I'm Back for More Cash

by Tony Kornheiser

  The same hairdos are still predicting the weather.

  Apparently, this is like the Supreme Court. No matter what fool opinion you have, they can’t get rid of you.

  Who hands out jobs like this? Katherine Harris?

  Last week they stood there with a straight face and said: You haven’t seen this much snow since the final scene in Scarface. It will be so deep, by the time you dig your way through it you’ll be underneath the Russian embassy.

  They swept their arms to show you where the snow was going to hit. They waved their hands around, up high with the clouds, down low with the approaching front. They’re so agile. They’re always putting things “in motion.” It’s like they’re doing tai chi. Only tai chi is better at predicting the weather. So is Ty Cobb, whose only drawback is that he’s dead.

  Excuse me, Tony. Aren’t you being a bit harsh? These are weather professionals. Members of the American Meteorological Society.

  What did they do to join? Send in box tops? Wear a beanie with a windsock?

  (Every time I say that, I get indignant mail from Channel 4’s infallible Bob Ryan. Ryan’s last letter accused me of “character assassination,” because I said that, at the very moment I heard the forecast for “a dusting,” Jean-Claude Killy was skiing down my block. Ryan took offense at my writing. “Look out the window, you moron!” Hahaha. Must I remind you, Bob? I am licensed to be sarcastic by the American Humorological Society.)

  What a racket. These guys have all the bells and whistles, including the color-coded Digital Doppler radar. In the winter the colors are chilly white, blue, and purple. (Weather pros call a big blob of purple coming out of Canada a “Hello, you’re dead” system.) The colors swirl and pulsate on the radar screen. It looks like a Lava lamp. For all the good it does, it may actually be a Lava lamp.

  The day after blowing the forecast, the weathermen don’t even do the honorable thing, which would be to go on the air, strip off their shirts, and beat themselves until they bleed. Instead, they rationalize. They say, “We were in the rain band, not the snow band.”

  No kidding, Sherlock. And I’m in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. WHERE’S THE SNOW?

  You don’t see weathermen in California predicting earthquakes, do you? Stick to what you do best. You’re a meteorologist, dammit. Predict meteors.

  I love when the anchor tosses it to “the storm center,” and these guys come running onto the set holding the latest info in their hands, like Moses coming down from the mountain. Oh, please. Like any of them do anything but rip the forecast from the National Weather Service wire and feed it into the TelePrompTer. Here’s all they really know about weather: It beats selling shoes.

  I’m showing restraint, I feel, by not calling for public executions. But come on, you stand there smugly among your radar echoes and scare us to death. You send us scurrying for snow shovels and halite. (What’s the deal? Do hardware stores call up and say, “We’re up to our keisters in product here, and it’s March. If we don’t move these shovels soon, we’re going Chapter 11. Could you maybe predict the Big One?”) And nothing happens.

  And without even a trace of irony, you blame the weather!

  Oh I get it. You’re saying: The weather, hey, it’s unpredictable.

  Why didn’t I think of that?

  Do us a favor. Next time, read pig entrails.

  My friend Tom says weathermen “ought to go around with electric-shock collars. And every time they’re wrong, we turn up the juice a little bit. Eventually, even those stupid Pomeranians learn to stay in the yard.”

  I like that.

  What I’d like more is if they replaced all our weather divas with chimps. That’s right, chimpanzees. They’re cute, they’re cheap, they’re low-maintenance. Everybody loves ’em.

  Here’s my friend Nancy’s idea: The TV station lines up some props—say, a snow shovel, a pair of sunglasses, a raincoat, a parka, a straw hat, a pair of boots, and an umbrella. They turn the chimp loose. He picks one up, and there’s your Accu-Weather forecast! If he picks the straw hat, you head for the beach; if he picks the snow shovel: Hello, you’re dead.

  Bad Weather Men

  Once again we return to the fault line between men and women. Today’s topic: the terrible summer thunderstorm. Surely you have been in an office setting when a thunderstorm bears down. Women stay calm. They remain in their seats and continue working. They are nesters. What happens outside does not concern them—unless, of course, it is a sale on Manolo Blahnik strappy black stilettos.

