KGB Report National Temperature Index

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WNN NTI KGB on WNN

Yes, Virginia, There Is A National Temperature Index

(aired on ABC World News Now Monday, August 21, 2000)

World News Now normally doesn't respond at length to viewer e-mails.

But we feel we must address a particularly disturbing message from a young viewer in New York. Her friends have told her that our National Temperature Index is a meteorological fiction, a mere fabrication by an over-caffeinated, sleep-deprived, cynical practical joker.

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They think that nothing can exist that is not comprehensible by their little minds.

Yes, Virginia, there is a National Temperature Index.

It exists as certainly as Leah Rozen and Barry Mitchell and George Watson exist.

How dreary this newscast would be if there were no N-T-I!

It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias -- or inserts from ABC Radio News. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance -- no polka! -- to make tolerable our obscure, late night existence.

Not believe in the National Temperature Index?

You might as well not believe in Peter Jennings!

You could hire Sam Donaldson to search for the NTI formula. But even if Sam didn't find it, what would that prove, aside from the fact that you should have probably also hired a producer and research assistant?

Nobody knows how the N-T-I is calculated, but that doesn't mean it isn't real.

The most real things in this world are those that neither children nor men can see.

Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Okay, maybe I'm asking the wrong audience. Anyway, that's not proof that they're not there.

Only with faith, poetry, love and chronic insomnia can you push aside that curtain and view the N-T-I's beauty and glory.

No National Temperature Index?

Thank God and David Westin! It lives, and lives forever.

A thousand substitute anchors from now, Virginia... nay, ten times ten thousand anchors from now... the National Temperature Index will continue to make glad the hearts of dedicated World News Now viewers everywhere.

So let's just drop it, okay?

Kevin G. Barkes

With respect and affection for Francis Pharcellus (Frank) Church.

The NTI is dead... long live the NTI!

On January 6, 2003, World News Now replaced the National Temperature Index with the National Darkness Quotient. The Darkness Quotient never caught on and was dropped without notice during the coverage of the Iraq War.

Why? Who knows?

Anyway, the responsibility for producing the NTI was assumed by KGB Report, where it is crafted with care and diligence, adhering as closely as possible to the "secret" formula used by ABC News' crack meteorologists.

Then WNN resurrected the NTI on January 5, 2007. Why? That's also shrouded in mystery. Check out the NTI section of the World News Now entry on Wikipedia for the latest info.

R.I.P. N.T.I
(A touching farewell to a national institution. Includes excerpts from "Yes Virgina," above.)

KGB on WNN re NTI: Thursday, January 30, 2003

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So there.
The kgb@kgb.com e-mail address is now something other than kgb@kgb.com saga.
kgbreport.com used to be kgb.com until December, 2007 when the domain name broker Trout Zimmer made an offer I couldn't refuse. Giving up kgb.com and adopting kgbreport.com created a significant problem, however. I had acquired the kgb.com domain name in 1993, and had since that time used kgb@kgb.com as my sole e-mail address. How to let people know that kgb@kgb.com was no longer kgb@kgb.com but rather kgbarkes@gmail.com which is longer than kgb@kgb.com and more letters to type than kgb@kgb.com and somehow less aesthetically pleasing than kgb@kgb.com but actually just as functional as kgb@kgb.com? I sent e-mails from the kgb@kgb.com address to just about everybody I knew who had used kgb@kgb.com in the past decade and a half but noticed that some people just didn't seem to get the word about the kgb@kgb.com change. So it occurred to me that if I were generate some literate, valid text in which kgb@kgb.com was repeated numerous times and posted it on a bunch of different pages- say, a blog indexed by Google- that someone looking for kgb@kgb.com would notice this paragraph repeated in hundreds of locations, would read it, and figure out that kgb@kgb.com no longer is the kgb@kgb.com they thought it was. That's the theory, anyway. kgb@kgb.com. Ok, I'm done. Move along. Nothing to see here...