I’m sick of ‘super moons’ and ‘super storms’ and ‘bomb cyclones’
It used to just get cold. It used to just snow. The moon used to just be . . . the moon. Sometimes the moon was a little sliver. Sometimes it was full. Mostly it was in between.
Not anymore. These days, nothing can be normal. Now a full moon is a “supermoon.” A cold snap is a “polar vortex.” A snowstorm is a “bomb cyclone.”
Really? A bomb cyclone? That doesn’t even make sense. Shouldn’t it be cyclone bomb?
Actually, it should be: “It’s January. It’s going to be cold. It may get windy. It may snow.”
But I guess that wouldn’t sell cornflakes.
Here’s my plan for making America great again: Get rid of all these superfluous superlatives. They’re like the “Breaking News” graphic that runs endlessly along the bottom of the CNN feed, purporting to herald something special but serving merely to numb us with its needless overuse.
I blame the wind chill, invented in the 1970s to let the TV Weather Guy pad his report. The wind chill was the perfect data point for the Me Decade. No longer was it good enough to just tell us what the thermometer said. We had to know how the thermometer made us feel.
Awww, Mercury’s in retrograde and I feel fwozen.
People in hot climates felt so left out that someone came up with the heat index to give them something to carp about. Suddenly, just saying, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” didn’t cut it.
Then in 1999, those Cassandras at AccuWeather registered “RealFeel temperature” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. They threw cloud cover, sun intensity and wind into the mix to “explain how hot it feels outside.”
How does it RealFeel outside? It RealFeels like — oh, I don’t know — summer.
Once the simple baseline experience of standing on a street corner had been quantified and branded, we started aggrandizing the assorted weather phenomena that have been racking our planet for millennia. It used to be that only hurricanes got their own names. Now every low-pressure system that manages to flutter a flag on the 18th green gets its own name, logo and saturation coverage on the Weather Channel.
Watch out, folks! It’s Super-Duper Storm Steve!
When we ran out of ways to tart up the lowly isobar, we went off-planet. We looked to the heavens for lilies we could gild. We have Super Moons and Blood Moons and Super Blood Moons. It’s only a matter of time before we have Taco Bell Cheesy Gordita Crunch Moons.
Nothing can be routine anymore. Everything must be special. Did it start when October became “Rocktober”? Or when mattress and carpet stores started calling their annual effort to shift some merchandise a “Sale-a-bration”?
Maybe it was when “Toyotathon” burst forth from the fevered brow of a desperate ad man, like gray-eyed Athena from the head of Zeus.
But we’re less like ancient Greeks than ancient Romans. We’re so inured to our orgies and spectacles that we must inject pageantry everywhere, smearing lipstick and rouge on the drab and the commonplace just to keep us awake. We supersize everything from our french fries to our blizzards. Snowmageddon, meet Snowpocalypse.
And meet the Super Blue Blood Moon. It sounds fake but it’s real and it’s coming Jan. 31. You know what I bet it looks like? The moon.
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