Dr. George Fishbeck would roll over in his grave!

of course, he might still be alive - he’s an awfully hard-to-track-down guy.

Anyhow, the pertinent point is that I’ve come across another fascinating Freakonomics article; this one dealing with the inconsistency and inaccuracy of weather reports. To be it’s supremely ironic that I stumbled across this a mere day after ranting about a similar problem in the news’ treatment of the course of the stock market.

A lot of it (the article) sort of dovetails with common sense, though it’s so easy to just assume that the newscasters actually know what they’re doing… but then again, that’s exactly my problem with stock reporting; you trust them to know what they’re talking about, and often they don’t have the decency to admit they simply don’t know.

As for Dr. George, well that’s just a blast from my past. I haven’t thought of him in years, until I was trying to come up with a ‘different’ title for this post. I think he will always be my image of a stereotypical weatherman from the ‘good old days’ - back before Dallas Raines (is that really his legal name?) or Christopher Nance or the comic Fritz Coleman. And in trying to look up whatever became of him, I stumbled across this little post which surprised me by informing me that Dr. George is immortalized in a Tom Waits song (I’m guessing Writin Wrong has heard it at some point).

To summarize, I quote from the article:

The takeaway message? Do not plan your weekend activities based on the T.V. weather forecasts unless it is already Thursday — but waiting until Friday would be even better.