Friday's Odds and Ends

It was a bit scary to watch the national news last night and see how many tornadoes formed over the last 24 hours across the country. I think the total number was 150. I don't know if we are seeing more tornado activity than in the past, or we are simply getting more news of storms because people can use their cell phones to capture images and send them to news sources.

This is the kind of wall cloud that often spawns tornadoes.

Some areas of Oklahoma were hit again last night, although not as severely as Moore, OK. That is one bit of good news. Tornadoes also touched down in Arkansas, but so far there are no reports of deaths or critical injuries from any of the storms last night. But we are not out of the woods yet, as the old cliche goes. The weather service's Storm Prediction Center is forecasting a moderate chance of severe weather in parts of Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas and Missouri today. 

Also a bit scary is the extremist who is protecting his right to bear arms by sending poisoned threats to New York Mayer Bloomberg and President Obama. Right. You want people to seriously consider leaving you alone with your weapons when you don't seem to have any control over your reactions? Right after Mayor Bloomberg went public with a call for more gun control following the school shooting in Connecticut last December, people started protesting his stance, and the protests have been anything but civil. Some of the comments made were personal attacks, calling the mayor a “nanny statist fascist” and another person dared him to “come and personally take my guns.”

Wordage in the letters sent to the mayor and to a gun-control advocacy group is equally combative. “You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns,” the letters said. “What’s in this letter is nothing compared to what I’ve got planned for you.”

I support gun rights and do believe that law-abiding people in the U.S. should be able to have weapons if they so choose. What I don't support are these fringe elements that don't seem to know the right way to ensure those rights. It is not by threats and violent stand-offs.

Now for a bit of fun. A recent B.C. cartoon featured a new spring flower that pops up in the first panel saying, "I have spring action roots."

In the next panel a bee approaches with a weapon and says, "Hand over the nectar, Springie."

Then a woman pulls up the flower and starts taking off petals while saying, "He loves me, he loves me not. He Loves me."

She tosses what is left of the flower and a dinosaur comes along, sniffs the plants, then stomps on it. The flower is left thinking, "Spring is a whirlwind of emotion."

Okay, maybe it was a lot cuter when you could see the dinosaur stomping, the bee threatening, and the lady pulling off petals.

Life Lesson from the character Grady Service in Ice Hunter by Joseph Heywood, "Relationships are either going forward or backward."