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Breath of fresh air

Jason Samenow @ 12:33 AM

Now Through The Weekend

Strong northwesterly flow will keep temperatures down and the humidity low today through Sunday. Highs today should be near 75, climbing to 78 on Saturday and near 80 on Sunday. The National Weather Service forecast mentions a 20% of showers this afternoon and Saturday afternoon, but I think most of the activity should stay to our north.

Both weekend days look great for the Alexandria Red Cross Waterfront Festival. You might also consider checking out Reston's Taste of the Town (pdf) on Saturday.

Complaining Cornhusker

I was amused when I stumbled upon the perspective "Hot times in Washington D.C." from the McCook Daily Gazette (Nebraska). (Have any of our readers been to or, much less, heard of McCook, Nebraska?) The columnist was not a fan of the weather here. Here's how she opened the column:
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.

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.
If she had only consulted CapitalWeather.com and delayed her trip a few days, DC would have met her expectations. Shucks.

Blast from the past

A colleague of mine forwarded me an article from the Washington Post's January 31, 1977 edition headlined: "Weathermen: Putting A Freeze on Humor". At the time Willard Scott, Al Roker, Barry ZeVan and Gordon Barnes were the local weathercasters. Copyright restrictions forbid me from posting the whole article, but here are a few funny excerpts:
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".

...

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."
...

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.
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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