Betty The Weather Cat Helps Local Weatherman More in Common

Let me see if I can get her to turn around here. Oh, we got to keep our fingers crossed. Here we go. Three, two, one. I'm Jeff Lyons, a chief meteorologist at 14 News in Evansville, Indiana, and this is Betty the Weather Cat. People all over the world are watching this crazy cat, Betty, Betty the Weather Cat, of course. The outpouring for this silly cat has been crazy. This is Betty, my cat. She's gone viral. Not only has she been seen in the U.S., she's been seen in Spain, England, a couple other countries in Europe, and also in Australia, way down under. All I had to do was just set the cat on this little table in there, and she just sits and watches the weather. People seem to like that, so, you know, why not? You've got Animal Planet on one side, and you've got local weather on the other. So we use a regular weather graphics system. Most people are using this to draw cold fronts and tornado warnings and things like that, which I do, of course. But if you import the pictures of the cat, then it turns out you can do all kinds of crazy stuff with it fairly easily. So I figured, well, her tail's such a big part of her body, proportionately, and it's kind of a trademark. So the first one I had with rain in the forecast. So I thought, it might be funny if the umbrella came out of her tail. People like that. You know, it's been kind of fun to play with that. Everybody's quarantining. Everybody's concerned about the pandemic. People seem to identify with it. There are a lot of pet lovers out there, because usually, you know, I'm standing in front of Indiana pointing to something, and now I'm in my dining room with the cat walking through. So maybe people feel like we've kind of become closer in that regard. You know, I think everybody needs a break, and the fact that people enjoy it, and they have been so positive about it, that makes it worth doing. And it's certainly no skin off of my nose to put the cat on the weather, so why not? Because she's been such an essential fixture here, we're going to bestow upon her the highest honor we can give in the weather department, and that is, Betty, your own lower third graphic. Betty says goodbye to the tri-state.