NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) – Tedious observations about the severe winter weather are expected to dominate the conversations of uninteresting people for the next 24 to 48 hours, boredom experts warned today.
With blizzard conditions blanketing the Northeast, a powerful front of mind-numbing weather-related banter is expected to pound the Eastern Seaboard from Sunday into Monday, with statements of the obvious stretching from the Carolinas to New England.
Half:
Very astute. I am aghast by how many minutes long today’s news coverage is on the snow story. In a short number of days, you can almost guarantee President Obama will be held responsible for the snow storm.
Of course, it is all part of the ongoing psychological engineering.
Make normal things into strange events and make trivial fact repetition, headline news and you are, by attrition, fucking up people’s circuits; their ability to calibrate what IS significant.
*Apologies for the serious bent, here!
These macro-interpretations, supplied by the mass media, serve as surrogates for a person’s actual experience/evaluation of their existence.
In any weather, it has always struck me how hidebound virtually everyone I know is by planning many activities on the basis of weather forecasts. How about just getting up in the morning and looking outside your window?
There are some situations where having an idea about potential weather patterns has some merit – but by and large, none whatsoever.
People are increasingly encouraged to reduce their lives to the circumstances that ‘happen to them’. And most ‘news’ simply feeds a construct long ago imbibed from our ‘enslavers’.
These ‘news’ shots frame our reality with somebody else’s intention; to react against them is usually a part of the problem. Personally, I think that until we source our own news with interesting life experiences we will always be tempted to buy into the prescribed constructs.
All this said, Andy Borowitz does say it well – as all good observational humour does..
uh oh — thanks for the warning, fe.
does whistling count?
Amanda:
I think you and your mom have just been programmed to do something seriously out of character in the next week or so. Watch for signs.
Particularly the one where you’re humming “The Lonely Goatherd” without prompting.
You’re right. The fog attacks are particularly violent and cause for alarm. They usually precede balls of heavenly fire which rain down to punish the wicked here for ambi-sexuality, overly rich food and extremely expensive metered parking. San Francisco is not what it used to be. Lucky you were in a vehicle.
honestly — every 10 minutes there seemed to be a commercial break featuring the exact same information-less “updates” the whole time mom & watched “the sound of music.”
*not* one of my “favorite things.” š
well you’ve seen it… that doesn’t mean we have… but in SF it snows on the same day there is a heat wave, a fog attack, thunder and an earthquake.
In fact once driving around SF bay area (on the way to visit William Pennell Rock) I used my car heat, my AC, the defroster, open windows and the windshield wipers all within one hour. I am not kidding. It didn’t snow or maybe it did and I didn’t notice because so much else was going on…
So in 2008 when I walked the streets of Kingston, the cold white particulate matter was symbolic snow?
give people up here a break, we’ve never seen snow before…
This is funny and much appreciated. I was out for a walk this afternoon, listening to my radio and I actually did think that if I hear *anymore* stories about what the weather is *about* to do along the east coast of Canada and the northern seaboard, I will scream!
You have to admit with some pleasure that after a full year of disaster porn this quiet is appreciated. Those little crystalline icon thingies really tend to quiet stuff out.
No two appear the same on any TV
Is snow that little white crystalline icon on the tv?
Thanks for the laffs.
Yep sure looks like snow.