This is your regularly scheduled reminder that women should be skinny and sexy at all times in order to be considered normal and non-aberrant. Women should also make sure they always are standing on their toes, and should additionally not expect to have names.
La Crosse Technology WS-9640U-IT Wireless Weather Station with "Oscar"
Fun for kids’ room, the family breakfast nook, or the classroom, this wireless weather station from La Crosse Technology monitors outdoor conditions with a fun image of a boy called Oscar Outlook. Based on the temperature and humidity readings received from an outdoor sensor, the display shows Oscar in one of seven different costumes. If he appears with a hat, scarf, and overcoat, for example, it is sure to be a day when bundling up is wise.
La Crosse Technology WS-9740U-IT-NL Wireless Weather Station with "Weather Girl"
Wondering how to dress for the day's conditions? Get it right every time when it comes to dressing for weather by just following along with Weather Girl and her 8 different outfits. With icons suggesting what to wear based out outside temperature, the station also displays indoor and outdoor temperature and indoor humidity, as well as time and date.
I'm not sure what gets to me more: the fact that Weather Girl has a bared midriff for three of her five poses (whereas Oscar dresses pretty much like I do on a day to day basis), or that the "bikini point" for Weather Girl is a honking 78.8 degrees Fahrenheit. For reference: that's what I keep the temperature in my house set at in the summer. And while it's quite comfortable for me, it's not bikini-comfortable.
A final note: I don't go looking for this stuff. I went online today to find a weather clock, and this stuff found me. (I ended up buying this, for the record.)
31 comments:
the "bikini point" for Weather Girl is a honking 78.8 degrees Fahrenheit
To be fair, they both start wandering around in rather skimpy (= cold) bathing suits at 78F.
The bared midriff thing, however...yeah, no. Especially not with a lower barrier of only 50F.
True! My point was less that it was a non-equitable thing, and more that if I owned this thing, in Texas, it would pretty much ALWAYS show a bikini girl. Which would get to me eventually.
Prior to noticing the temperature ranges, I was still sort-of considering buying Weather Girl just because I'd rather look at something that SORT OF looks like me than ... not. Ah well.
To be fair, it's not really a representation of a true woman. Instead, it is a visual depiction of a slightly malfunctioning Terminator units -- the perfect female-formed assassin from the future -- who has a malfunctioning thermocouple.
What La Crosse technology is trying to say but cannot because of threat of terminal censorship is that their company is now owned by this assassin, stranded here from the future in pursuit of an unknown but surely nefarious goal, and this is the poor engineer's cry for help.
The engineers are advising that the rescue mission -- represented by Weather Boy -- come armed (notice the space for concealed weaponry). Also, attempt rescue between 50F and 78F, when Weather Boy is still plausibly armed to the teeth but Weather Girl is revealing her one area of weakness -- the central processing unit located in her lower torso.
HAHAHAHA -- capri pants and bare midriff at 10C?? I live in Canada, and if I wore that getup at 10C my extremities would turn blue. Apparently someone thinks goosebumps are dead sexy.
This looks like it was made by someone in SoCal who has no clue what real weather feels like.
Noticing the heels that Weather Girl wears if she has anything on her feet, it becomes clear that she only stands on her toes because it saves art time - if you also start from the assumption that she needed to be wearing heels when fully clothed. (This is the mental form of a tongue twister. Heels are worn in order for women to look taller, right? So when inventing a blatant fantasy eye-candy woman, shouldn't she just be taller? What does it say that the fantasy woman is designed to wear an article of clothing that is supposedly making up for some deficit?)
I am also boggled by the idea of 26 C as a comfy room temperature, but I am Canadian. May I ask what you'd set it to at other times of the year?
Lastly, given the fractionally different angles of the devices, I would assume they're not photoshopped so much as they've just been programmed to give that as a demonstration screen with variable temperatures.
Heels are worn in order for women to look taller, right?
Unknown. I've heard that heels are also "for" making the hips/butt form new configurations. (Supposedly heels makes the butt jut out differently.)
May I ask what you'd set it to at other times of the year?
For our household, we pretty much maintain 76-78 F year round in our house when the A/C is on. (78 when we're home, 84 when we're not but the cats are, 76 at night to sleep.) When we run the heat, which is really only about 3 months of the year, we push that down to 66-70 F. (I feel strangely ashamed admitting that online because even I consider that kind of 'wasteful' since when I was a kid, we ran the A/C and heat even less than that. But I do like to be comfortable.)
