MR WRONG: Tiny Twister Terror!
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 97
COLUMN DEP’T.
MR WRONG: Tornado Alley Is the Street Where You Live
IT SEEMS LIKE everybody is doing something about the weather (making it worse) but nobody does anything about it, you know, the worsening part? I mean, I live in Baltimore, Maryland, a city on the planet Earth, and I always hear about all these devastating Weather Events in Other Places, like India, where it’s One Hundred and Twenty Two Degrees, or Texas, where it seems to either be flooding or freezing, or “The Heartland,” where shit just gets flattened.
I was minding my own business watching the regular national CBS Evening News with Norah O'Donnell on teevee and it got interrupted by the local TV channel, and the Meteorologist was all about a TORNADO WARNING, saying stuff like "get your ass into the basement, or at least someplace with as few windows as possible, no kidding," so like, if the Television Person is saying get away from the TV and go hide, that is some real shit. There were all these multicolored maps showing rain, hail, and debris getting ripped up and whipped up by high winds, from a giant weather system advancing on the region! They were talking about how there were all these little “hooks” in the cloud formations, so it looked like a tornado was gonna drop on somebody soon.
They interrupted the News because there was some fucking News, you know? I wrote this thing on the great and highly-paywalled-because-it-is-such-a-good-deal Flaming Hydra site about how there’s a Fox Weather channel, nothing but weather, and all they do is tell you about apocalyptic weather!
They don’t draw any conclusions about it, but they are steady running segments on high winds, torrential rain, different species of hail, and the number one on the Weather Terror chart, the Tornado.
My local weathercaster, talking local, preëmpting all over Nora O’Donnell’s national airtime, was saying stuff like “in all my many years in this region, I haven’t seen this amount of tornadic activity” since, like, 20 years ago, except this was worse, and worser-still, explained that the atmospheric formations were not typical ones, which tend to be very tall, these were less intense, so you get, like, low-level tornadoes, and they’re tough to pick up on radar, which is really cool when you’re trying to tell people about the tornadoes, having them basically be invisible tornadoes.
Later on after the WARNING in my area had expired, I was attempting to enjoy a baseball game on Cable Television, and it got interrupted by the BLLRRRT! BLLRRRT! BLLRRRT! sound of the Emergency Alert System TORNADO WARNING alert, because there was more fuckin’ tornado, not right on top of me, but a little bit down the road. I went back to the TV news and by now there were like three members of the Weather Team at once, talking about like, it’s not a good idea to be in a mobile home during this shit. Ugh! This went on until all of a sudden there was no more evil weather.
OK, so my area had a fistful of lesser tornadoes, which, like, big deal, right? Nobody got killed or anything, the property damage was minimal, but today I was reading some stuff about how “Tornado Alley” is moving to the east, because all the bad people live on the East Coast. Just kidding, it’s because of fucking Climate Change, surprise.
Anyway, All Weather is Local. It’s bad, and getting worse!
The MR. WRONG COLUMN is a general-interest column appearing weekly. No refunds.
Write Wrong: wrongcolumn@gmail.com.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, June 5, 2024
★★ The cloud cover that muted the daybreak slowly burned apart, leaving separate bluish-white clouds on a whitish-blue sky. The damp remained. The younger boy came home ruddy-faced from a school day of outdoor exercise. Down in Lower Manhattan, the light was doing confusing things in the confusing streets. Leaves turned over in a gust of wind, under a renewed gathering of clouds, but uptown things had thinned out again. Flecks of water came down from somewhere—an air conditioner, it had to be, given the state of the sky.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP’T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Mrs. Ericsson Hammond's Salad Appetizer Cook Book, by Maria Matilda Ericsson Hammond. Published in 1924, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Sandwiches de Crabe en roulade à l'Allgot
For Six Persons
Six slices of bread, three tablespoons of butter, one cup of crab meat, one teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, one teaspoon of lemon juice, and a few drops of onion juice, pepper and salt.
How to Make It. Stir the butter to a cream; take out one tablespoon of the butter for decoration, to the rest of the butter mix the crab meat that has been finely chopped, add pepper, salt, onion, and lemon juice, and spread the bread with the mixture and roll. Cut them all even sizes about three inches in length and three inches in thickness. Arrange them on a platter in the form of a rose and decorate a branch on each sandwich with the stirred butter that first has been colored green with parsley. Serve as an appetizer for afternoon tea.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
Supplies are really and truly running low of the second printing of 19 FOLK TALES, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! Sit in the gathering heat with a breezy collection of stories, each of which is concise enough to read before the thunderstorms start.
HMM WEEKLY MINI-ZINE, Subject: GAME SHOW, Joe MacLeod’s account of his Total Experience of a Journey Into Television, expanded from the original published account found here at Hmm Daily. The special MINI ZINE features other viewpoints related to an appearance on, at, and inside the teevee game show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, available for purchase at SHOPULA.
