Pet Clark's hurricane-survival tip

With Hurricane Sandy bearing down on the Northeast and forecasters getting their Apocalypse on, Petula Clark has some timely storm-preparation advice in advance of the end of days.

Indeed. Do not sleep in the subway, darlin'.

You might drown.

Oh, no! Don't let the house fall down!

There was a crooked man and he had a crooked smile.

Had some crooked fortune and he walked a crooked mile. Had a crooked cat, and he had a crooked mouse. And after Miss Katrina, they left their crooked house.

Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! My roof's got a hole in it and I might drown! Oh, yes, my roof's got a hole in it and I might drown!

And when Isaac's rain came down -- and when his wind blew hard -- the crooked, empty house came down, and the neighbors' house was jarred.

It gave those neighbor folks a start. It made their house a mess. For the crooked, empty house could not pass the acid test!

Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! My roof's got a hole in it and I might drown! Oh, yes, my roof's got a hole in it and I might drown!

And then the shutterbug from New Orleans' Picayune came to snap this picture and, thus, I cribbed this tune. For a fallen, crooked house comes but once in a blue moon!

Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! My roof's got a hole in it and I might drown! Oh, yes, my roof's got a hole in it and I might drown!

-- Apologies to the Serendipity Singers

Now if it had been Krispy Kreme. . . .

WAFB 9 News Baton Rouge, Louisiana News, Weather, Sports
Hurricanes can't shut down Waffle House. What's a little wind and rain?

Hell, for all I know, nuclear war and/or the Apocalypse couldn't keep the legendary short-order chain from scatterin', smotherin' and coverin' the hash browns . . . and probably anything else you desired. If hostile space aliens mounted an invasion of Earth tomorrow and came across a Waffle House, my best guess is that they'd be so busy assimilating waffles and chili-covered hash browns, they'd never get around to exterminating the human race at all.

And when they had sated themselves, they'd wobble away on their spindly, green little legs shouting "OOP! BLOOP! QUARK! FLEEGAMATRONICS!" That's space-invader speak for "I love you, man!"

"Y'all come back!" the gal at the register would reply with a friendly wave goodbye.

NOPE, nothing can turn out the lights at Waffle House.

Well, except for one thing: the long arm of the law. Baton Rouge, La., police were not amused -- well, maybe they were a little -- to find the lights on and a party going on at one Waffle House late into the Isaac-tossed night after a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew took effect Wednesday.

Here's the story from a bemused reporter from WAFB television, which a generation of baby-boomer Baton Rougeans grew up knowing as "big, booming, powerful Channel 9":

The streets were bare through most of the city, but it was like a party at the Waffle House on College Drive.

"Four o'clock this afternoon, you could hardly get in the door it was so busy," said Karl Landry. "It was packed. Matter of fact, the waitress told me they had to lock the doors at 5:00 to be able to clean up."

It was one of just a handful of places open as Isaac's winds and rain lashed the Capital City, which is why Karl Landry visited the restaurant three times Wednesday.

"We're here for the food," said Leah Couvillion. "Our power is currently out, so the air conditioning and the nice break to have some food and to get together is really nice."

"I'm very appreciative to Waffle House for being the only thing in town that's open," added another customer.

However, there was one problem. With the curfew still in place, the restaurant was not supposed to be open.

"I'm sorry, they're closed," an officer said. "We're under a curfew for the town, so I'm going to have to ask you to go home."

The curfew is in effect until till 6 a.m., so officers with the Baton Rouge Police Department spent the night making their rounds and forcing shops to shut down, sending employees and potential customers home.

"No one told us, so we came here and they told us and we were like, 'Oops,'" said one customer forced to leave.

"It's pretty devastating. I'll be honest. I mean, it wasn't that serious of a storm, so we thought Waffle House would be open serving us hash browns," Couvillion added.

HERE'S A TIP for corporate: It's Louisiana, y'all. I reckon that if a cute and buxom waitress had waved a plate of scattered, covered and smothered in front of the local constabulary, Baton Rouge's finest might not have actually failed to enforce curfew, but I bet they would have taken their sweet time about it.

Just as soon as they'd finished off a late supper at a Southern institution. And a couple or three cups of coffee.

Hometown hurricane inside baseball

I've been in the Midwest for a while, y'all.

This means I have grown accustomed to looking to local government for, well . . . government. This means I've grown unaccustomed to looking to local government for entertainment.

Then another hurricane hits Louisiana and I end up glued to the computer, watching the hometown TV news online, and suddenly I'm confronted by some clown dressed unconvincingly in police casual as he tries to rock it like Clint Eastwood rockin' it like Dirty Harry.

Again, unconvincingly.

And I'm thinking "What the f*** is this?"

THIS THOUGHT LASTS for a split second. Of course, it's the mayor of Baton Rouge, Kip Holden (right).

And of course, it's a hurricane. Hurricanes mean that Baton Rouge mayors have to start acting all bad ass -- it's a city ordinance or something, I think.

