Friday, June 17, 2005
Breath of fresh air
Jason Samenow @ 12:33 AM
I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting when I joined my son for the final leg of his cross-country trip to the east coast, but it certainly wasn't temperatures reaching into the upper 90s and humidity of 132 percent.If she had only consulted CapitalWeather.com and delayed her trip a few days, DC would have met her expectations. Shucks.
I came out here with completely different expectations. Mild days, cool nights, I tried packing for any type of weather, but had no idea I'd be changing my soaked clothes every two hours.
Channel 4's funnyman, Willard Scott, who has observed that "a trained gorilla could do this job every night," says the seriousness of the cold, snow and ice - the energy shortage, job layoffs, personal injuries - has "straightened up" his usually light-hearted presentation "considerably".It's interesting to note how TV weather has evolved in DC from the clown-like antics of Al and Willard to the seriousness of Bob, Doug and Topper. Perhaps the freeze of 1977 set this transformation in motion.
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Still, Scott, a happy giant of a man, can't resist one small joke, on himself. "I fell on the ice. A fellow called in and said he knew. It had been registered on the Richter scale."
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Like Scott, Channel 5's Al Roker finds this a time to change his delivery. "The weather's not a laughing matter anymore," says Roker, who one night did a TV weather show in Syracuse dressed as a cookie monster before joining Channel 5 here a little more than a month ago.