Coach's Corner

It's been my long-term Austin experience that our friendly local weather-people lie to us every summer. Is it intentional -- an institutionalized, Chamber of Commerce kind of thing lest the truth create a massive and economically destructive depopulation of Austin? Or maybe, what with the rapid turnover of weather-folk, they really don't know better.

Bill Hecke's my favorite weatherman. He's been doing Austin weather for as long as I can remember, mostly in the old days on the radio. I like Bill because he dearly loves all those isobars and high- and low-pressure systems colliding out over the Lesser Antilles. He wants us to like them too. Bill's old school. I seriously doubt he has any kind of degree in TV communications. Anyway, last week, in the middle of our annual 30-day roasting in temperatures over 100, Bill came on with a Mary Poppins five-day forecast which had every day's high as a suspicious, guarded 99. Bill looked sad and hangdog as he flashed this up on the screen. He didn't believe it either. Every other station had highs of 102, but not KEYE. Did Bill's bosses insist on avoiding the unmentionable 100's?

BB King says that even Lucille lies a little. So it is with all the rest of the weather community. To wit: the idiotic daily news anchor patter concerning rain. From June until September it does not rain in Texas. Not this year, not next year, not in 1803, and not in 2101. We all know this. Nevertheless, for the benefit, I guess, of people who just moved here from Oregon, they yammer on and on about rainless days as if it's an aberration. Why do they insist on putting in daily rain chances of 20% every day?

Then there's the heat. Even in the most benign of summers, we roast in a relentless day-to-day inferno, comparable to spending time in the trunk of your car. Still, no weather-person will ever say this. They always appear sad (and a bit chagrined) when another 100-degree day comes to pass. Never spoken is the sad, monotonous truth: This is it. Every damn day … until October. People from Oregon can take it. And if they can't, fuck 'em. They just sold their house in Portland, what are they going to do? It's not going to rain, and tomorrow is going to be just as hot as yesterday. Fall starts on Sept. 21? Dream on.

What's an August day like in Beijing, China? Soon we'll all find out -- though I, for one, am disgusted by the lack of media attention -- call it indifference -- to the decision by the Byzantine and hopelessly corrupt International Olympic Committee to award the Olympics to China. Is it a stretch to compare the political climate of modern-day China to that of the 1936 Olympiad in Nazi Germany, when Hitler was able to sanitize and pretty up the human catastrophe already taking place in his capital? Maybe, but not such a stretch that the comparison falls apart. The government of China executes a "dissident" a day -- and those are the ones reported to the Western press. The Chinese government has been, for a long time, among the most repressive on earth. Chinese leaders insist their massive population be nothing more than walking robots … or else. There's no freedom of anything in China, except, I guess, to ride a bike.

Yet, for political reasons that go beyond my single-cell-amoeba thinking, China is awarded the world's foremost international spotlight, where they, like Hitler on the eve of man's descent into the vortex of hell, can show the world that all that bad stuff we read about China is just silly. See the clean streets and happy, smiling people.

I've read how the world's biggest country shouldn't be ignored. To which I think, why the hell not? I've read how important "economic issues" are to the United States and the rest of the world; that the world community is afraid to offend the grand masters in this repressive, third-world nation. And I think, why not? Our president defends his Mel Brooksish missile defense scheme by selling us on the grave danger of China; yet let's give them the Olympics. I might admire this unapologetic straight-line Republican worship of the dollar if it weren't so amoral.

Ah, what the devil's wrong with me, anyway? I've no good excuse for this sort of churlishness. I'm not roasting away the last few cells of lucidity in the Texas oven, wondering where, exactly, is the 20% of Austin where it's raining. All the while obsessively pondering that the worst is yet to come. On the contrary, I'm sitting in a lawn chair, wearing a sweatshirt, watching a Rocky Mountain stream rush past, where my only worry ought to be which golf course to play on tomorrow and when will I find time to pitch my hammock.

I pick up a copy of the Vail Daily to note a large front-page color picture of a rodeo clown and 550 Kashmir goats imported here for 10 days to eat weeds. No mention of China … though a 20% chance of rain is noted.