Hurricanes Cause a Lack of Proportion

People here in Waco are preparing for the worst as hurricane Rita churns towards Houston. In fact, these people are going to such extremes as stocking many days' supply of food and water as well as hoarding flashlights and batteries, if not evacuating the city altogether. And its all just a big game. In fact, its ridiculous. Originally the path of the hurricane had it projecting Tropical Storm strength winds into Waco -- possibly. Overnight that changed and now we're not expected to get more than heavy rain and thunderstorms. From this I can conclude a few things:

1. Hurricanes cause people to lose all sense of proportion.
2. Pretentious rich people think that disaster and evacuation are fun.
3. Everyone who is not rich and pretetious in Waco (and some who are) either don't have access to the internet or are too ignorant to know how to go to weather.com or the National Weather Service.

Their actions are absolutely unfounded. My classes are cancelled tomorrow because of the hurricane. Now, I'm not going to complain about getting out of class, but the hurricane isn't even expected to make landfall until Saturday. Even yesterday they were saying that it would make landfall late Friday night. Given that it is currently moving about 9MPH, projecting Tropical Storm winds about 175 miles from the center, and that Waco is somewhere around 300 miles from where it is supposed to make landfall, we wouldn't expect to feel any noteworthy effects until late Saturday morning (it would take about 13 hours for the strong winds to reach us). Most classes here end before 3pm -- well before the hurricane would even make landfall. But still people are packing up and heading north (and I hope west, otherwise they're moving straight into the path of the hurricane) or stockpiling goods like its Y2K -- with about the same end result, I'll bet: lots of extra food that sits on the shelf until you move out. Anyway, some people are getting pretty crazy here and I think its crazy that they're getting crazy. But it comes back to my previous point, people who aren't actually going to be harmed think that disasters are fun, so they're pretending that we're at risk. Plus I don't think we can rule out the good old Texas desire to not be left out. "What, you had to evacuate your home in Houston? Oh, yeah, well we're all evacuating here, too. What, did you think that just because you're from a city on the coast directly in the path of the hurricane that somehow you're the only ones that are at risk? Us folks hundreds of miles inland well to the west of the projected path of the storm are suffering too." Or something like that. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong and the apocalypse is coming in the form of something named Rita. If that's true I probably won't ever write on this blog again. Otherwise I'll probably keep making fun of Texans -- especially rich pretentious Texans.

On a small tangent, my brother said that he read a meterologist's website claiming that the Russians developed a weather machine and sold it to the Japanese Mafia (is there such a thing?) who are now using it to create not only the hurricanes, but strange clouds in Montana. Those mafia types, they're always sticking it to us! What with those strange clouds and all. They're so spiteful!
It is notable, however, that a good deal of US oil refineries stand to be damaged by these storms (Katrina and Rita) since they are all in coastal areas of Louisiana and Texas (oil refining is pretty much all that Galveston and Texas City do, and they're two of the first cities that are going to be hit by the hurricane. They also get hit by big hurricanes just about every year -- I can't figure out why people still live there). If there were some rational way that hurricanes could be man-made I wouldn't rule out a conspiracy, although I don't think that the Japanese Mafia would be my primary suspects.