Editing 1324: Weather

Social norm accepts casual small-talk as an ice breaker for interaction — usually it is always safe to talk about the weather without hitting any disagreements as there are rarely any personal viewpoints about the weather — in contrast small-talk is never about political subjects (except perhaps at a political rally or in a similar context where it is reasonably certain that everyone agrees) or similar where chances are that there are strong personal viewpoints.

In this strip [[Cueball]] is described a "weather geek", enjoying subjects such as {{w|meteorology}} and {{w|weather forecasting}}. When [[Hairy]] makes a comment about the weather, Cueball launches into a detailed technical discussion, not realizing Hairy is simply trying to engage in small-talk. Only weather geeks would have this problem, but this topic is a common opening for a conversation in casual small-talk. Cueball switches to small-talk once he realizes that Hairy is confused and didn't expect this level of technical information.

*{{w|Jet stream|Jet streams}} are strong air currents high in the atmosphere which have a big influence on the weather.  

*18z is 18:00 {{w|Coordinated Universal Time|UTC}} (6 PM in London, 10 AM in California). See {{w|ISO 8601}} at Wikipedia. The letter "Z" is used as 'Zulu' in the {{w|NATO phonetic alphabet}}, meaning just UTC.

*GFS is the {{w|Global Forecast System}} (also known as NCEP-GFS). It is a computer model used by the {{w|National Weather Service}} to predict the weather up to 16 days in advance. The model is run 4 times a day and the output is distinguished by the UTC hour it was started (18z in this case).

*Part of the prediction is the {{w|atmospheric pressure}} expressed in {{w|Bar (unit)|millibars}} (or mb). 960 mb is very low pressure, which is usually associated with seriously bad weather (for comparison, the record low pressure for Minnesota was 963 mb until 1998).

*"Think it'll verify?": A forecast "verifies" when an analysis of observations at the forecast time are found to match the forecast. Cueball is asking if Hairy thinks the prediction of a 960 mb low will be shown to have been correct.

The title text clarifies the problem weather nuts like Cueball here have: Unlike other geeky pursuits (like, say, the {{w|Derinkuyu Underground City|Derinkuyu Underground Cities}}, [[1368: One Of The|one of the]] most well-known {{w|History of Turkey|archaeological sites in Turkey}}) weather is a fairly common small talk subject. As a result, weather geeks have to be constantly vigilant so as not to launch into technical monologues.