  Men salivate at barometric changes. We rush to the windows, pressing our snouts against them like basset hounds to see lightning. Scratch any man, and an inch down you find Al Roker.

  I was at home Wednesday when the sky suddenly turned the color of road tar. The women in the house were oblivious. (Later, when I asked a woman about this, she said, “If I cared about what happened outside, I would live in a carport.”)

  Instinctively, I switched on the Weather Channel, where I learned we were under a Severe Weather Advisory. Yes! A violent thunderstorm with 70-mile-per-hour gusts and hail the size of eggplants was around the corner, and it would be here in ten seconds. I read the advisory aloud, like a World War II air-raid warden: “Stay inside and away from windows.”

  The women in the house did just that. I did what any man would do: I walked onto the porch and brought my faithful, albeit whimpering, dog with me.

  “Stand by my side, Maggie, and together we will face the apocalypse,” I declared.

  “Are you crazy?” my wife called to me.

  I turned to face her—a fortunate move, I must say, because at that very moment a gust of wind blew one of the hanging flower pots off its hook, and it hurtled past. It would have sheared off my head like a Randy Johnson fastball. That was enough for Maggie, who began scratching wildly at the door to go in.

  “Judas,” I hissed.

  I stood in the fury—with my back resting on a plate-glass window, mind you, so a sudden blast of wind could shatter the glass and slice me like shaved ham—as the rain came down sideways and the thunder boomed and the wind snapped limbs off trees. I felt like Ahab lashed to the mast. I was alive!

  What can I tell you? It started with the caveman, this primal urge to go out in a storm and become a human lightning rod. My friend Tracee grew up in Kansas, where tornadoes are common. “My dad always made my mom and me go to the storm cellar. Then he got in the van and started driving around,” she shrugged. To this day during thunderstorms and tornadoes he drives his van downtown and sits in the bank parking lot on Main Street—underneath the cover of the drive-thru window so the hail won’t damage the paint job, of course—and watches small animals blow by. My friend Monty, who’s from North Carolina, said that in summer thunderstorms his dad enjoyed driving around and splashing through huge puddles. “He sounds like an Airedale,” I said.

  Men can sit for hours and watch video of a Force 5 hurricane, especially when it slashes into a beach-side house, crumbles it into toothpicks, and washes it away. Ha! Take that, Mister Rich Guy Summer Home! You know what else is great? Massive ice storms that cause cars to spin around wildly on the interstate and slam into other cars. Men also enjoy videos of animals eating other animals. I love it when they show a big snake swallowing a pig whole, and you can see the snake’s body bulge out like an accordion where the pig is.

  Ah, but I digress.

  We were lucky. We never lost power in the storm last week.

  The sudden loss of electrical power is another point on the fault line between men and women.

  In a blackout, women turn totally shrewish about refrigeration. They become Kelvinator harpies. They insist nobody open the refrigerator or freezer, for fear all the food will thaw and spoil—and this will mean the loss of thirty-five dollars’ worth of lamb chops that were bought fresh two years ago and buried behind the TV dinners that were purchased in 1987.

  What women don’t realize is that men are hoping the meat defrosts. This gives men a chance t
o do what they love best: set fire to big hunks of animal flesh. It satisfies our need to incinerate things in a postwar world. In a power outage I open my refrigerator and freezer at least twenty times an hour to gauge how much time I have left until I can strip my freezer and begin a combination estate meat sale and charcoal orgy.

  Much to women’s chagrin, men also repeatedly open their refrigerators during power outages to check if their beverages are still cold. During a recent power failure, my friend Rich offered to drive and get ice for the house. His wife said, “We won’t need ice if we keep the refrigerator door closed.” Then she thanked him for being concerned for the family, not realizing his only motivation was to maintain ideal conditions for the stash of beer he keeps in a small refrigerator in the basement.

