Fantasies with Romica Jurcă

Columns were born and have passed away, TV programs had their glory then went to oblivion, TV projects have gone from agony to ecstasy with a haste that requires reflection on the impermanence of all things that there are… And yet, amid this evolutional uproar, something has remained stable, like an island of permanence, a fragile illusion of endless continuity: the weather section.

What would the Romanian do without the weather section, religiously watched by those to whom weather information aren't of any use? What sense to the life, to man's existence on Romanian land without the clear conscience of the "minimum" and the "maxim"?! How would we conduct our everyday trivial conversations without a reasonable knowledge of the wind speed, air humidity, currents' traffic and, in general, of the weather forecast?! For, as I can see, such a precipitated nation cannot remain indifferent to precipitations, just as humans under the times feels he knows nothing unless he knows how... the weather will be. A small bracket, I remember how in the '80s, in my grandparents' village in Bucovina, people gathered around an old radio listening with amazing concentration... the levels of the Danube. What connections or there between Bucovina and the Danube is still not clear to me yet...

In time, the weather forecast had a variety of approaches, ranging for years between trend and scientific limit. Nobody was very clear on how this section at the end of the news should look like. Some said that, since it was a soft issue, the weather forecast involves girlies with long legs and nudist smiles. But what to do with credibility? It is common knowledge, that information will lose credibility when transmitted by the wrong person. This is why others, on the contrary, insisted on sobriety and scientificality, evoking the deep scars left in local mentalities by the famous Ortansa Jude, the one who spoke of wind and rain in midst communist drought. She did so, do you remember?, as if holding her doctoral thesis, but if one missed her they needed to call to the neighbour: should wear or not the mohair sweater the following day? The dispute was much complicated by the emergence of frenzied tabloids where the weather section presented in the nip. In case of low temperatures, they inevitably mentioned that the chick looking like a rehabilitated prostitute needs to warm up;  if it was hot, everything was logic, and giving up clothes was certainly imperative.

sursa foto: www.tvr.ro

And then how can one help from having (anti)fantasies  with Romica Jurcă, this fatality in a skirt of national meteorology explaining methodically and argued on TVR 1, how and why it rains on earth. She wears stiff outfits, with long clothes throwing weather forecasts in full media monasticism, her gestures are firm, like those of an impeccably trained infantryman, with a nearly boy-like hair dress and the attitude of an anthropomorphic blizzard. She speaks gravely and yet suavely, apodictically, but seemingly a priori, her words are chunks of polar ice floating on the TV oceans, although her voice carries tanks of hot lava. The mole to the left of her nose instigates heart debaucheries, and her big, round, piercing eyes seem to hide hardly hushed hells. Then, in the uncontrollable sequences of humidity in the autumn wind, I imagine her wearing leather and holding whip, with some naughty piercing... Or abandoned to a Bacchanal delirium, broadcasted live, with torn suits and traces of nails into her skin, with handcuffs ratchets and dirty words, uttered in a whisper, with greasy instances of the being and a sin burning the epidermis... But, alas, eyes open and we're still in the era of glaciation, inner temperatures announce frost, and the planet was transformed into the freezer.

Returning to the fate of weather forecasts in the Romanian visual field, it seems that the recipe for success was found by ProTv, who for more than eight years, have kept actor Florin Busuioc on the barricades. Busu chose the middle way, inspiringly combining a dimension of the reasonable (at the level of clothing, or by words of wisdom quite smartly chosen) with the dimension of a seriousness account. Something like: when it's funny we're laughing, when there's work to be done, we're working. It is quite unusual for a man wearing ultra-weird outfits, with multicoloured jackets, or with alien accessories to have so much credibility.  By September this year, GfK Romania, in a market research on weather bulletins, placed him first in a triple rating from Romica Jurcă. No comments!

Formally speaking, the interest for this bulletin should be decreasing. The explanation is simple: internet offers much more details, with higher probability, calculated on increasingly better defined areas. So well defined that you can find out whether tomorrow at 14.30, it will rain or not on your street. That, again, formally, because basically, the weather bulletin is no longer a show like the others, having turned into a national asset, a sacred canon. It is part of the small and fewer joys of the Romanian; the weather information comes to be the true axiological grid for many, depending on which they define their destinies, they live or miss their lives. Without the weather forecast, without Romica, without Busu, we would be infinitely more miserable... You know, like in those weather forecasts like lyrics: "The wind blows cold ... / Wounds are sore!”