September 23, 2005

"It feels like icepicks, almost."

Says FoxNews's Shepard Smith, suffering in the wind in Beaumont, Texas. Sometimes, I'm laughing at him, but I also feel awfully sorry for him. And kind of worried.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lots of talk about Smith's hat and underlying is-it-real hair, which we got to inspect when the hat blew off.

13 comments:

Be said...

Sorry/worried for anyone who'd refer to wind/weather anywhere south of where you or I am from as being like ice picks? Or something else?

Unknown said...

I'm frankly waiting for one of these dumbass newsmen to get themselves seriously injured or killed. (Or, to quote an anonymous stand-up comedian, "seriously killed"). I mean at some point, Darwin is just going to have to rear his ugly dead head.

Troy said...

I hope his rug stays on in this wind. Otherwise it's skinnerville.

Pancho said...

Texas is a big state. Here in West Texas there was not a cloud in the sky nor a breath of wind tonight.

Eli Blake said...

They have better hurricane predictions now, so he is actually where the action is, but when I lived in Corpus Christi several years ago, I heard the following story (it was also back when the media could get away with more phony news):

During a hurricane some years earlier, it was predicted to make landfall in Corpus Christi. So one of the big three networks sent a reporter there. At the last moment, the hurricane wobbled and moved a significant distance up the coast, to where Corpus Christi was at best overcast. So the news network got some big industrial size fans and set them up on the beach, so it would look like wind was blowing and then paid a couple of guys to throw buckets of water in front of the fans (this was on the beach so they just refilled them from the ocean) so the TV cameras would take pictures of this guy in a rain poncho with the wind blowing and sheets of water hitting him. Then the sound guy rubbed his hand on a microphone to create sound effects and told the reporter to hold one hand up to his earpiece and yell into the microphone.

Other than the few square feet of beach where the reporter was standing, no place in Corpus experienced hurricane conditions.

Anna said...

El Jerko Geraldo's description was knife slashing gusts! That guy drives me nuts!

Anna said...

Oh, and the rug dilemma has been resolved. Shephard lost his baseball hat and the hood on his jacket and the hair is still there! ha!

Ruth Anne Adams said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ann Althouse said...

I saw the hat blow off, in heavy wind, and if that is fake hair, it's sure super-glued on. It did look thin though. He had all-over hair, no comb-over issues, but you could see a lot of white scalp. Some surgical procedure, perhaps?

Unknown said...

Well, Shep and Geraldo are in competition with themselves, after the drama of Katrina, and are searching for some serious leaning-into-the-gale shots and perhaps a bridge or two with ABANDONDED PEOPLE on them. Shep has his cap on backwards, which means he is laughing ironically at nature's force. C'mon, baby, bring it on, I survived the Big One!

Anderson is competing against all of that. He looks like the spelling champ competing with the football team.

Charlie Martin said...

Could I vote for not being sympathetic because Shep et al are standing out in the ice-pick rain out of a combination of stupidity and narcissism?

XWL said...

Speaking of Shep, my guess is that it's a very good plug job (or just typical Northern European fine hair)

Now speaking of Anderson, from an old CNN puff piece about him, the image of his tasteful bedroom, dominated by a massive Warhol portrait of his mother (the late Gloria Vanderbilt) directly above his bed, just screams so many different messages that the less said the better.

Anna said...

Ann, In re: Sheps's hair. I would have to consider the plug or surgical implants angle. He is still better than Geraldo any day of the week even though he can be over-the-top, too.

As for any of them standing out there testing Mother Nature, I have only one word...stupidity!