A quick word...

First, I got an award from The Cat And The Coffee Cup, a very cool blogger who is also a member of The Great Postcard Campaign.  And this is what it looks like:

Not sure it goes with the overall decor, but I still apreciate it.  And you'll find it posted on the right hand side of this Newspaper of the Airwaves.  Now, I am supposed to rattle off 10 random things about me and then tag six other bloggers.  I am going to have Laurie come up with the ten-thing list.

1. Chris is the inventor of the "Cheez-Ho" - a HoHo that has been shot full of cheese-whiz.

          Cheese and chocolate forever!!!

2. His organizational style is more of "spread everything out all over to make it easier to find".

          It's still organized!  I have a hard time knowing where things are when they're "where they're   

         supposed to be.

3. Loves his two-legged kids, but probably gets more enjoyment out of the four-legged one.

         With the four legged one more.

4.  Takes great pride in patting stomach and saying, "Built by burgers!"

         My other great accomplishment, next to two legged kids and Cheez-hos.

5. Once an avid collector of comic books- has a yard thick layer of them in his closet.

         Economic factors and the sheer stupidity of DC have cut off new additions.

6. Collects orphaned golf balls on his walks with Scrappy.

         Hey, they're just happy to have a home.

7. Excellent mind for trivialities- especially on the subject of history.

         Those who know not history are doomed to repeat their mistakes.

8. He enjoys severe storms, thunder, lightning, the whole works.

         Just because I yell, "BRING IT ON!" at the first thunderclap...

9. He would love to spend his day sitting and watching the waters of any ol' lake. 

         Sitting at the dock of the bay, wastin' time...

10. Likes to look at the old antique type advertising signs, and has a handfull in his room.

         Not the fake jokey ones, but old gas station signs or the like.

As for tagging people, I'm not good at that sorta thing.  I think all my followers that blog are creative, so if you wanna, bag the trophy and have at it!  Just let me know that you're doing it and I'll retroactively tag you.  Bob, Alicia, you'd be perfect!  Don't feel obligated, just sayin'.

And for those of you waiting with baited breath for the outcome of that game I mentioned yesterday, Sputnik knocked off arch-rival Zauralie 4-2, stealing the very last playoff spot from them on the last game of the season.  On the other hand, Lokomotiv closed out with a second straight loss, this one to Taurus 4-2.  Dmitry Maltsev scored first for us, but then we gave up 4 straight goals- the first three on power plays, until Oleg Yashin got his 14th with just seconds left.

And a sad note- prayers going out to all of those who lost home or family to the tornadoes last night.  And to the family of former Monkee Davy Jones- more on that on this week's Time Machine.

The storms, the numbers, and Piper

I sat down tonight to blog about the monstrous wave of Tornadoes the last few days, and the past few months.  Even as I did my usual numbers-please research on the topic, I watched video live of damage in Bedford Indiana.  As I tried to find out about Denning Arkansas, the town destroyed last night, I met Teena Evans and her four year old daughter Piper.

They found Teena up against a phone pole... Piper, hurt but alive, over a hundred yards away.  It didn't look to me- if I learned nothing else- that Denning was a town that had a lot of options as far as shelter.

How do you begin to cover such a topic?  Coming into tonight, there were so far this year 20 counties with 5 or more deaths in a single day.  38.6% of tornado deaths since 2008 happened Sunday in Joplin, Missouri. The tornado death toll of 2008-2010 was more than doubled on April 27th alone.  504 Teenas so far this year.  Several dozen Dennings and Joplins.  Countless hundreds of Pipers.

How many Dennings until we get a Maples, or Zulu?  How many Joplins until we have a Huntington?  Is the next Birmingham Fort Wayne?  On the 16th of April, the plant our company operates in Sanford NC was missed by less than a half a mile.  It's getting too close, too personal, even at this distance.  One look at Piper Evans, orphan, tells me that.

Alabama

I remember being a child and watching a tornado warning be issued after the thing had formed over us on the way home from my aunt's, flattened the grass across the road, and was already clear to Hobson road (we lived a good five miles east of New Haven).

I remember in sixth grade when the super-outbreak of '74 happened.  We were just returning from a field trip when they hit, saw a funnel behind us but way in the air.  When we got back to St. Louis Besancon, the nuns had everyone else herded into the basement, and the little kids were crying.  We were laughing and joking about it.  The one nun asked "How can you joke at a time like this?" and we said, "We saw it!"  Instant celebrity.  We sang the school song (I swear in six years I had no idea we HAD a school song) and told ghost stories.  We were scared, but it was an excited scared, a fun scared.

By the time I had kids of my own, storm chasing was in vogue, so we tried it one afternoon after church.  By the time we got to the place where we were going to "follow" it, it was following us, preceded by rain heavy enough I could barely see where we were fleeing to.  I think I finally began to re-think the fascination.

I lived on Dupont road during the Northcrest tornado, and it passed right over us -in our mobile home.  No place to go to, I sent the kids into the solid-est place I could think of under a pile of blankets- and the phone rings!

Me:  What?
Kids' mom: What are you doing?
Me: Taking shelter from the tornado!
KM: What tornado?
Me: Look on the tv! CLICK.

I turned to see that my daughter had wandered back out to see if she could talk to her mom and was staring at me.  Needless to say, she only bounced once, right in front of the bedroom door, and scrambled back where I put her.  Now I've been through winds that shook the trailer back and forth, no big deal.  This was rocking the trailer UP AND DOWN. 

So obviously a lot of the fascination of close looks at tornadoes has worn off.  But last night I watched the video that kid took of the Tuscaloosa tornado.  I've never seen a blacker, more merciless monster in my life, and it scared me even separated by time and distance.  I looked at video of Tuscaloosa and thought, JAPAN.  We followed the live feed out of Birmingham, and even as they gave hope- describing one last line coming into the state that was the "dry line", i.e. the end of the storms- and THAT line sprung up a twister and sent it through the middle of a town that had already for all practical intents been wiped out by an earlier tornado.  Then I saw the sky-cam video of THAT tornado- how it went from a wispy little nothing into a hulking finger of Armageddon in something under thirty seconds.  I saw a post on facebook where a woman was holding a hailstone that covered two-thirds of her hand and said, "here's another one".

And I said, "Another one?"  Then I saw the first one.

I won't say that I'll ever get to a point where the "severe thunderstorm warning" comes on and I don't shout, "Bring it on!" just as I have for decades.  But I believe I might throw some more disclaimers on with the request.

180 dead just in Alabama.  And today you can watch it on radar as it approaches.  I shudder to think how many more it might have been if Birmingham got its warning when the storm was halfway to Talladega like it was back in '72, on that day we said, wow, that really was a tornado.  My thoughts and prayers go out to those people who are wondering where their lives will go and where their town went.