I will confess to being something of a NOAA Weather Radio
junkie. My father (now unbelievably a
defector to the Weather Channel and his local news station) introduced us to the
wonders of this service years ago, and I still have his original faux wood receiver
from Radio Shack. The
consistently-accurate NOAA is a real help in planning what to wear, determining
if we need to water the garden, or prompting us to turn on the heat lamp for
the chickens. But I find the looped
forecasts, climate summaries, and hazardous weather outlooks to be oddly
soothing as the synthetic voice drones on.
The icing on the cake is that the folks at our regional
National Weather Service office have a very sly sense of humor. They occasionally slip in something funny,
perhaps just to see who’s paying attention.
A couple years ago I was listening late at night, and for a few cycles
the forecast poetically described a beautiful sunny day ahead when “the highs
would reach into the upper 60s before the great orange ball retreated below the
Western horizon.” And during a cold snap a couple weeks ago, the forecast
was running through the list of potential hazards—wind chill, snow, etc.—and tucked
in there was “dangerous heat potential:
risk, nil.”
If you must Confesss* to hosting this typo in your own catalog,
at least you’re in good company. There
are 16 instances of it in the OhioLINK database and 135 in WorldCat.
(Logo of NOAA Weather Radio, "The Voice of the National
Weather Service," from Wikimedia Commons)
Deb Kulczak
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