveness of the topic makes it a local specialty).

Plus, we had a storm here last night. Eagerly anticipated by all, but no doubt even more so by our local weather folks who got to pre-empt all local programming (The Simpsons snuck through but even they got boxed in by a crawl ticking down watches and warnings). Sadly for some there was little in the way of spectacular damage to parade in front of the viewers so what we mostly got was footage of a transformer fire somewhere. From every angle. But how many shots of one transformer can a station run? Even with the creative camera angles, it gets silly amazingly quickly.

Now I'm as much a fan of transformer fires as the next gal. We have a transformer on the corner and about every other year some squirrel meets its untimely end (much to the Warrior Monk's delight) and our electricity cuts out. But re-running the footage every ten minutes? Even if it included flying squirrel bodies, I think even the W. Monk would get bored after a few viewings. But the station disagreed.

I'm not dissing my fair city now; the silly coverage is a function of weather, not Midwestern hickiness. When the Big Apple had a hurricane wander up the coast and then fizzle out back in the 1980's, the weather folk out there all clustered around a broken window on Madison Avenue. They were probably wishing some transformer would catch on fire.

We're so lucky!

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