This winter, expect some cold days and some snow.
It will snow before Thanksgiving, unless it doesn't, in which case, our first snowfall will definitely come after Thanksgiving. It will be cold in January and February, which isn't to say that there might not be a few warmish days sprinkled in here and there.
Around March, it'll start to get warmer and the grass will begin to green up.
Oh, and at least once between now and March, WOWT's Jim Flowers will warn us about a gargantuan snowstorm. One that we'll tell our grandkids about. One that will dump at least three hundred inches of snow on us. One that will cancel school until the year 2013 and make disabled people walk again. One that will cause Jim to jump in an SUV and drive around telling us via cellphone what he sees.
But then it'll only bring us about a half-inch of snow, if that, and Jim will explain that it just barely missed us.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Brockman is not a trained meteorologist. His forecasts are for entertainment purposes only and should not be used as investment advice, to plan weddings, or to schedule the planting of crops and/or the care of livestock.]
• For all the hype WOWT put into the CONTINUOUS TICKER it promised for election night, they might have considered making the words visible to the naked eye.
• KETV buried inept reporter/anchor Fubar Fazal about as deeply as it could without taking her off the air entirely during Tuesday night's coverage. Fubar was sent out to cover those opposed to Initiative 423. Technical difficulties prevented her from littering the station's signal until almost 25 minutes into the 10 p.m. broadcast.
• The normally level-headed Joe Jordan of KMTV got a little carried away when early returns showed Democrats leading in Nebraska's 2nd and 3rd congressional districts, prattling about upsets in the making and so forth. For all his experience, shouldn't he have known that early returns were from early voters and that six percent of the vote is hardly indicative of all the ballots cast?
• KMTV's coverage was generally strong, but why, during its 6 p.m. newscast did they call it "Breaking News" when they noted that several cases of norovirus had been identified at Methodist Hospital?
• Candidate Jim Esch has to be wondering what might've happened had he spent more than $400,000 on his campaign or had the Nebraska Democratic Party put some effort behind him. Esch came within 20,000 votes of unseating incumbent Lee Terry, Jr., even though he had virtually no TV advertising against Terry's non-stop barrage of spots during the final two weeks of the campaign. Perhaps it's a sign of just how eager some people were to vote against uber-dork Terry.
• How delusional was Senate candidate Pete Ricketts? At 10:35, he was 50,000 votes behind incumbent Ben Nelson but telling KETV's Brandi Petersen that he expected things to turn around. He apparently wised up around midnight.
• Why does it take so long for Nebraska officials to count ballots? Iowa's polls closed at 9:00, and by 10:00, officials there had tallied in the neighborhood of 250,000 votes. Meanwhile, west of the Missouri, where polls closed at 8:00, Nebraska's Secretary of State could only report on about 100,000 ballots by 10 p.m.
• Worse yet, Douglas County Election Commissioner David Phipps must've been counting them by himself. By 10:55—almost three hours after the polls had closed—Phipps had only managed to count 27,358 early-voting ballots. Things weren't much better by midnight, by which time he had counted fewer than 20 percent of the votes cast.