Gone with the Wind No More
by Karen Williams | January 06, 2006 - Seminole Chronicle
Good news: Hurricane season is over. Bad news: Next year is predicted to be as bad or worse.
I, for one, am tired of living in the bull's-eye of the hurricanes' target, and I bet a few other folks would second that emotion.
I did not move to Florida to have my roof blown off and to interact with flying, torpedo-like debris at regular intervals. I moved to Florida to cultivate a year-round tan, pluck citrus fruit off trees at the slightest whim, hob-knob with lovable theme park characters, and evoke intense envy from the folks up North.
Thanks to hurricanes that seem to come out of the woodwork as well as the ocean, I'm eliciting pity, rather than envy, from Northerners. Yet as long as Florida offers me more summer than a lemonade commercial and opportunities to match wits with fire ants and cockroaches, I'll stay right here. I would, however, like to find a remedy for these hurricanes so that home, hearth,and Internet poker aren't at risk each June through November.
A truth widely overlooked by storm-ologists is that a hurricane is far more than a huge, destructive, low-pressure system.
It has more than an (evil) eye - it has an actual mind, and that mind is full of fiendish intentions and malevolent designs.
We must stop dealing with hurricanes as inanimate weather systems and acknowledge that these sea monsters are out there with atlases and calculators, figuring out which part of the country is sufficiently populous to warrant their next visit.
So let's knock off the nice names. We'll no longer call them Charley, Katrina or Wilma. Let's start with Attila, Bruiser, Creep-Face, Dracula and E-gor.
Then we must devise a way to stop these blowhards in their tracks.
If we can put a man on the moon, and we can invent a robotic vacuum (thank heavens), then we can surely do something about these storms-on-steroids. Prevention would be better than spending a year's savings on batteries and roof rescue.
I say we pull our top scientists off irrelevant projects such as counting the times a lab rat burps and throw these scientists at the hurricane problem. And if science refuses to comply, we citizens should come up with our own ideas and implement them as best we can.
Possible approaches could include:
Flush ice cubes down the toilet. If all Southern citizens did this three times a day, we might cool off those oceans and score a knockout against global warming and the storms it reportedly spawns.
Build a very high brick structure around the perimeter of the southeastern United States. Hey, it worked for the three little pigs, didn't it?
Nuke the hurricane - as in bomb it with radioactive material. When my law school son suggested this, I thought he was just greedily anticipating lawsuits from the nuclear fallout - the people who sprouted extra toes and heads and such. But I'm beginning to think it might beat the heck out of losing entire cities, including sports stadiums.
I say we give a Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, even a Country Music Award to anyone who comes up with a way to stop these storms.
Until then, could someone puh-leeze manufacture a roof tarp in a multi-colored, textured floral pattern? And how about window plywood with inside paintings of the countryside, complete with blue skies and grazing, contented cows?
These measures will reduce stress until we find a way to knock the wind out of Creep-Face.
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Copyright 2006, Karen Williams
