There were some light showers this afternoon. Further south this same system produced a couple of tornados. There was a gap in the cold front and the strong storms went around us. That seems to happen sometime when the front comes out of the northwest. There are some good-sized lakes up that direction above us, and I think those large bodies of water affect storm fronts and saps some of the concentrated power out of it as it passes through. Big rivers seem to have the same affect.
I worked a job up in Columbus, Nebraska for about four months one summer. Columbus is located on the Platte River. More than once in the short period of time I worked that job the town's sirens would go off to warn the local people that a tornado had touched down. The area I grew up in on the coastal plains of North Carolina didn't get many tornados. Hurricanes, yes, but tornadoes didn't reach us very often.
Some local people worked on the job that talked about living in "tornado alley". They sworn that if the tornadoes approached from the southeast from down toward Texas, when they got to the Platte River they drew their funnels back up into the storm clouds for a ways before they set them down again. So, the town was located on the protected side of the river. That's the only time I've ever hung around much in tornado alley, so they might have just been shining me on. Still, it's a plausible story, even if it isn't entirely convincing.
The TV weathermen around here seem convinced that we're having many more electrical storms and tornadoes than in the past. I don't agree. I don't know one way or the other, so I don't send them e-mails calling them liars. I think that with the technology they have for recording these storms that they're just finding out more of them happen than they figured in the past. Now, they have satellites and radar to detect them and then track them for longer periods of time.
My personal opinion is that the world is experiencing information overload. I guess it's just further evidence of my extreme selfishness, but I don't wanna know about every earthquake or disaster if it doesn't affect my immediate world. There is nothing I can do as an individual for the earthquake victims in China. I don't need to know how many soldiers get killed in every battle on Earth every night on the six o'clock news. There is nothing i can do. Why would I suffer literally for all the disasters that happen in the world on a daily basis? I'm fairly tough, but not that tough. Overload. Too much information. No need.
I drove a big semi rig for about six months for a large trucking company. They sent me all over the place. I went to a lot of places up north that I hadn't spent much time in. I had passed through many of the cities around the Great Lakes, but not often. I've always been afraid of cold weather. Driving that rig I went to all of them again and again. I became fairly familiar with the industries there because I picked up and delivered to them.
Especially Detroit where the automobile industry seems centralized. What a dump! I saw a documentary a while back about why that area is so crappy. When they use something up they abandon it and let it rot. It's cheaper just to buy some more cropland and build new buildings, which will also get abandoned for the same reason. What a wasteland.
One of the most fascinating drives I've taken in the U.S. is from around Paducah, Kentucky up toward Chicago just east of St. Louis. The corn belt just fascinates me. It's so flat and the land is so rich it's almost like they could feed the entire world. I like where the glaciers carved all those hills smooth on both sides of the Mississippi River. It's something so powerful in scale that it's obvious that humans couldn't accomplish that with their tiny little machines in a thousand thousand years.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
