"Doctor! We're losing him!"
"Get me 50cc of the smoothest chart hits pumped straight into his bloodstream."
"It's no good Doc; his body's rejecting it, he's too far gone."
"Gah! We've lost him. Time of death, 5:34pm."
Let it be known that at this time, on Tuesday 3rd April 2018, I have finally lost it; I have officially lost touch. To be honest, it's been coming a while. Ever since I left college, almost two years ago now, I have known that it was only a matter of time before I completed my inevitable slide into cultural irrelevance. And now, as I write this article about a beta version of a national weather-forecasting site for a website ostensibly aimed at a student demographic, I think it officially marks the final nail entering into the coffin of my being 'with it'. Indeed, my use of the phrase 'with it' is surely the unceremonious shoveling of dirt onto the lid of that coffin, now lowered into the earth.
Regardless of how much that morbid introduction to an article about a weather-forecasting service came as a surprise to you, and indeed to me, I think it is safe to see that Met Éireann's new website will come as a ray of sunshine through that unforeseen darkness - assuming rays of sunshine are what's forecast. I don't want to oversell this badboy but seeing, and using, the beta version of this new beta site has improved my Tuesday by a net total of a tasty 3% (rounded to the nearest whole number). No. Exaggeration.
When you do take the plunge and decide to finally click onto their site, having taken the appropriate precautions as to your own welfare beforehand - sitting in a comfortable chair, strapping protective padding to your chin to shield it should your jaw hit the dang floor - you will not regret your decision. As the dulcet blue trimming of the website first begins to load, you will be hit smack bang in the face by their new weather map (not literally). This weather map has numerous settings, the default, 'Rainfall Radar', provides you with a live map of rainfall movement over time across the country (literally).
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This is where I imagine some of the sticklers, some of the hard-core weather buffs, among you might rear your ugly heads. "But the old Met Éireann website had the very same feature," you wail at your screens. "Surely this can't be the reason you've brought us along on this wild goose chase of an article." And you'd be right. This is where the wheat (the new Met Éireann website) is really separated from the chaff (the old Met Éireann website), you are now also able to view a live forecasted map of rainfall across the entire country.
I'll just give you a moment to let that sink in. To drink in that news, so rich and potent that someone ought immediately confiscate your keys and appoint a designated driver to take you home, or at the very least plonk you in the back of a taxi with your address scrawled on your forehead; so intoxicated you must surely be by this news, so inebriating in its wonder. Perhaps you would like to take this time to call a loved one - or your marital partner - and let them know the news. To, for a moment, act as a prophet and spread the good news that our national conversational arsenal for talking about the weather has received a bold new addition.
Similar features are also available with regards to wind and temperature, not just, our main boy, precipitation. It also places your location on the map so that you can see exactly what is coming your way, weather-wise. You can also look at a live reading of the pressure across the entire country which, if you are, like me a recent college graduate hoping to one day earn enough money to own anything more salubrious than an upturned recylcing bin in a car-park by way of property, this pressure map must surely just have the words 'unrealistic, lots of' plastered over the entire country.
Is this article the place for a quite ham-fisted attempt at satire? Almost certainly not. Is it staying in as I've an unrealistic word count that I'm expected to meet. I think the results speak for themselves.
