sweasel.com

Pfffffft! For real weather drama there are 2 choices…Ed’s weather posts at Grouchy Conservative Pundits or spend 20+ years in the Midwest and loose your house in a tornado while you’re in it (been there done that!!!)

Happy Friday!

Excuse me, Armybrat, but this is a lovely, nay, spectacular piece of weather. No, it’s no tornado (I’m still waiting to see my tornado, but then, I’ve seen lots of video of those); it’s no hurricane (which I’ve only ever had at night when I couldn’t see the bloody thing); but it’s better than, say, any but the most severe case of mammatus.

Please, Weasel, contact your local paper and see if it’s possible to get a good color scan of the photo they ran, and maybe interview a local meteorologist. This is just a fabulous formation, and I’d love to know what the heck was going on.

Am I right in thinking that this image is looking down the barrel of this beast?

Video would be favorite.

Yes, I’d like to see a better shot as well! Wow!

The UK, for its size, has more tornados than the US.

Ask Uncle B about the Great Storm of 1987. This is the one and only time I have actually been blown off my feet by the wind.

“Ask Uncle B about the Great Storm of 1987. This is the one and only time I have actually been blown off my feet by the wind.”

You were out and about in it? I slept through most of it!

So did I, JuliaM!

At the time I was living right in the centre of London, in one of the tree lined squares. I awoke that morning to find half the trees uprooted and leaning at ‘after the bomb’ angles – some crashed into balconies, others poking through roofs and windows.

Didn’t hear a thing.

Those were the days!

Looks like what we-‘uns ’round hyar call a haboob — a smooth-topped wall of sand/dust a thousand feet high coming at you like an atomic train with the pile dampeners pulled.

No rain with the associated electrical display, though.

Blow Western wind, when wilt thou blow
And down small rain can rain
Christ if my love were in my arms
and we in our bed again!

My favorite poem, and my favorite memory – a stormy afternoon spent in bed with a favorite lover.

I’ll remember her and that storm until I die.

I thought it was a drawing from a pornographic Japanese comic – but that only tells you about me.

In retrospect, going outside during the Great Storm was foolish. There was so much debris flying around I could have been badly hurt. I was woken by the wind at about 2 am. I’d never heard anything like it. It was this deep bass chord, which was from the 120 mph wind striking a tone off the corner of the wall outside my window. A solid, brick-built structure was literally thrumming in the gale. You could feel it at an almost animal level. I went outside to see what the hell was going on, stepped out of the lee of the building and was instantly eight feet away, flat on my back. The sky was terrifying. It looked like the scene from Close Encounters where the little boy is abducted. Lightning was going 360° like flashbulbs at a West End premiere and illuminating the clouds which were racing overhead faster than I’ve ever seen before or since. And it went on for hours. I crawled back inside and pulled the blankets over my head. The devastation was immense. I remember they were still clearing up Cowdray Park three months later. Sevenoaks was turned into Oak in an instant. In my home town a gust hit 140mph and then the anemometer on the Town Hall blew away. It plucked twenty pound ridge tiles off my parents’ roof and flung them sixty feet. It uprooted their lilac tree and fired it through next door’s greenhouse. Not far from them the wind blew a window in and got into the cavity wall and sucked the side of the house out. It was very impressive.

Sure hope the chickens didn’t blow away.

Nope. They were too stupid to go in on their own, though — I had to shoo them in. And day before yesterday, Mapp apparently flew full-tilt into the mesh or something. She’s got a bloody comb and a big, fat black eye.

Chickens? Did somebody say chickens?

Techno music! You’ve been too close to Europe for too long. Run before you turn inot Dieter!

LMAO!

Techno’s equivalent of Disco Duck!

Too friggin funny!