So what happened to Friday's post last week?
Well, the most honest answer is a mixture between "I forgot" and "I was lazy." But in the spirit of "better late than never" and "put lots of things in quotes," I'm doing one today, and I figure it might as well be about the fascinating things I was ogling when I should have been writing my Friday post.
The subject was tornadoes.
Tornadoes deeply fascinated me the moment I heard about their existence as a child. I remember lying awake in my bedroom one night, scared that a tornado would come through my wall. Even as a very young child, I knew my fear was irrational, but the idea that a cloud could start to spin and become dangerous is just so wild and evocative that I couldn't let it go.
A lot of my intense dreams (arguably nightmares, but I often find my nightmares are as enchanting as they are frightening) are about vortices. Often these are tornadoes, but I remember one that was a world-destroying space vortex, possibly a black hole. The people of Earth were staring up into a night sky as it descended on us.
I think part of what makes tornadoes fascinating is the beauty of them. Part of it is the outlandishness. The fact that they are so destructive hits our emotional centers as well, and then we really become hooked.
Below are a few links of videos I've been watching on tornadoes.
Witness Joplin, a documentary on the deadly Joplin Tornado (not always a happy story)
World's Top Most Deadliest Tornado (and baffling superlatives) by Nova
Skip Talbot's deconstruction of the El Rino tornado, which impacted many storm chasers.
Skip Talbot's video of a multi-vortex with satellite tornado
No comments:
Post a Comment