Southern Living once wrote that if Jim Cantore is coming to your hometown, you’d better get outta there. Fast.
Batten down the hatches, Boone, because Cantore, the John Wayne of weather, has landed in your town!
Not familiar with Cantore?
The itinerant meteorologist is most often seen buffeted by strong winds in front of The Weather Channel cameras, sometimes wading through floodwaters in a bright-blue windbreaker.
You simply do not mess with Cantore when he's reporting on the weather, whether you're an intoxicated frat boy or Hurricane Michael.
The first notion the weatherman might be heading to the mountains of Western North Carolina came Thursday, when a blog from WCNC refuted a claim he was coming to the Queen City:
"'I love me some Jim Cantore, but he's not in Charlotte,' (Charlotte meteorologist) Brad Panovich wrote on his Facebook page.
Panovich said he was texting with Cantore Thursday morning. Cantore told Panovich he was headed to Asheville on Friday."
Twitter, predictably, reacted with a mixture of hilarity and panic over the rumors. And then on Friday morning, Cantore himself appeared to confirm the news with his own Tweet.
By Friday night the Weather Channel settled the mystery when it put out of list of where weather reporters were hunkering down and it had Cantore assigned to Boone.