Retiring from the Weather business.




What was your favorite Tom Skilling report?

I believe he was the first to call the Groundhog day snomageddon.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

Didn’t realize this was the Meteorologist Career Resting Place. What’s a thread about Bill Cosby doing here?

Gotta be the worst guy to sit next to at a bar ever

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the world will always the world. your entire existence is defined by your response.

Didn’t he cry during one of the eclipse events?

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Yea but you've never gone and seen a total eclipse.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

First Alision Payne dying, then Dan Roan retiring, and now Skilling hanging it up? When Jackie Bang goes out to pasture I won't recognize anyone on WGN anymore. Robert Jordan still alive? Steve Sanders?

I had no idea Alison Payne died


She was a hottie

She had been hurting for a long time. Poor Alice.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

Does a total Eclipse of the Heart count?

The one in 17 was pretty cool, even if I did have to drive to Missouri to see it.

Lucky bastard. I was in grand island Nebraska

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

He's a deceptively folksy meteorological huckster who falsely exaggerates the possibility of "extreme weather events" to boost his ratings--not unlike the way his scumbag brother artificially inflated Enron stock value so he and his oily cronies could reap enormous financial rewards while screwing over employees and ordinary shareholders. Good riddance to him and his beguiling isobars.

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They all do that.

You cannot talk that way about a cocksucker.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

Some of the stations employ young, extremely attractive weather informers vice a guy who could be my doppelgänger, to boost their ratings.

I can't say if I have ever really heard what one of the hotties is saying despite paying close attention to their delivery. Same could be said for Skillings page after page of computer models and map overlays, so they are just as effective.

In fact, I don't even watch any tv news/weather any more, except what I may be exposed to second hand. I figure the important stuff will make itself evident to me eventually, and the apps on my phone are more real-time for outside conditions.

Skilling was among the first to do it and was an innovator in at least two regards:

1) Developing new kinds of visually compelling but misleading pseudoscientific graphics to imbue his forecasts with a sense of scientific authority even as they compel attention through style rather than substance;
2) Consciously cultivating a "folksy" on-air persona to persuade his audience to trust him and his fictionalized forecasts.

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there's probably never been a local weatherman who attracted viewers like him

I've never paid that much attention to weather. My wife does. My mom does. Maybe its a woman thing. I wake up and if its cold, i put on a coat. Tommy was best used to predict people's behavior, for instance, if he predicted snow, you could bet there would be more traffic in the morning, so leave earlier.

Dahl used to do a funny impression of him but it heavily implied homosexuality, which turned out to be true, and so, he stopped. I think Skilling even called him on it.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

He's one of the few bridges left to the "Chicago's Very Own, Channel 9" days of out youth. WGN was a reliable local station. There is nothing like that anymore.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

While I can look at my phone (or out the window) to see what it is doing now, I find his clearly articulated forecasts helpful for planning purposes. For example I have no doubt it will be windy and perhaps drizzly at Sunday's Bears game. However, when it comes to snow forecasts, like the MANY others he does seem to whip himself into a frenzy. Yet he also often states that snowfall amounts can be difficult to predict accurately.

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"I honestly don't see a good bet on the board here."

The weirdest Robert Feder article of all time is the one where he reported that Tom Skilling's dog died and then casually dropped that Tom lives in a polycule with two married men.

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lol what?

C'mon now, they are ROOMMATES!

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Apparently the Meteorological Huckster and his morally decrepit TV pals were part of some kind of bestiality cult:

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newsroom going to strike because now they'll have to fill 5 minutes on the broadcast since the weather report will be shortened from 8 to 3 minutes

hell yeah I love when my dog gives good face

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whats he gonna do now? He'll get bored in 1 week and come back.

You're on to something here, Dolphin. Let me add a little Nas spin to this...
"Maybe it's a biological woman thing"

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Tom: It's going to be hotter down south then my finger, deep in Sparkies A-Hole!

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"I honestly don't see a good bet on the board here."