All brides-to-be worry about the weather forecast for their wedding day. But few have the tools that Channel 4's Jesse Ritka has at her disposal as the newest member of the station's weather team.
That hasn't necessarily given her an advantage.
Ritka's off the air through June 25 as she heads to Minnesota to get hitched on Saturday.
And her weather worries were clear on her Facebook page this week.
"I know every bride is uber nervous about what the weather is going to be like on their wedding day... but I think it's even worse being a meteorologist in the same position. With so many computer models saying so many different things I'm becoming less confident in my Minnesota weekend forecast due to all of those "What ifs" and variations in the forecast models ... sorry for the vent!"
Don't apologize for the vent, Jesse. It demonstrates the strength of social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, which allow a closer connection between the on-camera folks at the viewers.
On Tuesday's morning show, executive producer, Julie Pearl, made a wedding cake and the team gave it to Jesse at the end of the show. Susan Kim tells me the weathercaster needed a cake topper.
"So she took the one from the cake! It was of a bride dragging the groom to the altar."
On TV: Channel 12 has picked up a prestigious National Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio-Television Digital News Association. It won for best newscast in a large market and focused on the 10 p.m. news the night of the O'Donnell Parking Garage collapse.
- Comedy Central has picked up Daniel Tosh's "Tosh.0" for a 26-episode fourth season.
- Lifetime is making a docudrama on the suburban Chicago cop Drew Peterson, the suspect in the deaths of his third and fourth wives. Rob Lowe has been picked to play the bombastic Peterson.
- Amy Poehler's "Leslie Knope" is the credited author of a 240-page tome called "Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America." It's due out this fall.
A serious Kelsey Grammer: Starz has released a first look at Kelsey Grammer in "Boss," a drama about a Chicago mayor that's due to air this fall. Here's the video:
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
