Sunday, July 20, 2008

Name a Hurricane.

Until 1953, when the U.S. Government adopted the use of alphabetical female names for tropical storms, it had followed the centuries-old tradition of naming these storms for the Catholic saints on whose day they were designated.
In 1978 NOAA began using both male and female names to identify storms, no longer calling every hurricane a “her.”)
“All racial groups should be represented,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, adding that she hoped that the weather establishment in future “would try to be inclusive of African American names” such as “Tanika, Keisha, Jamal and Deshawn.”
Why not sell the naming rights to hurricanes to the highest bidder? As a source of government revenue, we have done this already with football bowl games, sports stadiums and a growing list of other things.
“Thousands of quivering people are evacuating Miami,” Dan Rather would tell his viewers, “at the approach of Hurricane Jell-O.”
Or it might be “Hurricane J-Lo,” if movie star Jennifer Lopez puts in the biggest bid for the naming rights to this powerful storm. It could become a commercial art form, like thoroughbred horse investing, to buy rights early and cheap to unpromising “Seabiscuit” storms that, with luck, might grow into a long-lived hurricane generating weeks of headline news coverage. Think of all the private meteorologists and cloud seeders who might be hired to select, enhance or even create such storms.
An angry millionaire out there right now might be willing to put a fortune into the public treasury in exchange for pinning his ex-wife’s first name on a nasty storm, thereby prompting the media to do a story about the person behind this name. Some widow might want to put her granddaughter or late husband into the scientific history books of our planet by doing likewise.

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