You da man, Topper.

Weather people, as it turns out, have powers beyond those of us regular newsfolk. Not only can they predict the future, which if you think about it is no small thing, they are completely invulnerable to the whims of the beast known as the Teleprompter.

That's right. While the rest of us live or die by the scripts scrolling by, weather people do their thing without a net, so to speak. They just seem to memorize that whole weather spiel, from the current temperatures to the 7 day forecast, to that wierd low pressure system that may or may not bring snow in July. Frankly, I don't know how they do it.

I remember once in the 7pm news we had dangerous thunderstorms breaking out all over, with the possibility of tornados somewhere. We went wall-to-wall weather, which basically means I sat there watching Topper wax on and on about storm stuff.

It was just Topper and the computer for like, 20 minutes with no commercials.

I was blown away, and it had nothing to do with the storm.

He was like an artist, using the Doppler 9000 to zoom in here or moving over there, providing smooth commentary the entire time.

And lets face it...there was really only so much new info and he'd gone through most of it in the first 3 minutes, but Top never seemed to be repeating himself...or even stressed about it. His whole attitude was " I could do this all night." In fact, you thought maybe he wanted to.