PETER SAGAL, HOST:
You know the old saying everybody complains about the weather, but nobody devotes a whole bunch of time on the radio to making fun of it? Not true. Here’s our weather coverage from 2014.
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CARL KASELL, BYLINE: Go home, Arctic, you're drunk.
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SAGAL: That was Greg Laden, writing at scienceblogs.com, about the big what this week?
MITHCELL STEPHENSON: The polar vortex?
SAGAL: Yes indeed.
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SAGAL: This was the polar vortex, a spinning cold air monster that usually lives at the North Pole but, as you heard, got drunk and stumbled down through Canada to fall asleep on top of us.
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SAGAL: It was colder in Chicago, this is true, than in Antarctica this week.
PAULA POUNDSTONE: Wow.
SAGAL: The Polar Bear at a Chicago zoo, really, said to hell with this and went inside.
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SAGAL: And the penguins said idiot, now they know we can talk.
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SAGAL: More true stories. With the wind chill, it was actually colder in Minnesota than it was on Mars. And the Mars Rover was not cool about this. It kept posting pictures of itself on a hammock.
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SAGAL: You guys of course endured the worst of it in L.A., Paula and Adam.
CHARLIE PIERCE: And me. I was in L.A. this weekend.
ADAM FELBER: We came pretty close to having to put on pants at one point.
SAGAL: That was terrible.
POUNDSTONE: Yeah, no I actually bundle up during the winter, even though I live in Santa Monica, because in the morning often it gets into the 50s.
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POUNDSTONE: No, I'm telling you the truth.
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PIERCE: And there's, like, a breeze, too, right?
FELBER: Yeah, because it's near the water.
PIERCE: The wind chill goes down to like 49.9.
POUNDSTONE: You're exactly right.
SAGAL: Does that mean you have to wear your thermal sandals?
POUNDSTONE: No. I do wear a thick sock, however, and of course a high-waisted cottony brief.
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FELBER: Oh, dear.
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SAGAL: And people tried to have fun with this. One big thing, you know that trick, you probably saw it on YouTube, where it's really cold, and you throw boiling water in the air, and it turns to snow. True fact, at least 50 people across the country scalded themselves trying to do this.
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FELBER: Well, they didn't realize you were supposed to go outside.
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POUNDSTONE: They threw it at one another. I thought it was going to freeze.
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PIERCE: It was probably stuff like, you know, this idea that...
FELBER: It's physics' fault.
PIERCE: It'll freeze faster if I throw it directly into the wind.
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SAGAL: Have you ever been in minus-15 degree weather, Paula?
POUNDSTONE: Are you kidding me? Yes.
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FELBER: You don't even have time to make up a plausible lie, do you?
POUNDSTONE: No, I'll tell you something. Sometimes at the beach, we'll have a cooler, and boy, you reach in there to get a soda, and I've got to tell you...
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POUNDSTONE: You know what I'm saying? I mean, nippy pippy, yeah.
SAGAL: I understand.
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BILL KURTIS, BYLINE: You're going to let a glass ceiling hold you back? A glass ceiling? You're a hurricane for crying out loud. Just shatter it.
SAGAL: That was NPR's own Beth Novey giving advice for what particular kind of hurricane this week?
MICHAEL YORKE: One named after females.
SAGAL: You're right. Very good.
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SAGAL: Hurricanes with female names.
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SAGAL: A study that came out this week showed that female hurricanes do more damage because people do not take female-named hurricanes as seriously as they do male named hurricanes. You know, 'cause we think of lady hurricanes as dainty things just sitting around, putting on makeup, reading Cosmo's 35 ways to obliterate your man this weekend.
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SAGAL: But, no. They're hurricanes.
PETER GROSZ: Do they depend on - I mean, Hurricane Lilly is hard to take as seriously as like Hurricane like Bertha.
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SAGAL: No, as a matter of fact...
JESSI KLEIN: Which, of course, is a fat hurricane.
GROSZ: Hurricane Hildegard you'd take seriously.
SAGAL: This is actually true. There's even a difference between the quality of names. If it's a particularly kind of girly name, you know, like Hurricane Miley, no one takes it seriously.
GROSZ: Right.
MO ROCCA: Hurricane Chrystal with four Ys.
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SAGAL: Yeah.
ROCCA: That just strips all the clothes off the people in town.
GROSZ: Hurrican Ke$ha with that dollar sign.
SAGAL: Yeah, that seems serious. So there are two solutions suggested for this problem - first, give hurricanes both names and nicknames, so it's Hurricane Tiffany, the devourer of worlds.
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SAGAL: And second, doing nothing because anybody who doesn't get out of the way of a hurricane 'cause it has girly name deserves what's coming to it.
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KLEIN: I was just going to say though, at least female hurricanes will ask for directions and it will find you. It will get you.
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KLEIN: A male hurricane might just drive off - doesn't know where to go.
GROSZ: I've been up this coast before.
KLEIN: I got it, I got it.
GROSZ: All right, let's turn around - go back to...
KLEIN: I got it. I have GPS, I got it
GROSZ: I would love to see a hurricane like pull into a bank and be like, she made me come in here. Where's North Carolina?
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SAGAL: Mo, it’s tough being in a relationship these days, what, with Facebook, Twitter and gay marriage breaking up couples.
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SAGAL: Well, new research out this week says there's another threat to monogamy - what?
ROCCA: Oh, gosh. I mean - another threat to monogamy. Not the - well, the Internet was alluded - includes when you said Facebook so it's not that. It's...
GROSZ: We have a microphone in Mo's brain.
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SAGAL: I'll give you a hint. You could say it's an inconvenient truth about love.
ROCCA: Oh, global warming.
SAGAL: Yes.
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ROCCA: OK.
SAGAL: Dating site, Victoria Milan, asked 5,000 members if stress about the heating weather would cause them to cheat. Seventy-two percent said yes.
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SAGAL: The site CEO says "summer loving is something everybody experiences when they're growing up" unquote. So basically, watching the planet broil is going to make us all want to go neck with Eileen Greenwald under the boardwalk again.
KLEIN: Neck.
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ROCCA: Wait...
SAGAL: Boardwalk.
ROCCA: It's not the "March Of The Penguins." It's the walk of shame of the Penguins.
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GROSZ: Fracking.
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SAGAL: Yeah.
ROCCA: Fracking does sound fun.
GROSZ: Just fracking.
ROCCA: Ozone hole. Sorry.
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GROSZ: We've just been reduced to saying things that are suggestive. Fracking. Ozone hole.
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GROSZ: Drilling. Deepwater horizon.
(LAUGHTER) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.