Nature's Fireworks

It's raining again here at My Sick Headquarters. Lately, we have had a thunderstorm almost every day, along with heat and high humidity. It has reached the point where West Deptford residents are traveling to the Amazon rain forest for the cool, dry weather. It clears out our sinuses, I think.

During today's thunderstorm, I flipped on the Weather Channel to see where the red and yellow stuff was. As it turns out, it was right over my hometown. The little crawl at the bottom of the screen was telling me to expect high winds and damaging hail. No kidding. Out the window, I could see that it was raining sideways. Then, it warned me that I should watch out for lightning because "lightning is one of nature's number one killers." I had to read it twice, quickly before it disappeared into the space at the side of the screen. One of nature's number one killers. That's interesting, since I had no idea that there was more than one number one. My head was about to explode - or was that more thunder?

I decided to look it up, because I can't imagine that lightning kills that many people, since I am constantly reminded that I have a better chance of being hit by lightning than winning the lottery. But, with New Jersey shut down, I assume the lottery odds just went way up. As it turns out, extreme heat is the number one weather-related killer, according to NOAA and Al Gore.

Then, I found another site that told me that flash floods are the number one weather related killer. Yet another site I visited told me that, world-wide, the number one killer is drought. What I gleaned from that combo is that a good, steady rain that stops will not kill anyone. That's a handy piece of information to have.

You're welcome.

This one told me that heat is the number one non-weather related killer, but if heat isn't weather, then what is it? It's still nature, right? Unless you die under a French fry heat lamp at McDonald's, it's nature. As we know, only God can make a fry. They also told me that if it's hot, I should stay out of the sun. I'll take "The Bloody Obvious" for $100, Alex.

I'm exhausted. If research-fatigue kills me, can we count that as a nature-related killer or do I blame Google? I'm not even sure who Google is.

So, what did we learn today? We learned that if it's hot, stay out of it and when the thunderstorm hits, run out and buy a lottery ticket.

I also learned that lightning is one of nature's number one killers, and not to argue with syntax anymore.