. . . can be very interesting.
Mrs. Bulldog and I - and another very clever blogger that I know - spent most of our lives in the Great Plains area. The weather on the Nebraska/Iowa border and on the Missouri/Kansas border can be . . . well, extreme.
While Mrs. B and I lived in Omaha, we saw two tornados. One F2 storm hit less than a half-mile from our house. The other was an F4, and blasted across town four miles away.
Mike Hollingshead is a storm chaser from Blair, NE. His storm photos are simply amazing. Give his website a look. Here's a Nebraska example.
Now this may look fierce, and it is. However, compared to hurricanes, tornadoes are generally much smaller, last a much shorter time and cause less overall damage.
I would rather live in tornado country than hurricane country. Call it the Wildebeest effect. In tornado country, you have only one lion chasing you, he gets tired very quickly, and there are lots of other Wildebeests milling around. Chances of getting eaten are pretty small. On the other hand, a hurricane is a whole pride of lions, backed up by reserves, and they don't tire out for days. Chances of getting eaten are much greater.
. . . All of which may cause you to ask why Mrs. B and I now live in Virginia. The answer is that we DON'T live in Virginia during hurricanes. We go inland.
4 comments:
See this is one of the scary things about bits of America. I love the country (to some extent - G. W. Bush appears to be an idiot) but you have very scary weather and animals/invertebrates/gangbangers-with-guns which are at best intimidating and at worst fatal.
Plus we need to teach you about cheese...but that's a separate subject...
Extreme weather is always awe-inspiring - as long as you're not directly in its path! The most extreme it gets over this side of the pond is it floods from time to time and we occasionally think we ought to consider getting air-conditioning when the "summer" (I use the term very loosely) gets beyond 35C (95 Fahrenheit).
Even our earthquakes are so weedy I manage to sleep through them, not quite so easy to do in San Francisco!
Actually, we need lessons on bread as well as cheese. Unless one picks up botique bread, the standard fare barely is one step above cardboard. I have a good source for Irish soda bread, though.
We do have quite a selection of cheese available, including almost all of those mentioned in the Python skit. I even saw Wensleydale last weekend - the cheese, not the shopkeeper. It's just that the typical American has no taste for anything other than Velveta. Pearls before . . . well, you know.
Oh no, we have the cardboard bread over here too - in fact there are two massive factories near my office which churn out 100s of 1000s of these loaves every day. I really find it impossible to eat them; the "bread" sticks to the roof of my mouth. I wonder why so many people are prepared to tolerate it or is that they genuinely like it?
BTW: I looked up Velveeta cheese (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A262414) - I like the fact it is described as "...like aerosol cheese it is so fake it does not require refrigeration..." - nice!
That IS true... it does not require refrigeration. Just like Cheese Whiz, and the aerosol cheese.
Tornados, btw, still scare the crap out of me. There have been a couple of times when I've been held over at work during a tornado warning with the storm being on the opposite side of town where my daughter is. Not a fun thing! :(
At least hurricanes offer a couple days' warning.
I'll leave you two back to your conversation. lol
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