Taking life for granted

Here we sit in the descending darkness three hours after a power outage.  At about five a thunderstorm with thunder, lightning, hail, and strong winds came through.  In the middle of working on our computers the Internet went out on our modem.  Then we heard a clap of thunder very close and then another.  Our power went out.  Later my wife said the second seemed more like an explosion of a transformer.

I used my cell phone to call the power company.  The automatic system informed me that 2,956 customers were affected and crews would be working on it as soon as possible.  I hoped not too soon because the weather was still rather bad.

We considered going to the restaurant at the corner but figured they wouldn't be able cook much, and so I made tuna salad.

I read the New York Times on my iPhone and played a lot of Sudoku.  My wife read the paper copy of the Duluth News Tribune and then a book.  As it got darker we gathered flashlights and put them where we could find them in the dark.

About twenty minutes ago I looked out the front window to see if the corner restaurant had any cars in its parking lot.  It did and its lights were on!  It is on a different local grid!  We could have gone there for supper and had coffee afterwards!

Oh, well!  My wife is ready for bed and reading a book by flashlight.  Hey, the power just came back on!  Thanks to the Minnesota Power crews who are ready to work on a Sunday evening.

We'll get everything back in order and I'll send this on my laptop.

We considered this power outage as a minor inconvenience that we were certain would be fixed in a reasonably short time.  Even if the repair had taken several hours longer, it still would have been only an inconvenience.  Considering how many people whose lives have been turned upside down by violent storms, fires, and wars we can only look at our little problem as just that, a little problem.

Oklahoma, tornadoes, Pat Robertson, God, and James Imhofe

Pat Robertson supposedly stated that the deadly tornado that destroyed homes and killed people in Moore, Oklahoma was because people didn't pray enough.  See "God and the Moore Tornado", Roger Talley, Examiner, 2013-05-25.  This in turn cites "Pat Robertson: Tornadoes Could Have Been Stopped If People Had Prayed", Huffington Post, 2013-05-20, which in turn uses a video from other sources.

What exactly did he say?  If you watch the video, both the Examiner, which seems to have a bias toward religion, and almost all the other "short quote" media, didn't give the full context of Robertson's statement.  In the video, Robertson gives a scientific explanation of tornadoes, stating that this is the way God set things up to provide thermal balance for the earth.  He then asks why people build in places with known dangers.  He does state that God could have stopped the tornado if enough people had prayed.  That is quite a different statement than God punished Moore because not enough people prayed.

This pokes a bit of a hole in the joke that I have, but I'll push on anyway, partly because the Examiner article put this spin on it.  What if the Moore tornado was a warning from God?  Could it have been a warning not about prayer but about re-electing James Imhofe to the U.S. Senate?  After all, Sen. Imhofe is one of the chief global-warming deniers in Congress.

All kidding aside, the data is not in on the connection between global warming and tornadoes.  As usual, we have the usual suspects jumping to draw their own conclusions.  On one side global warming doesn't exist because scientists have not found a definitive link between tornadoes and global warming, and on the other side tornadoes must be increasing in severity because of global warming. Actually, global warming could increase them or global warming could decrease them.  For a balanced view on the research in progress, see "Tornadoes and Global Warming", Robert Kunzig, National Geographic, 2013-05-22.