Heels are also worn to change your posture by tilting your pelvis, which makes butts and boobs stick out more, and to change the height/width ratio and the legs/torso ratio. You can take the with-heels ratios and bumpiness and use them on an image of a woman standing flat-footed, but I bet that'd look even more alien.
And I noticed that too: it makes SENSE to have her be essentially a paper doll with fixed features Because LCD, but-but-but-but why then START her out with heels that then must be Ballerina Toes when undressed? I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOUR THOUGHT PROCESS, LA CROSSE.
I am also boggled by the idea of 26 C as a comfy room temperature, but I am Canadian.
I should also note that this varies WILDLY by person. I have a best friend with low blood pressure who is FREEZING at 80 F / 26.7 C. (HOT!) And my step-daughter is most comfortable when we keep the house at 72 F / 22.2 C. (COLD!)
So it's not just the Texas thing; there's a lot of personal body stuff going on too.
WE SHOULD HAVE AN OPEN THREAD!!
True; I remember one of my brother's close friends in high school being chilly in midsummer. (And unfortunately very vulnerable to UV, which meant she couldn't be in direct sun for long to soak up its precious, precious heat.)
That makes sense. But it also means that Bikini Girl is ... a selling point?
Isn't she supposed to be? Failed, in this case and others, surely, but intended as, yeah.
Unknown. I've heard that heels are also "for" making the hips/butt form new configurations. (Supposedly heels makes the butt jut out differently.)
Also, to accentuate the muscles of the legs, supposedly.
Oscar kind of makes sense for kids who aren't great with temperature yet, and don't know how cold 60 F is. (I don't know how cold 60 F is either, because I reject your iconoclastic imperial units.)
Weather Girl exists because, apparently, there were too many nice things in the world and we nearly suffered a cataclysmic unbalancing event.
@Will, LOL.
@GeniusLemur, I kind of like the idea of the clothing, to be honest. Husband and I routinely go out dressed "wrong" for the weather because even though we KNOW "gonna get cold today!" we reach instinctively for the warm weather clothes for several weeks after warm weather stops being a given. The paper-doll is a little bit more of a direct AND HERE IS WHAT YOU SHOULD DO ABOUT IT hint than the picture of the sun combined with a number.
Especially in the morning, before coffee...
Hehe. The temperatures should also calibrate on precipitant, because while the temp might get up to where Weather Girl bares her midriff, the rain (especially in Fictional Forks) pretty well demands someone be covered, unless they like being soaked. Also, the wind here makes it difficult to use parasols or bumbershoots, so we compensate with layering and water-resistant jackets.
Sorry, weather girl, you're only meant for dry tropical climates.
Yes, we should! I'm always curious as how small things like culture, body stuff and availability of resources play in how a house is maintained. I am now greedily rubbing my hands together at the thought because LEARNINGS.
About 16C. When I was in Japan, google was my friend because it let me quickly convert things. Changing how you think of numbers is an interesting paradigm shift. Even if you are being silly?
I've been screwing up in the opposite direction since I moved to my new apartment. I swear it is at least 10F cooler in here than outside, except at night when the heat comes on. I dress for my apartment, go outside and discover I should've gone with a short sleeved shirt or could've gone without a jacket.
Granted, I am also a lizard person and perfectly capable of being cold in the middle of the summer.
Now that I am much more awake, my much more sensible response is just to headdesk. Because what else can you say about someone wearing heels for snow? I can't wear them- I've been on crutches over ten times and I don't go courting more- but she's dressed so impractically for snow I would cry. Ah, patriarchy. *headdesk*
Knee high boots with really tall heels and no tights when it's below freezing? That is a recipe for coldness, slips on the ice, and a very fun hospital visit where they cut your boot off with a scalpel to get at your broken ankle. FUN!
I can actually wear fairly light clothing down to fairly low temps as long as my legs are covered, but have to keep skirts and shorts for awful sweaty gross days. And there is pretty much no weather where a bikini is comfortable - very hot weather requires loose white linen, hats, and iced tea. Bonus from that is that you don't have to make sure that you're slathered in sunscreen several times a day.
I do actually walk on the front pads of my feet a *lot*, especially when barefoot. Ironically, that is one of the reasons I can't wear boots like the model does - the diameter of my calves cannot be contained by most tall boots. (Some of it's fat, but even the muscle alone is pretty prohibitive.)
