And Now, the Weather ...

Last night we were able to pull in a partial signal from GBC (Gibraltar) TV - a momentously thrilling feat because this English-language intruder not only snatched the linguistic monopoly away from our Spanish stations but also meant that we could watch TV without a dictionary in hand.

We tuned in just in time for the weather. This is a fairly exciting time for weather people: the Levanter, which has been blasting us for over a week now, offers all sorts of possibilities for commentaries, the inclusion of inane arcane historical weather facts, and meteorologists get to oooh and ahhh about how strong the wind is blowing. Given that there's an airport 50 meters from the town, you'd think that Gib's meteorologists would have a ready & presumably accurate source of data for their evening reports. So one might have thought that Gib's weather forecast for tomorrow (now today) would have included information like:

Temperature: 15° (high), 12° (low)

Humidity: 77%

Visibility: 9 km, mostly cloudy

Wind: E 72 km/h

Sunrise: 8:12 am, Sunset:7:00 pm

Barometer: 0 mb and falling.

Well you'd be wrong. (Although the above forecast is accurate).

This was last night's weather report: "Tomorrow it will be grey and windy."

I can't argue with its succinctness and I suppose that in a world of excessive verbosity I should be lauding and/or applauding this meteorologist's economy of words but, frankly, I am at a loss as to why she just didn't show the above photo - a photo, I might add, that they could have used for the last 10 nights - in lieu of a report. Why bother with words at all? Surely a picture is worth a thousand words. Or at the very least seven, i.e., "tomorrow it will be grey and windy".