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I just about never watch television in the morning. I catch about five minutes worth of the Today Show each month. Katie is just as cute as a button, and Matt is the least-threatening male in all of media. This I know not from watching the show, but because these two happy-morning-people are pop culture icons. (They were also the first two people I saw on tv on September 11.) I know there’s a show called Good Morning, America on CBS or ABC, but I wouldn’t know its anchors if you wrapped them in a fish and slapped me in the face with them. That’s not the point.

There’s also a weatherman. For some reason all television news programs must have a ridiculously annoying self-possessed hyperactive ham reporting the weather. I don’t know why this is, but I do know it is a universal truth. The local guys are even more full of nincompoopery than the national ones. (It should be noted that The Weather Channel is the sole, curious exemption from this truth.) Are Americans too scared of weather predictions to take them without a shot of comedy that only a septuagenarian could enjoy?

For as long as I could remember, there was a chubby guy named Willard Scott who told us the weather. When I was a kid my mom always watched the Today Show while we got ready for school. Willard was balding, but he sometimes wore a toupee. Willard looked to be incredibly unhealthy, ready to keel over at any second. He always told us about people who were 100 years old (or more!) who wanted us to know that they got that way by smoking a cigar a day or drinking whiskey every night or having bacon every morning or something else that was completely contradictory to what medical science seemed to think was good for you. Willard frightened me. I didn’t think he was funny; I thought he was scary.

The new Today Show weatherman is Al Roker. Al doesn’t frighten me. I like Al. Al is hip. Al is so hip that he has Al’s Journal, a blog! What could be hipper?