Okay so maybe the “Ed” premiere isn’t exactly a presidential address, but must you cut into it every 10 minutes to tell us it’s raining? I’d see cause for alarm if there was a tornado on the way, or at least some significant hail, but it was just raining!
Plus, when you do cut in, keep it short for Pete’s sake. Last night you told me all about where the storm was, and then WHERE IT HAD COME FROM? Who cares! Bastards.
I’m with you slacker! Stick your head out a damned window if you wanna know what the weather’s like. Every time they break into regular programming, my heart sinks for a second. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, figuratively speaking, with the terrorist situation. Pre- 9/11, it was just an inconvenience. Now I fucking hate it.
Quadruple double Doppler radar, my ass. You still have no F’ing idea when it’ll rain, especially here in North Texas (Allen, in my case). Even a broken clock’s right twice a day.
They have a keen eye for the blatantly obvious.
I was just about to close out this thread when I ran across that line.
Me friggin’ too!!
Except in my case, I can’t stand the damn Emergency Broadcast interruptions. And for some reason, they’ve been going nutso with them ever since 911.
Jesus! Talk about making someone nervous. Even their scrawl gets me jumpy… ATTENTION SAINT PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS RESIDENTS. EFFECTIVE FROM 9:00 P.M. CENTRAL STANDARD TIME TO 11:00 P.M. CENTRAL STANDARD TIME, THE FOLLOWING CITIES… what? What?? WHAT!?! What’s happening here!?! …WILL BE CONDUCTING A TEST OF THE EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM… Oh thank God.
It’s the first time in years I’m actually expecting them to tell me something. Each time they don’t, it’s a relief. But with all the concerns going around these days, every time it comes up I stop what I’m doing.
Listen EBS folks, do our nerves a favor, stop running those damn ads until we have a chance to settle down. Or at least stop running them almost twice a week.
Here in the Omaha area, our local yokels on ALL FOUR network
affiliates break into programming to tell us of ordinary, everyday thunderstorms occuring wihin 150 miles of Omaha.
(90% of the time these thunderstorms are not even severe–
no hail, no tornado activity, not even straight-line winds of any real force, just rain and lightning.)
The idiot programmers of these stations don’t seem to know:
Omaha over-the-air TV signals don’t travel very well throughout the Omaha area, much less the surrounding countryside. Cable was such a success here because everybody was sick of “4 ghosts on 7” and “freaky-colored newscasters’ faces on on 3”. Whenever the cable’s out, I can see that any quality changes over the past 25 years have been for the worse.
People living nearer to Sioux City, Des Moines, St. Joe, Kansas City, Lincoln,NE, or Grand Island,NE are probably watching one of those cities’ TV and not Omaha’s. Many small-town cable systems pick up the closest city’s TV for rebroadcast, as well. NOBODY more than 60 miles outside Omaha watches your station. Nobody in Omaha cares about an ordinary rainfall IN Omaha enough to want their tube disrupted, let alone an ordinary rain in Woodbury County,IA
or Pawnee County, NE.
Those of us whose first recollections of TV consist of Howdy Doody on 3 and “the Captain” on 6 can remember when responsible people ran your stations’ news departments. A
“special bulletin” really WAS special ( Ike having a heart attack, the Kennedy assassination, the first space shots, etc.) and weather bulletins meant it’s getting bad enough outside to head for the basement. You peoples’ tendency to make a big deal out of everything will lead to disaster one day as cynical viewers decide to take bathroom breaks rather than stick around for the tornado warning or the news that anthrax has been introduced into the water supply
thinking its just another bullshit “it’s raining in Falls City” announcement or network nitwit’s “unconfirmed report from a usually reliable source” or some self-serving politician exploiting the misery of others for selfish gain( this includes YOU, Rudy Giuliani. You miserable philadering troll!).
Get used to it Slacker. If there’s severe thunderstorms in the D/FW area then you’ll see your programs inturrupted on a regular basis. That’s just the way they do things down there.
Marc
Believe me I know - I’ve lived here almost all my life. 
The people in the path of the storm care. The people who have been affected by the storm care. This may come as a surprise to you, but not everybody who gets the NBC broadcast lives in the Metroplex. Some people live in rural areas and they need to know if there are potential floods.
Yes, it is annoying to have your show interupted, but I think your rant is misplaced.
I dig the fact that on occasion people need to know when a storm is coming, but in this case the weatherguy droned on for a few extra minutes about where the storm had come from. That, IMO, is extraneous information. I’d be delighted if he just cut in, told us who needs to duck, and cut out.
Incidentally, the storm was still going during The West Wing premiere - but they didn’t dare interrupt that. All they did was run the little warning lines across the bottom of the screen.
A few years ago, a tornado ripped through an area just outside Birmingham, Alabama, killing several people.
For a year after that, local stations would completely interrupt network programming if a mild thunderstorm was coming. None of this map-in-the-corner stuff; the weathermen would be on-air for two or more hours, pointing out color splotches on their Doppler radar screens and getting all worked up whenever a cloud showed the least inclination to rotate. All of this over storms that might drop an inch or two of rain, and weren’t particularly severe.
The strange thing is, we get tornadoes a lot in this area. I guess because that particular tornado actually hit near Birmingham, it made them jumpy. That, and they all probably just spent several hundred thousand dollars on new weather technology, and had to justify the expense somehow.
Channel 5 weather hasn’t been the same since Harold Taft died. (Long-time residents of D/FW know who I’m talking about.)