![]() 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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