Tag: Washington

Hurricane Questions

After the loss of life, and confusion, following Hurricane Charley, an interesting op-ed piece was written by Bryan Norcross, Chief Meteorologist from WFOR in Miami. You can read it here now, or click the ‘continue’ link at the end of this posting.

Norcross makes some interesting points, many of which I agree with.

Though we make our own forecasts at the TV station, we respect the Weather Service’s watches and warnings (though there are times I mention them, followed by what I think will actually happen).

The bigger problem occurs when watches and warnings are contradictory. Uncoordinated watches, warnings and statements for hurricanes, severe storms… even winter weather, is a continuing weakness of The Weather Service. All hurricane watches, warnings and statements should come from one place – period.

This certainly led to the disservice done to the people for Florida.

When local offices speak, they address problems from their own perspective, which is not necessarily the public’s. And, the public and media are probably concentrating their attention on the Storm Prediction Center (Whose idea was it to change this from the much more meaningful Hurricane Center?), which is where most people would expect to find hurricane info.

I work in Connecticut, a small state served by three NWS offices. Their statements often mislead the public because each only refers to the region for which they forecast.

Here’s an example. If Boston says a watch has been canceled for Connecticut, they mean their counties. No one in Connecticut could read a statement like that and understand that half the state is still under a watch.

During the winter, Litchfield County, our ‘snowbelt,’ might be under a lesser category of alert because the Albany office uses somewhat different criteria than the New York or Boston offices. When I post a map which shows a Winter Weather Advisory for Litchfield while there’s a Winter Storm Warning for our other counties (even though Litchfield has the more wintry forecast) it does nothing but confuse.

I have been to NWS ‘customer’ conferences in Washington, and have tried to sensitize them to this confusion. As you see – no change.

Continue reading “Hurricane Questions”

Stranger Than Fiction – Much Stranger

I got a call from my friend Farrell earlier this evening. “Do you still have today’s Times?” he asked.

He was calling from Washington, but I knew he wasn’t talking about the Washington Times. The New York Times was his concern and I still had my copy at home.

“Look at Page A6.”

So tonight, when I got home, I did just that. It was a typical inside page in the Times main section. Fully 75% of the page was ads. The lower half was a sedate graph touting the ratings for NBC’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention. It was that ad Farrell was referring to.

A first glance it looks perfectly normal… but read each word carefully.

I can’t believe this got by everyone at NBC and the Times!


It’s An Addiction – I’m Not Alone

Katie Haffner had an interesting story about blogging in this moring’s New York Times. I always thought (and Helaine will confirm) I’d gone off the deep end with blogging, but this article makes it seem like I’m not so bad. There are others who have been bitten far worse.

Thanks God for small favors.

Continue reading “It’s An Addiction – I’m Not Alone”

Gene Klavan

When I was growing up, my parents (mostly my dad) listened to WNEW. To me it represented what adult life was about. It was sophisticated and upwardly mobile. The stars of that era of popular music hung out at WNEW and socialized with the disk jockeys.

It was a Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Jack Jones, Steve & Eydie kind of place.

The morning show was Klavan and Finch. Gene Klavan was the comic and Dee Finch his straight man. This past week Gene Klavan died at 79.

I was speaking to my dad tonight, looking for the right moment to tell him about Klavan, when he told me.

I stopped for a minute. Is it right to tell a 78 year old about the death of a 79 year old? And then I asked him.

I didn’t want to pry, but I wondered how my dad looked at death. I think (and he reads this so he’ll tell me if I’m wrong) that he just sees it as a part of life. Where he lives, in Florida, he is surrounded by it.

His life now is the best it’s ever been. He and my mom are incredibly active – much more so than ever before. He says, 78 is an age he never imagined, much less consciously thought of.

I see my parents living forever. But they are so much better at dealing with reality than I am.

Continue reading “Gene Klavan”

Crunch Time for School

Our 20th wedding anniversary is coming up tomorrow, so I am rushing to finish my school assignments so the day can be free and dedicated to celebrating.

It’s funny, but in the beginning of the school year, Severe Weather was the tough course. Now, it’s Statistical Climatology.

Tonight, doing some homework necessary for a quarterly test, I worked for a half hour on a problem only to realize the data was split between two pages, so I had left half of it out. This problem had dozens of individual little steps. And, after a point, everything became dependent on what you had previously calculated.

When I realized how long it would take to redo everything, I went a little crazy. If only I knew how to do it on a spreadsheet!