The first thing I thought of was that I wanted a weather clock with a little icon of a cat in a bikini, so I thought it was funny. It could be spitting and hissing in the rain, curled up in the snow, sprawled out if it's sunny -- it's the lolcat weather clock.
It occurs to me that this must already exist.
I like it. The world needs more lolcat items.
I was referencing the very silly redneck weather predictor that is somewhat popular here. Its a board with a donkey painted on it and horse hairs or yard in the middle where the donkey's tail should be. Its directions for use were as I said. Though the idea of a donkey in thong, and something saying 'nice ass' just kinda made me giggle.
I'd consider buying that.
25C is considered high temperature over here. If it gets anywhere near 30C we get "record heat!" headlines. My optimal operating temperature is somewhere around 10-20C outside, inside should be 20-ish or a tad lower to be pleasant. And forget about trying to get proper sleep if it's near 25 or over...
Yup, same for me. Inside temperature is set to 19.2C in winter, and I usually turn it down a little when I'm up and about and doing stuff. I prefer putting on another layer and grabbing a fleece blanket than turning up the heat.
Of course, we don't have air conditioning so if it gets hot it just gets horrible.
Heh. My ideal indoor temp is between 72 and 78 degrees Fahrenheit - that's about 22-25 degrees Celsius, for you conformist metric users - whatever end of the scale is closest to the temp outside. Which is to say that 72 is freezing for me in summer. Not sure why my fellow North Carolinians think that's a reasonable temperature for air conditioning in public buildings, but I hate hate hate that I always have to carry a jacket around in summer.
I had a roommate once who thought that 60 degrees was an ideal temperature for an air-conditioned house in summer. Sixty. Degrees. Fahrenheit. As Asha noted, that's around 16 degrees Celsius. We... had issues.
And the only times I've donned a bikini when it was less than 80 degrees Fahrenheit, I've been at my grandparents' mountain home and unable to wait for warmer weather to enjoy the lake. And forgotten my warmer swimsuits.
Yeah, we metric users are so conforming we actually agree on the origins of our measuring system. ;p
I prefer the temperature between 65-68 degrees, especially at bedtime, and am not comfortable at all when it gets up to 78-80 indoors (outdoors I can handle a bit more). This is a problem and expensive in Texas. :-(
Looking at the pictures of Weather Girl (can we give her a name? Windy? Who's sweeping down the streets of the city? Anyway...) here's what I notice: each subsequent image is basically added black to the one before it. So the first picture is a bikini, the second adds heels, a skirt, and (if you look closely) a [i]vest[/i] over the bikini top. You can see the connecting string in the front. The third adds long sleeves to the vest, but still leaves it open in the front.
The fourth picture (now it's below 50 degrees) gives her a full jacket, boots, a scarf.... But still, the jacket is open to below her cleavage and she still has nothing but that string bikini on beneath! If they'd removed that line across her chest, I would be able to interpret it as maybe a white turtleneck where the collar is hidden below the scarf?
Many sads.
Has best friend had her thyroid tested? That's a pretty extreme need for heat. 72 F/22.2 C is a pretty average temperature for people to find comfortable with pants on, in my experience. (I'm also Canadian.) Lots of people set their thermostats lower than that here.
I think what i notice about the difference is that... to me, Oscar looks like the kind of friendly character you are supposed to identify with. Weather Girl looks like the kind of sexy stereotype you are supposed to stare at.
Clothes or no clothes, that's what attracts my attention... the boy is meant to be sweet and someone you can relate to, the girl is meant to be the Other.
Clearly, the answer is to have a fake donkey's tail on a board. If it's wet, its raining, if it's at a ninety degree angle, it's windy, if it is dry, it is clear, and if you can't see it, it's night. And then have the fake donkey dressed in a bikini for no other reason that a donkey in a bikini is hot.
I need more coffee before I attempt humor. Excuse me.
So what's the point of having the figure at all? It's conveying the same data as the one Ana bought, except not as efficiently. (I can unpack what the figure's wearing and realize it's cloudy, or just see "cloudy" on the display) And the one possible benefit, "here's what to wear today," is useless if it can't be calibrated to the individual user, especially seeing how miscalibrated it is in the first place.
I've heard "heels accentuate the muscles of the legs" as well, which makes little sense to me as I have giant leg muscles. Being a toe-walker since one could walk will do that to you.
Also, I must share: I viewed this thread with mild confusion when I'd seen just the title, because in the other places I hang out online, this is Weather Girl. (Note: not human, though still idealized, and safe for work.)
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