Desperate Housewife Angered By 'Severe Weather' Coverage
Birmingham (JM) - Honey Prater, a homemaker from Roebuck Springs, was incensed last Sunday evening when her favorite program, 'Desperate Housewives' was pre-empted for wall-to-wall coverage of normal springtime thundershowers. "I can't believe they cut in again!" screeched Mrs. Prater, throwing an overstuffed sofa pillow across the room. "Every single week they find some excuse! And always during Housewives!"
Prater may not be crazy, according to research on trends in television
weather reporting conducted at Birmingham-Southern College.
Anthropology student Pridesh Gupta recalls that when he started
researching his thesis on depictions of sexuality on prime-time
television, he began to realize that week after week his videotaped
footage would show giant animated 3-D radar images instead of regularly
scheduled episodes of brief partial nudity, sexual situations, and
adult language. "At some point, I decided to start compiling statistics
on which programs were most often interrupted by severe weather
coverage," said Gupta. "Strangely enough, a weather-related
interruption is 48% more likely to happen during a show known to
feature risque content or language. This has been true throughout
tornado season, and all winter long. I haven't yet been able to posit a
reason for this correlation."
The Coalition of Christian Meteorologists has a theory, though. "I'd
suspect that if what Mr. Gupta says is true, that it could be
interpreted as the divine will of our Lord Jesus Christ," said Maxwell
Pinella, a spokesman for the powerful prognosticator's union.
"Obviously we can't control when severe weather strikes, all we can do
is come on the air and urge people to go to their place of prayer and
safety. If we have to interrupt programming for that, I don't think
anyone here is upset that it might be programming with unwholesome
content."
Mrs. Prater was not impressed, though. "It wasn't even [expletive
deleted] raining Sunday night!" she moaned. "Samantha's softball game
went into extra innings and we had to call in and grab some carry out
from Outback to even make it home by 8:00, and there's James [expletive
deleted] Spann striding back and forth with his sleeves rolled up
talking about 'possible rotational signatures' heading for some
insignificant little cluster of trailers nobody's ever heard of. As if
he has personally mapped the location of every Unocal and Shop-A-Snack
in central Alabama."
Mrs. Prater paused to sit back down on the couch and hide her face in
her hands. "The [expletive deleted] radar map was completely clear
except for some faint green readings right around the center of the
radar sweep," she whimpered before gathering her composure. "This is
just stupid! Even I know that's just ground clutter!"
Digging deeper, this reporter was able to shed light on another
possible influencing factor: A source at ABC 33/40 who asked not to be
identified revealed that CCM meteorologists are guaranteed a certain
number of 'severe weather events' each year in their contracts with the
local stations. "A lot of these guys make a lot of extra money with
public appearances. They rely on severe weather to give them
credibility as trusted figures. If there's no fear, there's no respect.
Furthermore, the standard CCM contract gives the head meteorologist a
lot of say in when to break into programming. It's their call, not the
network, and certainly not the National Weather Service."
At press time the Coalition of Christian Meteorologists could neither
confirm nor deny this allegation.