Speaking of Weather

The weather has long been standard chit-chat conversation, a relatively safe topic for talking when nobody knows what to talk about -- or when everybody knows what needs to be talked about but refuses to do so.

That's what I keep thinking of when I visit The Weather Channel and see this:

As if conversations about the weather were not already adequately safe in their relational shallowness, this sounds to me like an invitation to superficial interaction through the anonymity of the internet.