by Chris McGinty
I suppose it’s not as bad out there as I first thought it would be, but it got a bit cold last night as the weather turned and ruined our plans this weekend. It’s still long sleeve weather today. In the future of Al Gore’s Hellscape, some people might want the anecdotal truth of what Texas weather was like when we could still go outside without fearing a ManBearPig attack.
PMRC now stands for “Parker & Matt Really Cansuckit.” It’s estimated that if we change the PMRC acronym once every year then Chris’s head will explode by 2026.
Apparently, Trey Parker and Matt Stone did a South Park episode where it turned out that ManBearPig was real as acknowledgement that they were wrong about climate change. While that is probably good, I must say that I still believe that Al Gore is completely wrong about his predictions from “An Inconvenient Film.” I wrote a blog post or two about my issues with how climate change has been explained. I’m an environmentalist. I just wanted a reasonable explanation of what was really happening.
Now that I’m a real character PMRC stands for “Parker & Matt ‘R’ Coolw/me.”
But I’m not here to talk about climate change. I’m here to talk about Texas weather. I’ve been pointing out for a few years now that I don’t trust that the Texas winter is truly done until May 2. This is based on the time in my life when I was a security guard. I was lucky and bought a coat from the company when they were still selling really warm coats. I mean, technically I’m warm. The coat just did a good job of trapping my heat. Yes, I had the greenhouse gases of coats. I almost removed the coat from my car in April one year, because it was getting hot. I had the little battery powered fan in the car to help keep me cool, and winter was firmly behind me. Then on May 1 of that year, I went into work and two hours into my shift I started noticing that it was getting cold. By the time 10 pm rolled around, I was reaching into the backseat to get the coat. It got into the 30s that night. Then it was summer.
I’ve never breathed a sigh of Texas summer relief until May 2 since. Like I said, today isn’t that bad, but it’s why I didn’t put away my long sleeve shirts. Nathan asked me last week to come out to his house today to help him with a garage sale, a practice that goes back years even though we haven’t done one together since he was in the Fort Worth house. Then last night it started getting a little wet in the sky rain zone, and then I got a text from Nathan saying, “Yo, C-dog. The weather is all like 80% chance of rain all day tomorrow, so we gone try the crib junk in the driveway sale on Saturday and shit.” I might be paraphrasing.
One last memory from my security guard days before I go; I was listening to Astronomy Cast and found out what the temperatures were like on Mercury. When it’s facing the sun it can get up to between 750 and 800 degrees Fahrenheit (spelled it right the first attempt) and when it’s not facing the sun it can get down to -330 degrees Fahrenheit. I was mildly chuckling to myself because it was post February, pre May (somewhere in there) and that’s what the weather felt like. Each night we would get a call from one of the supervisors to make sure we hadn’t fallen asleep on the job. The supervisor called me that night and we got to talking. I relayed what I had learned about the temperatures of Mercury and he said, “Sounds like Texas right now.” I guess he noticed too.
Chris McGinty is a blogger who is not a meteorologist but once played one on public access TV. I think. It was when I was in seventh grade and our teacher gave us an assignment to do a sketch that she taped and would put onto public access. Part of the sketch had to be news and weather. I did the weather portion. Whether or not it was a precursor to Art Hillary or Lewis Cannon, I don’t really know. The character was more like a valley girl in his speech patterns. Sadly, the time that I was told our class’ sketches were going to be on public access, they weren’t. I ended up taping another class’ sketches. I can only presume our sketches ran some other time. I ran into that teacher a year later and asked her if she still had the sketches. She said she had to use the tapes for another class and taped over them. You kids with your digital video and Tik Tok don’t know the real struggle.