Tomorrow: Sunny with a chance of weather

During the Phoenix summer season, simply telling me that it's going to be hot tomorrow is like discussing presidential politics with my neighbor's Labrador. Both are exercises in pointlessness if not madness.

And yet every 20 minutes or so, radio stations dutifully report the weather: "More hot temps with a chance of showers." Ditto for cable news, except they insist that I also know the weather in Yazoo, Mississippi and every other place unrelated to my personal square-yardage on the Blue Marble. Of course the media wouldn't sell it if the public didn't lap it up. So why do people care so much about the weather?

For folks engaged in agribusiness, seafaring, aviating, war-fighting and pleasure touring -- okay, I get it. For everybody else -- you know, 99.999% of the population -- day-to-day weather conditions rarely matter. Rain might slow down your commute, delay a little league game or (god forbid) wet your hair. Excessive heat might mean skipping a jog or a higher A/C bill. But ambient weather conditions usually don't stop your life in its tracks. And yet, as author Julie Poland discovered last year, "An estimated 6 billion people watch The Weather Channel. Six billion - with a B." (Actually, that number is suspect since there are only 6.94 billion of us on the planet. Still, hundreds of millions surely tune into the popular channel.)

Poland speculates that we're weather-obsessed because we like to see that other people have it worse than we do (which is sad), it gives us something to talk about (which is sadder still), and because we use our information as a status indicator (which is saddest of all). She also thinks that "some of us like to learn about science, and weather is part of that." Well, that at least accounts for the six or so people in Phoenix who turn their porches into NASA-quality weather stations. If Poland is right, we need to get back on our meds.

My theory? Manchurian Candidate-like brainwashing. We're conditioned from childhood with weather-related code words (hot, cold, rain, humid, etc). When a trigger word is heard, we go all 28 Days Later and zombie-hunt for weather news. That's gotta be it. Nothing else makes sense. In fact, General Jack D. Ripper is probably right. It is likely connected to the Commie conspiracy to "sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." That's the way your hard-core Commie works. What? Yes, I am serious. And no, I don't want to go with the nice men in the white coats ...