Page M2 Apri 18, 1990. This Week | In search ofa killer. | he found someone Vi whos either thé love ~ # of hislife... j “ 4 ee at orthe end of it. - Fi ool a * MARTIN BREGMAN mar s HAROLD BECKER nx : ATPACINO) —ELLEN'BARKIN’ — JOHN GOODMAN : —_“SEAQF LOVE" “s TREVOR JONES svt MICHAEL SCOTT BREGHAN "7 RICHARD PRICE ER ™"2 HAROLD BECKER swsswrenia ‘dio, Inc. All Rights Reserved MICHAEL DOUGLAS [IR BLACK RAIN | HOME VIDEO. New This Week Michael Douglas in BLACK RAIN Coming May 16 LITTLE MERMAID Order your copy now Only ‘22 Look What’s New on Video This Week Al Pacino in Sea of Love Victoria’s Largest & Best Video Store Keep Your Movies For a Week KID’S MOVIES 99° weex Monday-Tuesday Wednesday Special 5 teh (Excluding adult tapes) HOME OF THE WEEKLY RENTAL 2631 QUADRA ST. (Between the Roxy & the Brick) 361-4949 HUMO! Everybody talks — about the weather, but nobody does anything about it * verybody thinks that Mark Twain wrote that, but he didn’t. A pretty well utterly forgotton scrib- bler by the name of Charles Dudley Warner penned that observation way back in 1897 in an editorial that appeared in the Hartford Courant. Somehow, history bungled it, and now the whole world thinks the cre- dit belongs to Mark Twain. That doesn’t surprise me. Weather is a treacherous topic best untrifled with. But the hell with it. Its a blustery, cruddy late Spring day; there’s a pair of worm-lusting robins hunched over on my front lawn like a couple of winos on a streetcorner; there’s a leak in my Freshie and wind up cling- ing to a floating picnic table in a deluge that makes the Johnstown Flood look like a sunshower. You get home that night and turn on your TV and does Mister Blow Dry Pompadour apologize for his goof? Nah. He smiles and banters about the Blue Jays with the Sports Jock- ette and points a well-y. manicured (dry!) finger towards the low pressure trough over Baffin Island that is going to, make Sun- day a “great day for a pic- nic.” Once — just once — I’d like to see the weatherman pop up on my TV screen right after the newscast, all decked out in manacles and prison greys. I'd like to hear him confess basement, a incompetence draft under for missing the back = door, my = cat's got spring fever, which means I have to get up every three min- utes and for- ty-five se- Basie slack yesterday’s blizzard: plead guilty ® to lousy fore- casting in general, then commit * the weatherg person’s equivalent of conds to ei- By ARTHUR BLACK hari kin — — ther let him 7 falling on his out or bring telescopic him in... and I feel like pointer in front of the Can- picking on somebody. So let’s beat up on... The weatherman. You know what bugs me most about weathermen? Not that they’re wrong all the time. As a matter of fact, theyre not. Their forecasts are reasonably accurate — at least as reliable as Old Man Maidle’s down the road. He keeps track of squirrels’ acorn stashes and the thickness of cater- pillar pelts. He also has a whole bunch of agricultural rhymes about the weather. Rhymes like “Crick don’t flow; watch fer snow;” and “Cows in the clover, sum- mer’s "bout over.” I figure Old Man Maidle’s weather poetry is dead ac- curate about 50 per cent of the time — which is about the same as the guy with the Magic Marker on TV. No, it’s not the weather forecasters’ accuracy (or lack of it) that bothers me. It’s the fact that when they are wrong, they .. . never apologize. It’s true! They can tell you on Friday that Satur- day’s going to be a great day for a picnic, and you can go the park with your little hamper of egg salad sandwiches and Thermos of ada Weather Map. It won't happen in my lifetime of course — but I would have settled for watching TV in Britain the night after the devastating hurricane of 1987. This really happened, folks. Following his newscast, the BBC news anchor turned to weatherman Ian McCasikall and said, on live TV: “Well, Ian, you chaps were a fat lot of good last night.” Ian defended himself meekly, pointing out that they had forecast a “rather windy, showery airflow.” “No kidding”, responded ~ the news anchor withering- ly. “If you can’t forecast the worst storms for several centuries ... what are you doing?” Poor Ian McCaskill. He and all the other British weather forecasters really didn’t have a leg to stand on — particularly when it was revealed that weathermen in France, Spain and the Ne- therlands had forecast the hurricane, using data ob- * tained from the Weather Centre in... Reading, England. If only Ian had double- checked with Old Man Mai- dle.