Wrong, Paul Gross!

I never thought I would be nitpicking a weather forecast. But this morning's forecast for metro Detroit from Channel 4's Paul Gross flew in the face of commonsense. He said cloud cover would increaase but that it would not rain at all. Well, around 5 PM, it was clear that he was wrong. It was not a major downpour, but enough to prove the point that where there are dark gray clouds in the sky, rain is usually not far behind. Luckily I did not get too wet on the way between the building and my car.

That's what's going on around the world

Al Roker of the Today show is notorious for doing human interest soundbites and then turning it over to local weathermen with his trademarked catchphrase "That's what's going on around the country, here's what's happening in your neck of the woods," having said nothing whatsoever about the national weather.

For all his quick wit, Al Roker is perfectly incapable of changing his catchphrase. Lately he has actually been talking about weather in his weather segment. With the Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajokull continuing to spew ash into the air, it makes sense that Roker talks about how the jet stream is taking the ash over to Europe. Sometimes he then says something about weather in America, sometimes not. Either way, his segue to local weather is exactly the same.

You can control the weather with a satellite? Really?

The film: Superman III, starring Christopher Reeve and Richard Pryor.
What happened: Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor), is a computer whiz tasked by his boss with ruining Colombia's coffee crop with excessive rain. Gus commandeers a satellite and causes a hurricane to pour down on Colombia's coffee fields. Superman shows up in time to dissipate the hurricane and dry out the crops.
Why it makes no sense: What exactly is it that the satellite does to cause rain? Does it shoot lasers at the clouds? Does it drop moisture on the clouds? The science on this particular fiction makes about as much sense as that in Weird Science, but at least Weird Science doesn't pretend to give plausible scientific explanations for its fantastic events. But the Superman films try to sometimes: for example, the "dense molecular structure" of Kryptonians such as Kal-El and Zod which give them superhuman strength when they are on a planet illuminated by a yellow sun. Therefore, in Superman III, it's not too much to ask for some halfway plausible explanation of how a satellite orbiting the Earth far above its atmosphere could have any influence on its weather.
And even if we accept the notion that a satellite can change the weather in a controllable way in a specific part of the world, doesn't Colombia have other crops which the United States would want destroyed by any means available?