I tried getting my friend Bob on Instant Messenger. He’s Mr. Meteorology (actually Dr. Meteorology) and a math wiz. Nothing. So, a quick call to Paul in California who has used spreadsheets for years to do budgets… but never stat work and never using any functions other than add, subtract, multiply and divide. I needed to do square roots and other obscure functions.

As I was hearing about Paul’s limitations, Bob answered the IM call. I hung up on Paul and phoned Bob. In two minutes I had accomplished as much as I had before I discovered my error earlier!

I don’t want to sound like George HW Bush at that Grocery Convention a few years back&#185, but I have no experience with spreadsheets. They were, after all, the first ‘killer app’ for computers – beginning with Visicalc. I should have a working knowledge.

It is astounding what I was able to do, accurately, and in very short order. And, to do the simple stuff was fairly easy. I should be able to go back without trouble.

I am using the spreadsheet built into OpenOffice.org, which is a Microsoft Office look alike/work alike… and it’s FREE! I would like OpenOffice.org more if it was supported by books. There are dozens of books on Microsoft Office but hardly anything to buy on OpenOffice.org.

With the homework now finished, tomorrow I can take my tests (actually, later today).

&#185Today, for instance, [Bush] emerged from 11 years in Washington’s choicest executive mansions to confront the modern supermarket.

Visiting the exhibition hall of the National Grocers Association convention here, Mr. Bush lingered at the mock-up of a checkout lane. He signed his name on an electronic pad used to detect check forgeries.

“If some guy came in and spelled George Bush differently, could you catch it?” the President asked. “Yes,” he was told, and he shook his head in wonder.

Then he grabbed a quart of milk, a light bulb and a bag of candy and ran them over an electronic scanner. The look of wonder flickered across his face again as he saw the item and price registered on the cash register screen.

“This is for checking out?” asked Mr. Bush. “I just took a tour through the exhibits here,” he told the grocers later. “Amazed by some of the technology.”

Marlin Fitzwater, the White House spokesman, assured reporters that he had seen the President in a grocery store. A year or so ago. In Kennebunkport.

Some grocery stores began using electronic scanners as early as 1976, and the devices have been in general use in American supermarkets for a decade.

From The New York Times

Kennedy Assassination As a Universal Experience

I remember, with vivid clarity, the moment I found out about John Kennedy’s assassination. I am not alone. It has been said that no one who lived through November 22, 1963 will ever forget where they were, what they were doing, when they found out.

For me, it was a sunny, late fall day, in Mr. Friend’s classroom on the back side of the first floor at Harold G. Campbell Junior High school. In New York City school names are ceremonial, at best. It was JHS 218 or JHS 218Q (for Queens).

Mr. Friend was told first and he relayed to the class that Kennedy had been shot. That’s all we knew. I can’t speak for the class, but I can tell you that whatever I thought at that moment, I wasn’t grasping the significance of the moment or that anything more could happen.

It was a time when TV news was much less crime and picture oriented. The grit and grime of violence may have been played out every day in the Daily News or Mirror (in 1963 the New York Post was a liberal newspaper which tended to play toward organized labor and its causes, not crime and debauchery)… but I read The Long Island Press, published in Jamaica, Queens. Violence outside of war didn’t exist as far as I was concerned.

November 22, 1963 was the day newspapers lost their position as ‘news of record’ for most Americans to television.

The windows from our classroom faced east, across open space and toward Queens College. Within a few minutes, someone in the class noticed a flag at Queens College being lowered to half staff. That’s when it hit me.

We were dismissed early and I began to walk home. I know I was with friends… maybe Dennis Westler, possibly Marty Ingber. I’m not really sure but I know I wasn’t alone. We discussed the fact that the president was dead and Lyndon Johnson, the vice president, had suffered a heart attack. I know now that was wrong – I didn’t then. We speculated what would happen. I was 13.

Still, we were discussing facts and the emotion had still not hit me. We were cavalier.

As I came home and turned on the TV, I realized this was major. All regular programming was gone. News, in a somber manner, was on all channels. Slowly, from the adults around me, I began to become aware of the gravity of the situation. We all sat, glued to the television.

Though I was born during the Truman administration and remember Eisenhower in a sketchy sort of way, Kennedy was the first president that I really knew. My parents were good Democrats in a lower middle class area of trade unionists who were also Democrats. The huge apartment complex we lived in, made up of dozens of three and six story buildings, was financed and built by the Electrical Workers Union Local 3 and called Electchester. Our friend Morris Scott, on the first floor of our six story 72 unit building, was a Transport Workers Union and Democratic functionary. He was not an exception in Electchester. The two went together.

