Last month we had a tornado here in Howard County. It hit 2 dairy farms and a strawberry farm. Thankfully though, there wasn't much damage at all, and the malteds were great ! I see that Tornadoes have killed 40 in Oklahoma. I know Nato has had trouble with its' targetting but this is getting ridiculous. A newcomer to Portland arrives on a rainy day. She gets up the next day and it's raining. It also rains the day after that, and the day after that. She goes out to lunch and sees a young kid and, out of despair, asks, "Hey, kid, does it ever stop raining around here?" The kid says, "How should I know? I'm only 6." The Lewis family owned a small farm in Canada, a stone's throw from the North Dakota border. Their land had been the subject of a minor dispute between the United States and Canada for generations. Mrs. Lewis, who had just celebrated her eightieth birthday, lived on the farm with her son and four grandchildren. One day her son came into her bedroom, holding a letter. "I just got some news, Mom," he said. "The government has come to an agreement with the people in Washington. They've decided that our land is really part of the United States. We have the right to approve or disapprove of the agreement. What do you think?" "Hmmmm," his mother said. "Don't hesitate. Tell them we accept! I don't think I could stand another one of those Canadian winters!" I was watching the weather forecast last night and they actually used the word HOT to describe the British weather! It took me back to the good old days when the weather maps where not computerized. They used to use sticky plastic shapes stuck on cardboard maps. I remember one funny incident, the weather was foggy over most of the country, as is the way with a British summer. They didn't have a symbol for fog -- they used to just stick the letters FOG on the board where they thought the fog was going to be. This one day they were in the middle of the broadcast and the letter F fell off the board, but the weather man just kept going. When he go to the area where the fog was he noticed the missing letter and uttered the immortal words: "Sorry, about the F in fog." Although Ralph was a qualified meteorologist, he ran up a terrible record of forecasting for the TV news program. He became something of a local joke when a newspaper started keeping a record of his predictions and showed that he'd been wrong about 80% of the year. That sort of notoriety was enough to get him fired. Ralph moved across country and applied for a weather forecasting job. The job application form asked for the reason for leaving his previous position. Ralph wrote, "The climate didn't agree with me." |
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