Go, El Nino!

[camwyn]

A friend of mine once introduced me to a word game of sorts: the game of Things That Cannot Mean Anything Good If They Appear In An Obituary. The most popular contender was 'while cleaning his gun', but there were quite a few other phrases and/or words that made the list - my personal favourite was 'nail gun', although there were a few circumstances under which it might not be bad. ('Inventor of' or 'manufacturer of', mostly.)

I'd like to open a similar game for weather forecasts, and the inaugural entry is courtesy of Bill Evans on WPLJ this morning. The word is: 'Biblical'.

You just cannot HAVE a weather forecast that uses that word that means anything good! For the record, it had to do with an El Nino storm in the Pacific that looks like it might drop enough rain on LA to end the area drought. Bill claimed that the storm looked like it would make its way across the southern US and spawn snowstorms as it headed up the coast, with accumulations in 'the low end of Biblical - 16 to 20 inches'. I think he was talking a week and a half in advance.

Comments

[ahmeemee.livejournal.com]

Anything involving animals, like cats, dogs, and frogs, cannot be good when used in a weather forecast.

[camwyn]

Well, I dunno. Weather forecasters sometimes think they're being amusing when they use the cats and dogs phrase - but frogs? There's nothing good that involves the mention of frogs. Either it's raining frogs, or it's a frog-strangler rainstorm, or something like that - and either way it's not good.

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

...might drop enough rain on LA to end the area drought.

What drought? They're getting about the expected amount of rain, allowing for the fact that most of SouthCal is desert.

Sorry. Hot-button issue to those of us farther north.

-M

Re:

[camwyn]

The drought that New York area weather people seem to believe exists? I dunno. Bill was the one who used 'drought' in connection with 'Los Angeles'. Also words like 'years-long'. 'scuse me, Bill, I thought that was parts of the country like Wyoming and the Carolinas (NC had a three-year water shortage situation as of last May - dunno if that's changed since then).

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Apparently the past few years they've been getting even less than their normal 'not very much,' which of course makes them ask to steal our water. Again. Never mind that the Bay Area is fairly arid itself...

-- Lorrie

[sdelmonte]

Biblical snowstorms? Well, the Bible takes place in Israel, Egypt, Babylonia, and other points in the Middle East. It does snow in that part of the world - indeed, there is even a ski slope at the northern end of Israel - but snow is not weather I associate with the Bible.

Does anyone know of any snowstorms actually occuring in the Bible? I don't.

So the low end of a "biblical" snowstorm would be about the same as the high end.

(Yes, I know what he meant, but he asked for it.)

[camwyn]

A fact which I realized about five minutes after he said it. I don't remember any of the major wrathful passages citing snow as the scourge o' choice.