  Every woman I know has the same reaction to the loss of electrical power: They want to go to an air-conditioned bar and drink martinis until power in their house is restored.

  Women don’t want to be dependent on candles. They don’t like it when the dishwasher and the washing machine don’t work. They don’t like it when their kids are yammering because the cable doesn’t work. Plus, women hate the junglelike heat and humidity, because it makes them sweaty and clammy.

  Men see power outages as an opportunity to get lucky. The candles, the clamminess: There are fewer clothes to take off, fewer lights to dim, and you’re already sweaty, so let’s rock and roll. What else is there to do?

  So maybe this explains the whole primal appeal of a raging thunderstorm. It plays to a man’s strengths: seduction and the ability to barbecue spoiled meat.

  The Shape I’m In

  My loyal fan Vladimir M. Kabes sent me the following fax in praise of last week’s hilarious column about John Glenn: “How can a respectable newspaper publish such disgusting, lowly and vulgar trash as Tony Kornheiser’s ‘Geezer’ column? The abuse of an elderly, but trim and fit, man appears sorely misplaced from a fat slob.”

  How perceptive of you, Mr. Kabes, for noticing that I’ve become, as they say, a bit “thick around the middle.” In fact, around my middle is a tire of flab so thick it appears that doctors have surgically implanted one of those circular floats that little kids take to the pool—only without the duckie head. I have recently taken to wearing vests to hide my belly. Soon, I fear, I will have to clothe myself in those billowing quilted things they hang on the walls of service elevators.

  Mainly this is because I stopped going to the gym several months back, in June. It is now November, and thanks to the miracle of modern science, which allows potato chips to be packaged in four-ounce, eight-ounce, twelve-ounce, sixteen-ounce, and “trough” sizes, I’ve gained seventeen pounds! I now weigh 216. By USDA standards I’m eligible to be cut into steaks.

  With the approach of the holidays, I fear for my life. I may keep eating until I grow so enormous that you will see me on The Jerry Springer Show being extricated from my house with a forklift. (Just imagine how Newt’s gonna pork up now that he’s no longer occupied with being speaker. By Thanksgiving, he’ll look like the Bullwinkle float in the Macy’s parade.)

  I try to diet, but unfortunately I’ve come to the point in life where nearly everything disgusts or disappoints me except food. And so I eat all day long. If I had a family crest, at this point it would be a man with a chicken breast in one hand, a cheeseburger in the other, and a garland of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips around his head.

  My friend Richard advised me to take a novel approach: Stop eating.

  Astoundingly, this worked for him. He has lost twenty pounds in a year.

  He says he visualizes a plate, and each day he gets to eat what’s on that plate.

  “Just one plate?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “How big is the plate?” I ask, imagining my one plate would be the size of Rosie O’Donnell.

  My friend Nancy stays thin by eating meals that look as if they have come from the bottom of a hamster cage. She says she has had the same rule since she was twenty-five: “Never eat until you are about to pass out from starvation.”

  That’s different from my rule, which is: “More cheese.”

  Everyone knows it gets harder to lose weight as you get older. My editor, a young man of forty-one, recently complained to me he was getting fatter despite his best efforts, which include the heavy lifting required to make my column publishable.

  “Before I turned forty I had a thirty-two-inch waist,” he said. “At forty-one it was thirty-four inches. By the time I’m forty-three, I’ll have a thirty-eight-inch waist,” he said, crestfallen.

  I thought to myself: A thirty-eight-inch waist. Man, those were the days.

  Imagine my dismay hearing that these punks can’t keep weight off. What hope can I possibly have at fifty?

  My boss George advised me to take an aerobic step course. He takes “step” with a bunch of women—a terrible mistake for a man. Men look like cows on ice skates as they try desperately to remember the steps and keep count with the music. Invariably they stumble over the step, twirl the wrong way, and smash into the women taking the class. Men who take step are menaces who should be forced to wear padding and running lights.

  “How can you take step?” I asked George. “You’re as graceful as a backhoe.”

