What John Bolaris reads instead of tea leaves

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate,” I told Swamp Rabbit, quoting from an old movie but referring to Philly-based John Bolaris, one of the shiny happy people paid by the media machine to communicate weather forecasts.

Bolaris was on the radio, explaining why the “monster storm” predicted for us barely touched PA and NJ before rolling over New England, where big storms in the East usually end up. It seems he and his fellow weather swamis had to choose from a number of possible computer-generated storm models, meaning scenarios. He and they chose wrong, but better to be safe than sorry, blah blah.

“What a blowhard,” I said. “People in the real world get fired for being that wrong.”

The rabbit, sounding more savvy than he did last winter, said I was the one who was wrong. “His job ain’t to inform people, Odd Man. It’s to scare ’em, like them horror movies do. People like being scared. The more scared they is, the more they watch the TV news. Ain’t you learned that yet?”

I was still ranting. “I spent the whole night worrying that the roof of this shack might cave in from the snow that never fell.”

“Well there you go,” the rabbit replied. “The weatherman done his job, didn’t he?”

Footnote: Too bad the mainstream media would rather hype winter snowstorms — they’re so unusual! — than inform people about long-term climate change. But that’s another story — a real story.