During the campaign for the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy spoke at a campaign rally at Parsons Boulevard and Jewel Avenue, a block from our apartment. I found the photo on the left at an NYU site – amazing it’s preserved on the net. The facade of the building behind Kennedy is from the Pomonok Housing Project, which was across the street from us. The camera is shooting from the SE to the NW, across the intersection. My memory is of a huge crowd, but I was 10 at the time. This busy intersection was closed and a wooden platform was built.

Richard Nixon had nothing to gain by coming to my neighborhood. He was everything we weren’t, Kennedy was like us, though nothing could be further from the truth.

Anything I thought or felt about Kennedy during the campaign was based on those things that affect a ten year old; my parents, grandparents and the folks we lived around. I knew nothing about his policies, politics, social standing or any of the things we know today… and there’s no doubt we know a hell of a lot more today.

In my sphere of influence, Kennedy was like a god. I know that sounds foolish or naive now, but that’s the truth. To me, he was much larger than life. And he was the first adult I knew of to die tragically.

I had tickets to see a Broadway show on the Saturday following the assassination. It was probably my first Broadway show. Like the NFL schedule the next day, Broadway went on. In hindsight, both football and theater performances were bad ideas. Even so, with a bunch of my classmates and Mr. Friend, we boarded the bus for Flushing and the IRT subway (actually it was mostly above ground) to Times Square to see “Enter Laughing.”

I now know, this show was an autobiographical sketch from Carl Reiner. Then, who knew who Carl Reiner was? I remember it being funny in an irreverent sort of way, but the day being gray and gloomy in every other sense.

Sunday morning we sat home in our tiny apartment, 5E. I lived in an apartment with only a northern exposure. At no time in the 16 years I lived in this apartment… and decades longer my parents lived there, did we ever see the sun!

The TV in the living room, our only TV, was tuned to CBS. Along with millions of others, I watched Lee Harvey Oswald being shot, live. Being live, coast-to-coast, from that Dallas Police Department Garage was quite a technical achievement 40 years ago. Today, we see the videotape replay as grainy, dated black and white. Back then, it was live and vivid. Grainy black and white was the norm.

I was stunned. We were all stunned. How was this humanly possible? Today’s metal detecting, secure area-ed society was light years away. I had never seen a pistol, but in Texas, they were much more the norm.

Monday was the funeral. I think my dad was home, which was not a scheduled day off from work. Certainly every school was closed and my guess is most businesses too. By this time we had a common grief and stunned disbelief in what had happened. If it is possible, I remember being a 13 year old who was depressed.

The country stopped for the funeral. It struck me then, as it does now, that there are people who actually know how to plan an event like this with the proper protocol and deference to tradition. What a morbid field of expertise.

It was an awful, rainy day in Queens on that Monday. The funeral was long and sad and more than anything else I remember the riderless horse, the muffled drums and the crying. We’ve all seen the photo of John Jr. saluting. I believe that was only seen by still photographers. I don’t think we saw that live.

People think it was live because it’s been published and seen so many times. A similar situation is the film of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, with dust flying and the shadow of the lander on the surface. That too was never seen live on TV, though we did hear the voices of the astronauts and Mission Control.

Five or six years after the funeral I was marching down those same Washington streets, protesting the war in Vietnam. In 1963 there was no thought that you might protest what your government was doing. But after JFK’s assassination, everything changed.

Lyndon Johnson became the president and used the Kennedy aura to pass Civil Rights legislation that began to bring this country out some draconian policies that survived even the Civil War. Johnson also inherited Kennedy’s involvement in Vietnam, which would be his undoing as a president. The war accelerated, halfway around the world.

Before Kennedy’s assassination we were innocent and invulnerable. World War II had taken place without any conflict reaching America’s shores. Korea too was fought far away. The strength of our military, combined with the breadth of the ocean, protected us from harm. But now we found that harm could come from within and that nothing would ever be safe again.

A generation only knows about the assassination through Oliver Stone’s movie. Shame on him. Shame on them. Stone’s powerful use of the medium told America a lie, packaged as the truth.

Forty years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday.

(This entry originally posted November 22, 2003)

Phantom Lightning

As the power failure/blackout story progresses, the Canadian power authority has begun to blame a lightning strike in Northern New York State.

This would be a subject I have some expertise in. So, take my word. There was no lightning strike in Upstate New York this afternoon that might have set off the blackout. Period. End of story.

Continue reading “Phantom Lightning”