Showing posts with label forecasts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label forecasts. Show all posts

Friday, January 24, 2014

How To Humiliate Those Jerks Who Blame Disasters On Gay Marriage

A weird conservative politician in Britain named David Silverster attempted a tried and true response to the recent passage of gay marriage legislation in that country.
A storm slams Britain in December. A local
politician blames the bad weather on the
gays, as always, which has led to some
hilarious mocking. 

Silverster said devastating December storms and floods in Britain were God's wrath for gay marriage. Religious wackos have used that line in the United States for years.

In the United States, we just roll our eyes at such stupidity. But we should take a page from Britain, where comics and wiseguys invented their own weather forecasts to mock Silvester.

On person Tweeted:

Tonight for the first time
Just about half-past ten
For the first time in history
It's gonna start raining men. 


Of course, that's lyrics from the 1980s song "It's Raining Men" by the Weather Girls, which is particularly popular among many gay people. 

So many people have latched on to this song since Silvester made his dumb comments that the tune might once again reach Number 1 on the charts in Britain next week. 

Martha Wash, who was a vocalist for the Weather Girls, is not surprisingly, just fine with this.

"I'm flattered that after all these years, the song is still relevant (event if it is for storms and floods)" she wrote in an email  

Dean Burnett, writing in The Guardian, wrote a mock science article that indicated Sylvester had a point, because maybe gay marriage was disrupting local weather patterns and worsening global warming, which in turn was causing weather extremes:

"Logically, same sex marriage leads to an increase in the number of wedding. Weddings invariably involve a large number of people congregating in one place, which leads to a lot of body heat and warming, and this heat enters the atmosphere, increasing the air temperature and producing more warm fronts.

People also cry a lot at weddings. This likely to be even more pronounced at same sex weddings, with the added element of recently achieved equality making the events even more poignant. 

Tears are basically water, which quickly evaporate, thus adding to the water content of the atmosphere.

Weddings also typically involve a lot of alcohol, which makes people colder, meaning they're more likely to turn on heating systems when they arrive home, releasing more heat and CO2 into the atmosphere."

Finally, actor Nicholas Pegg did a deadpan mockup of a Serious Official Shipping Forecast that the BBC regularly broadcasts to a large audience in Britain.

In Pegg's high seas forecast, he warned of "Gays at Viking, Southeast Iceland and Bongo Bongo land" and alerted mariners to the risk of "homophobic outbursts, back peddling westerly and becoming untenable."

So, the next time some right wing wacko in the United States blames the gays for the inevitable spring tornado outbreak in the Midwest, we should be ready with our own forecasts.

I suggest using the song "Tornado" by Little Big Town, with the lyric, "I'm a tornado looking for a soul to take."  
 

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Groundhog Is Innocent: Death Warrant Dropped After Evidence Phil Was Just The Fall Guy

Last week we reported in this blog that the Ohio attorney general wanted the death penalty against Punxsatawny Phil, the Pennsylvania groundhog that predicted an early spring.
Death warrant dropped for this guy  

It turns out the prosecutor had the wrong guy. He admits it and has dropped the charges. The Groundhog is safe to forecast the weather on another day.

Phil's handler, Bill Deeley, said that the groundhog had actually accurately predicted six more weeks of winter, but Deeley misinterpreted Phil's language on the matter and thus Deeley delivered the wrong message.

So Phil did not mislead and defraud us into thinking an early spring was at hand. The Ohio prosecutor is also not going after Deeley, because he made an innocent mistake and did not intend to deceive the public.

I also think part of the reason people are no longer calling for Phil's head is because the weather has improved somewhat in the Northeast. It's not exactly warm and sunny, but the snow has largely stopped, which makes people a bit less frustrated and a bit more helpful. Cooler heads are prevailing, even if those heads are still wearing hats because it isn't that warm out yet.

Of course, Phil might ask this question, too: Why are you relying on a rodent to forecast the weather?