Frog Day Afternoon

Has anyone else noticed the recent weather rebranding?

“Someday, a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets,” predicts Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Of course, he became the “rain,” metaphorically speaking, with enough cultural impact that John Hinckley, Jr. was inspired to shoot Reagan. Speaking of rain — Paul Thomas Anderson took symbolic precipitation to new highs (or lows?) when he had a plague of frogs rain down on the San Fernando Valley in Magnolia — one of the most memorable movie moments of the past quarter-century of cinema.

Given such inspiration, why haven’t meteorologists borrowed from this lexicon when rebranding our weather systems? Consider the terms “supercell” and “bomb cyclone,” which sound more like a place to lock up Lex Luther and the box office results for Dwayne Johnson’s Red One. Closer to home, those of us in the San Francisco Bay Area are currently experiencing an “atmospheric river,” which, for Petalumans, translates to “sky slough.”

Remember storms? We used to have storms — just plain storms th…