There used to be a Twitter account called @NFLDraftPicks100 that seemed to have an uncanny ability to guess who a football team was going to draft weeks in advance. They knew the Chiefs would not only pick Patrick Mahomes, but also some 5th round kid out of Murray State.
In and of itself, this isn’t a particularly rewarding skill, unless you could monetize the site and help bettors in Vegas place cheap bets before the odds changed on a team.
So the gamblers came to the owner of this site and immediately found his secret. The owner of the Twitter account would spray 10 or 20 different picks out around three weeks ahead of the draft. The Chiefs select Mitch Trubisky. The Chiefs select Patrick Mahomes. The Chiefs select Deshawn Watson. And then on draft day, he would delete the two wrong tweets, leaving a three week old tweet “predicting” the true event.
For some reason, I recalled this guy’s genius over the past week while watching the weather. Long gone are the days of “Dan Henry said it would be like this.” And here are the days where Saturday’s weather has nine different forecasts depending on what day and hour of the report.
Let’s consider this, the only magic trick weather forecasters can do is tell you it’s going to snow in a week. This, admittedly, is their only skill. Being able to give me a week head start to know that snow will fall from the sky. From there, it’s gambling.
First off, there are five weather people that work for TV stations now. So you automatically have five times the number of forecasts. Joe Lauria could say on Monday he thinks it’s going to snow six inches, and Gary Lezak could say he thinks it’s going to snow three. Boom. You’ve already dotted two boxes on your weather BINGO card. Then they use the ranges for snow. It’s not six inches it’s 4-7 inches. It’s not one inch it’s “a trace to three inches.” That’s an old roulette trick called covering the field.
The newest smoke-and-mirror trick they’ve come up with is giving you the data straight off the four global forecast services. On Tuesday, I watched one of the stations put up four totally different forecasts about how much it was going to snow Sunday and they literally ranged from one inch to 10 inches. You know what? That “forecast” happened to be right because I got about an inch and a half of snow at my house for two hours early in the morning of Sunday that was completely melted by noon. But Super Doppler Weather Forecaster Person can say he or she was “right on the money” and take a bow.
So here, for the readers of The Landmark, I will submit my Rambling Morons 2019 Spring Forecast that you can take to the bank.
According to the window in my office, temperatures will hit 60 degrees for the first time between today and June 30. This is a guarantee! According to multiple data sources, that temperature on March 28 for the Royals Home Opener will be between 0 and 82 degrees with a possibility for rain or snow or wind or sunshine.
There you go, readers! Another stone cold lock forecast!
(Get stone cold lock weather forecasts and other pearls of wisdom from Chris Kamler on Twitter where he is known as @TheFakeNed. You can also find him on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube)