It's that tornado time of year

Where I live, we have our share of semi annual Tornado watches, warnings, and hits. Thankfully, none have been anywhere near me. The last time I saw a real tornado, it was from a low lying cloud, and it was running across a cornfield. It came, it lasted about 10 seconds and disappeared that quickly.

I, like most of the people my age, spent my early childhood scared to death of tornado's thanks to the Wizard of Oz. My children have followed suit. Nice to know we have the Wiz' to pass unrealistic fears on to our children, or grandchildren and so on.

I remember being a little kid, at a party at the VFW hall (remember when our dads used to party in the parking lot of the hall on into the night and no one cared?) I looked up into the sky, because the thunder had been rumbling, but didn't have any rain yet. As my dad yakked with some guys, I watched as the clouds seemed to be bumping into an invisible wall, they were moving fast, but then went straight up. It was weird. Then I had that eerie feeling where everything goes quiet, and greenish.. I know now that the weird feeling is more or less the fast drop in air pressure, but I was a little kid, all I knew was that something wasn't right. The clouds got darker, and faster, then the whole ball of wax started to roll. First with an upward twisting motion, then it kinda rolled on it's side, and the whole cloud formation sort of lowered down like a space craft. I grabbed my dad's hand and cried, telling him to look up, he looked up, went "huh", and went back to his buddies.

The whole thing came and went in a few moments, and it scared the daylight out of me. I thought we were dead, and I looked at my dad as fearless. About that time I got over my fear of storms. I don't really know if this incident had anything to do with it, all I know is that from then on, not only was I not afraid, I found them to be really cool.

Which brings me to my point; I have a crapload of weather sites on my browser, for watching storms and things. But when you get the actual weather service bulletins, it's like they speak in weather-guy code.

"The storm is tracking so and so, on a line from so and so northeast to so and so from 3z to 12z"..

I would love to have an app that I can sit down to, type in a center point, say Chicago, and the get a list box of all the Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin cities. From there be able to quick-search the cities and double click on them, and as I do, the app draws lines so I can visualize the line of storms. Also, it would be cool to identify the starting point of a tornado and give it a couple of cities it's passed over, and have it draw a "guesstimate" of the track so I can see it.

I might give it a shot with Google' s Googlemapping API - if I knew anything about HTML/XML. But I don't..

Oh well.

Oh, I wonder if Twister can be the modern equivalent of the Wizard of Oz?.. Maybe I'll sit *my* kids down and watch it - or maybe not.. :)