Saturday, December 24, 2022

It's -7º and people have iPhones now so...

If New York is a finger gun pointing at Canada,
NYC is down by the wrist, the thumb is trees, and
 Rochester is mid-knuckle on the index finger.
You may already know this, but while I've lived in Santa Cruz, California for the better part of the last decade or so, I am, in fact, from Rochester, NY. It's a medium-sized city on Lake Ontario, about an hour east of Buffalo. If that's more information than you need, I'm sorry, I just that I often find myself having to offer geographical context when telling people where I'm from. It's been my experience that most people out here aren't aware that New York City is attached to an entire state. I mention this because it made me feel incredibly old this morning.

"At least we're not Buffalo..."
-The City of Rochester's motto
No, not the finger gun thing, but the news. You see Rochester, like much of the country, is being pummeled by a once-in-a-generation, absolute goat-rodeo of a winter storm right now. Power lines are down, flights are canceled, and local news stations are, for reasons passing understanding, sending reporters out into the Siberian conditions to narrate how unlivable conditions are right now. The key take aways are one: Buffalo is getting this storm way worst than Rochester.

And two: Everyone on the news is twelve years old. Twelve! I mean, look at this:
Pictured: a bunch of twenty year-olds producing local TV news
 pieces that no one under sixty will likely ever watch.
Above: the kind of swagger and confidence only
immobile 1980's news anchor hair can project.
To be clear, I don't usually watch local news--I'm not that old--but I did check out WHAM's website this morning to see what's happening. I'm sure it's just because I haven't seen the local news, much less the local news from my home town in years, but the anchors and reporters used to be, you know, a hundred. Part of this phenomenon is that, as a child, anyone older than oneself is impossibly ancient. The other part is a weird assumption your brain makes when you move somewhere else that everything you leave behind remains just as you left it.

Which, of course, it doesn't. Time marches on. Our family and friends age, get married, have kids, and our local TV anchors get replaced by twenty-somethings who stand outside in sub-zero temperatures and read the news off of their actual phones. 
I mean, at some point you'd think they could let the reporters stay 
inside and just tell viewers to read the news off their own phones.

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