![]() Rain, ordinarily a spoilsport, could be a lover’s friend (“Isn’t This a Lovely Day to be Caught in the Rain?”). To lyricists in the guileless 1920s and ’30s the weather was a meteorological playground, and they didn’t hesitate to write about phenomena not necessarily known to science: blue moons, paper moons, stardust, stars falling on Alabama, pennies from heaven, life over the rainbow, and love east of the sun. It’s a state of mind, the stuff of dreams and yearnings. America’s songwriters knew in their bones that the weather was not reducible to facts and figures. Listening to those grim technicians during the summer’s calamitous heat, I thought of an earlier breed of sky watchers who didn’t take the weather so seriously. No pity softens the voice of the weatherperson notifying us that tomorrow’s 96-degree day will have a “real-feel” temperature of 107. ![]() Poetic ruminations about the moon and the stars and the wind have no place in TV’s world of scientific charts: runic arrangements of circles and arrows purporting to denote storm fronts, floods, blizzards, hurricanes, and other natural calamities heading our way. Television has hijacked the weather and stolen its mystery.
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