Beware The Donner Party Scenario

Forecaster Committed To Long Term Mental Health Care, Still Ranting About Weather

Toronto (CP). It is an occupation where you can be wrong 90 percent of the time and still keep your job. It usually requires an affable personality and reassuring tone of voice. Occasionally it attracts those to the job who possess those qualities and don’t panic at the drop of, well… a snowflake. Other times it draws in those who do panic.

Of course, we’re talking about the television weather forecaster.

Harry Benning came to work at the Weather Network in 2009 after several years at a CTV station in Victoria, British Columbia, doing the same job. Perhaps it was living in Victoria that spoiled him and left him unprepared. After all, winters in Victoria are mild, with more rain than snow. And yet even that shouldn’t have been enough to bring out the issues that sprang up in the years that followed.

Because Mr. Benning was working in Toronto. A city that doesn’t really get the hard winters that much of Canada faces. And yet he took a job as one of the network’s daily forecasters, repeating the same forecasts every few minutes for the country as a whole. Probably a boring job, one that makes you wonder: do we really need such a network on television?

However it began, it was slow at first. Benning was known to come across as somewhat anxious when the first snows started, and would only be more or less calm when the spring finally melted the last of the winter’s snowpack. Was it seasonal depression, as some viewers started to ask. Plenty of people have that. He would predict ten centimetres of snow falling in one place or another, and he’d come across as nervous and on edge. Later in the night, another forecaster saying the same forecast for that spot would be calm and reasonable, telling viewers to be careful on the road, but no hint of anxiety.

As time went on, the anxiety seemed to grow, and more viewers noticed that about Benning. And it was no longer confined to winter. He would prattle on about tornados if there was a story about tornados elsewhere in the world. He would give a list of statistics and tell you a dozen different ways a tornado could kill you, as if the tornado was out there stalking you. A volcano erupting across the planet? He would warn you that it could happen in your backyard, even if geologists would tell you that’s simply not the case.

And then came the on-air calls for cannibalism.

It first happened over three years ago. A blizzard was bearing down on eastern Ontario and through Quebec. Benning came on air looking like he hadn’t slept in three days. His tie was askew and his hair was dishevelled. He looked, in short, like hell. He talked about thirty five to fifty centimetres in places, raising his voice at times, warning that what he was calling “Snowpocalypse 2016” could drop three times as much as forecast if it decided it wanted to. As if the blizzard was a living, thinking thing.

Benning told viewers that they had to do whatever it took to stay alive. Loot the stores for bread, milk, and maple syrup. Eat from the dead if that was what it took to survive. He was quickly yanked off the air by producers and assessed for his own mental and physical health. Eventually they let him back on the air. And from time to time, if there was a blizzard forecast, and if he was on the job, he would find himself describing Donner Party scenarios and advise about drawing lots as to who would have to sacrifice themselves so the others could live.

Finally the network had enough. Benning was pulled from the air while in mid rant last month. This time he was remanded to mental health care in a more stringent facility at the request of his wife and children. Crofthaven Mental Hospital treats the most hopeless cases, according to the founder of the Kingston based institution, Doctor Jeremiah Crofthaven. “Our mission is to get the deeply disturbed out of their delusions, their despairs, their conditions, to heal their minds and their hearts and their pancreas and their…. wait, forget the pancreas. It may seem that someone is beyond hope, but our staff have been trained to take the steps needed to give them hope.”

Crofthaven can’t speak of individual patients or their conditions, but this reporter did see Benning escorted by orderlies out of a session with his therapist. “They’re coming!” Benning yelled back to this reporter. “You have to tell them all! They’re coming for us all!” Benning seemed like a man so far out of hope, screaming like the utterly deranged. What he said next just seemed to confirm it.

“The frost giants are going to kill us all!”

Benning was taken down the hall. This reporter noticed Crofthaven beside him. The doctor had seen enough, and sighed, shaking his head. “I’m afraid some of our patients pose more of a challenge than others.”

To say the least. In the opinion of this reporter, Harry Benning is batshit crazy.

Alpacalypses And Weasels

I have an image blog today. Enjoy!

The Rage Of Edgar Knickerbocker

Police Seek Murder Suspect In Bizarre Case; Weather Forecasters Terrified

Minneapolis (AP) A mysterious murder is being investigated in this city, one in which the victim is not so much a person, as a personification. And to complicate the matter, the victim is not quite dead, if experts are correct. Minneapolis Police Department spokesperson Nina Madden addressed the matter with the press at the department’s headquarters today.

“We can confirm that our Homicide detectives are investigating a death that has been deemed suspicious. Cause of death being shot ten times in the chest,” Madden said in a dry, matter of fact way. “The victim was found in Lowry Park today, and police were immediately called. The victim was unresponsive, as you’d imagine, with ten bullets in him. There were no witnesses, nor are there surveillance cameras in the area. We are, however, waiting for the victim to revive and identify the person who shot him.” Reporters asked how a corpse could revive. “Well, as it turns out, the victim isn’t quite human, and according to our experts, it’s just a matter of time before he comes back to himself. The victim is Old Man Winter.”

Said victim, said to be hundreds of millions of years old and often appearing in the form of a white haired, white bearded heavily cloaked man, continued to lie at the crime scene, overseen by detectives and crime scene investigators, who, despite what C.S.I. shows suggest, do not go around personally solving crimes and pushing the actual cops out of the way. “It’s just a matter of time,” the responding detective at the scene told reporters, who were kept at a distance in the park, but within sight of the corpse, looking ghastly with bloody wounds on the chest. “Every expert we’ve talked to says you can’t kill winter. Winter goes away, but comes back again. So they’re expecting a full recovery when he reboots himself.”

“And this is technically still a murder?” one reporter asked.

The detective nodded. “Yes, well, whoever shot him really was shooting to kill. Those are what we in this line of work call kill shots. The sort of shots you take when you’re really, really, really pissed off at someone. Whoever it is, they’re pretty homicidal, so they’re going to have to be brought in to face charges. Now, mind you, the suspect list might be pretty long. Lots of people hate winter, after all. It could be millions of suspects. But in a case like this, we’re hopeful that Old Man Winter won’t have a problem telling us the name of just who it is who put all those bullets in him. Or at least helping us with a witness sketch of the shooter.”

Winter itself goes on regardless, with snow falling all over the state and much of the northern U.S., well into Canada. Just as you’d expect out of a winter. There has been a lot of it in the last twelve hours, leaving many a television forecaster in a panicked state.  “I’ve never seen four feet of snow fall in twelve hours,” Green Bay meteorologist Chip Styles said on the air, looking unhinged. “We might be talking Donner Party situation here, people! Donner Party! Eat your dead!”

While waiting on the personification of the season to revive, detectives sparred over whether or not the investigation should really count as a homicide investigation, given that usually their victims stay dead. “It’s one of those hypothetical ideas,” another detective told reporters. “What would happen if we had to investigate a vampire’s murder? I say hypothetical, of course, because vampires don’t actually exist. But if they did, what are the chances they might revive from a gunshot to the head? And more to the point, would we want to catch the shooter if the vampire were of the sparkly variety?”

The police may already be casting their eyes on one Edgar Knickerbocker of Kansas City, who last week posted a 400 000 word rant at his Facebook page titled Winter Must Die, And Die Horribly In The Most Agonizing Way, a rant that went viral, but not for the reasons he might have wished. He was turned, however briefly, into the butt of many a late night comedy monologue. Knickerbocker, a recluse wingbat who has in the past been known to stand on street corners yelling at strangers, has expressed deep hostility where winter is concerned, and locals in his neighbourhood describe him as the “angry old man yelling at everything, the sort of person who makes people want to move out of the state just to avoid.”

Whether or not the aforementioned Knickerbocker is a suspect or not, there are those who are hardly sympathetic about the temporary demise of Old Man Winter. “I hate winter!” Molly McLain, a tax accountant from Boston told this reporter in an unsolicited phone call. “You never warm up if you’re outside, you feel cold to the bone, and it takes until May before you start to feel like yourself again. And then before you know it... boom! Leaves are falling and the snow’s coming down again! One of these years, I’m moving to Florida!”

When asked if she might have had cause to kill Old Man Winter, McLain snorted. “When would I have the time? I’m hip deep in preparing taxes this time of year for people too lazy to do it themselves! Did I mention I hate being an accountant?” This reporter hung up on McLain, expecting that McLain hated many things.

North of the border, David Phillips, a well known meteorologist and spokesman with Environment Canada, took it all in stride. “Look, I know a lot of people would like to do in winter, but it just isn’t going to happen. People have tried before, with howitzers and grenades and swords and fire and cluster bombs. Winter happens, and it’s more productive to just accept winter for what it is and get on with it.”

Elsewhere north of the border, reporters sought out an unlikely person for comment on the weather and the mysterious murder of Old Man Winter. They found him knocking out a correspondent for Entertainment Tonight Canada who had come to his detachment in the Alberta foothills. As it turned out, the correspondent had come to ask who he thought to be the drummer for Metallica what he thought of Beyonce’s pregnancy news. Lars Ulrich, the fearsome and legendary RCMP Inspector, frowned when he saw more reporters arriving. Once reassured that they knew him to be a Mountie and not a half deaf drummer, Ulrich answered their question. “Killing Old Man Winter doesn’t work. Back in the 1930s, there was a fur trapper named Mad Harry Kowalski who tried it. The story goes that twelve hours later, Old Man Winter came to and left Mad Harry frostbitten for life in just the wrong place as payback.”

Update: twelve hours after the murder was reported, Old Man Winter revived, identifying his shooter to Minneapolis PD detectives on the scene. Kansas City Police were called, and Edgar Knickerbocker was taken into custody post haste. When taken out of his residence, past reporters, Knickerbocker was ranting. “Old Man Winter has to be dead, I tell you! It has to be! Nobody survives ten bullets to the chest! Wait, did I say that out loud?”