Oklahoma, Where the Wind Comes Whipping Down the Plain

We got up to the lake without battling too much Friday traffic. After having something to eat, I settled down to catch up on all the online stuff, and to watch the Yankees-Red Sox game. Now after losing four straight games to the nearly last place Mets, I was hoping for a little redemption by kicking some Boston ass.

Not much later I began to see the tweets coming out of the Midwest. Tornado warnings, flash flood warnings, and much of it was centered over Oklahoma, more specifically, not too far from Moore, site of the mass devastation less than two weeks ago. More and more, the tweets took on an ominous feel. I turned off the game and put on The Weather Channel. Word was coming across that one of their vans, with the crew inside, was picked up by one of the three tornadoes currently on the ground, and was thrown 200 yards into a field. The distance was later revised to 200 feet, but does it really make a difference? When they showed the van, I thought it had been a car... that's how flattened the roof had become.

The crew all survived, battered and bruised, but alive. A mother and child trapped in their car, were not as fortunate. As of this morning, there are five dead, and after watching the footage of the tornado clouds forming, and hearing the reports from the stormchasers, I can't believe the count is not higher Some areas received 11 inches of rain creating flash flooding.

Why Oklahoma has been chosen as the official poster child of this year's tornado season, is not something to which any of us have an answer. And while the rest of us will go through this first day of June enjoying a weekend full of enjoyment, so many people in the Midwest will be trying to pick up their lives.

As many of you know, I write a couple of columns a week over at sprocketink,com. It's a site where we take the news of the day and give it a sarcastic, snarky spin. After the Moore tornado, one of the founders of the site wrote about it. However it wasn't sarcastic, it wasn't snarky. What it was, was a first-hand account of someone living 25 miles away from Moore. It's very worth your time to take a read.

It's called Crutches and read it here: http://sprocketink.com/crutches/

Now spend a minute or two of your day holding some good thoughts for a lot of good people who seem to be caught on nature's Merry-Go-Round, and be thankful you're not riding on it too..

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