  “It’s a great workout. I get soaked,” George replied.

  “You wanna get soaked? Strap yourself to the conveyor belt and go through a car wash.”

  Here’s my dilemma: I realize I won’t stop eating unless I staple my lips together—and that would probably be bad for my radio career. So my only solution is to head back to the gym.

  I signed up at a new gym last week. (Go back to my old gym? Are you kidding me? I have some pride, you know. I’m not going back there as long as I’m this fat.) I met with a trainer to craft a program for me. He was lean and in his early twenties. He greeted me with one of those smiles that said: I’m happy not to be working at McDonald’s anymore.

  I asked him to give me some exercises to lose weight.

  He took me through some of the machines, working me out at ridiculously low weight levels. I’ve lifted seven-layer cakes that were heavier.

  “How does this feel?” he asked more than once, as if he thought I might be in danger of a stroke.

  I looked around the room to make sure he was talking to me, and not, say, Hume Cronyn.

  I’d noticed that the free weights were all downstairs, where the serious lifters were.

  I asked him if he might show me some exercises down there. “Oh, no,” he said. “Let’s keep you up here for a while so we can keep an eye on you.”

  I realized that he thought me old! I suspected he might even offer me some pudding.

  My worst nightmare had come true. After years of calling myself fat, old, and bald, others were seeing me that way, too.

  Devastated, dejected, and depressed, I sought comfort in the usual way.

  Gimme a bacon cheeseburger—extra cheese—and a coupla bags of chips.

  Don’t Tread on Me

  Lately I’ve been trying to lose weight (again!), so I’ve been going to a gym and running a couple of miles on a treadmill in the morning. I’m on the treadmill for forty minutes. I run at a very relaxed pace. If I ran any slower, I’d go backward in time.

  The gym has two rows of treadmills. One row of seven machines faces the interior of the gym. There’s a TV you can watch while running. But if you are on one of the outside treadmills, you have to crane your neck to see it, and you run the risk of flipping sideways off the treadmill. Is a glimpse of Matt Lauer really worth a ruptured spleen?

  The other row faces out, onto Connecticut Avenue. There are eight treadmills in this row. This is where I prefer to run, because watching the commuter traffic provides a more pleasant distraction than watching a bunch of fat geezoids on StairMasters. (The gym I used to go to had the treadmills facing the aerobics studio, and you could watch young babes bounce around while taking step class. It was heaven. The day after they turned t
he treadmills to face the weight machines, I quit the gym.)

  So the other morning, I’m in the gym jogging. I’m on the last treadmill on the right. That means there are seven treadmills to my left. And all of them are empty. Suddenly, a fat dope in a Hobart College sweatshirt gets on the treadmill RIGHT NEXT TO ME!

  Talk about invading my space. In some cultures, that act would have meant we were engaged.

  I looked down at my time. I had twenty-seven minutes to go, and now I had to spend it close enough to this yutz to exchange bodily fluids.

  I was furious. I thought seriously of reaching over to the control panel on his treadmill and slamming down on his “Stop” button, so he would pitch forward and crash through the plate-glass window onto Connecticut Avenue.

  That afternoon I related the story to my boss, George, screaming, “How dare this jerk get on the treadmill next to me when there were seven empty treadmills in the same row!”

  George asked me if I’d have felt the same if the person next to me had been a supermodel in spandex. I conceded I might have been slightly mollified if it had been Wendy Rieger in that clingy leopard-skin blouse she wears on Channel 4. But the principle remained the same: You don’t get on a treadmill next to someone when there are open treadmills down the row.

  George told me I was an idiot and a baby, saying, “Tony, you’re a self-absorbed egomaniac, and you refuse to accommodate yourself to anyone else.”

  “And your point is?” I responded.

  George weakly theorized why this Hobart dolt got on the treadmill next to me.

  1. “Maybe that’s his favorite treadmill.”

  His favorite treadmill? Oh, please. I didn’t know people built up emotional attachments to treadmills. Who is he taking to the Hobart prom, a Nautilus machine?