They have to tell people obvious things as if the fine citizens are abject morons -- which, of course, many are. They have to threaten to arrest all those potential offenders of the public order, throw their asses in jail and then laugh when Yankee civil-rights advocates demand that arrestees be supplied with soap on a rope.

I think I even saw Kip do that corner-of-the-lip thing. He even may have said "punk" a couple of times, but don't hold me to that. I was laughing pretty hard -- it all was soooooooo Baton Rouge.

I MEAN, if you were a looter, would you be deterred by the sight of . . . that?

Me neither. By the way, nice flat screen you have there, Your Worship. And you keep the jewelry and cash where again?

And for what it's worth, I think the Boss Hogg look (top) would work a lot better for you. And if you could have a joint press briefing with Gov. Bobby Jindal when he's doing his "Mister Rogers on speed" act, that would be great.

What is dumbth?

WAFB 9 News Baton Rouge, Louisiana News, Weather, Sports
I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.

Oh, look! Here's a great example caught on camera as Hurricane Isaac turned Louisiana's Lake Pontchartrain into a swollen, storm-tossed tempest -- which, of course, is to moron 20-something males as a light bulb is to a moth. And with similar results.

Plaquemines Parish's watery passion play

Seven years to the day after Hurricane Katrina, Plaquemines Parish, La., is going under the waves again.

As I write, authorities and private citizens in private boats are pulling people off of their roofs and out of their attics. We see what has become of a subdivision in Braithwaite, La., in this photo posted to Facebook by the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.

Hurricane Isaac, by the way, came ashore as a Category 1 storm. And this house, by the way, is three stories high.


ONE HAS TO WONDER how much longer whole swaths of coastal Louisiana, for all practical purposes, will remain habitable absent a massive federal effort to extend the hurricane-protection levee system and an even larger effort to restore Louisiana's lost wetlands. Of course, then you have to consider the reality of coastal subsidence, climate change and rising sea levels.

Between nature, neglect and the failure of state and local government to effectively govern -- and let's not even get into Washington's special brand of dysfunction -- my home state, day by day and bit by bit, literally is becoming a no man's land.

Lord have mercy. Mercy now.

Oh, hail, no!

I'm sure there must be at least a few reasons why someone actually might wish to live in the Texas Panhandle. This is not one of them.

Those aren't boulders, and that's not a narrow grassy path through a lava field.

That's four feet of hail, with a gully carved through it by the runoff from another three inches of rain. That's not something the Amarillo-area chamber of commerce will want to be playing up as it tries to attract new residents.


NOT THAT anyone would believe such a thing -- even about Texas.

Sure, everything's bigger in Texas. But 4 feet of hail from one storm? That's what the National Weather Service, the Texas Department of Transportation and a local sheriff say happened Wednesday in an area north of Amarillo when hail piled up in drifts so wide they cut off a major highway.

The National Weather Service office in Amarillo even posted a photo on its Facebook page, but that wasn't enough to convince skeptics.

"Serious do not think this is 100% hail!!!" commented one person.

"It's a lite dusting of hail on some damn rocks," said another person, referring to the image of a firefighter standing next to what could be taken for boulders.

"I can assure you we do not have big rocks like that in West Texas," Krissy Scotten, a spokeswoman for the weather service office in Amarillo, told msnbc.com.

WELL, at least that's something.

Just a little Category 2 hurricane

Our State magazine

For more than 108 years, the Markham-Albertson-Stinson Cottage has stood watch over Old Nags Head, N.C., as in this picture from last year.

Did I say "has stood watch"?

MSNBC.com

I'm sorry, I meant had stood watch.

It had survived all manner of hurricanes, squalls and nor'easters since 1903. Three families had whole worlds wrapped in its weathered timbers.

It could not survive "just" a piddly Category 2 hurricane named Irene this weekend. Eventually, worlds cease to be, except in blessed memory.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

If it's June, and they're playing baseball. . . .

If it's June, and if a College World Series night game is under way, you pretty much can expect this to happen. Repeat as necessary.

Usually, a slightly above-average outbreak of thunderstorms doesn't merit the tornado sirens going off -- not without a tornado warning -- but this one did because . . . see above. You had a lot of folks inside TD Ameritrade Park at just after 8 p.m. Monday, and even more outside all over downtown Omaha.

With a gust front with winds up to 70-plus m.p.h. headed their way.

Smart move.

In fact, cops were getting people out of their cars on 10th Street and herding them into the Qwest Center Omaha.


NOW, I'm no Jim Cantore (and I don't play him on television), but this is what it looked like in west-central Omaha.

This was just after the gust front went through. I don't know what the wind speed was but -- being that I was outside standing in it like an idiot -- it was strong enough to make it hard to catch your breath.

Back to you, Jim.

Simply '70s: The tornado of '75

Thirty-six years ago this month, it was Omaha's turn to be devastated by a major tornado.

It wasn't a good year. What became known hereabouts as "the tornado of '75" followed by four months (almost to the day) what became known hereabouts as "the blizzard of '75."

Both extreme-weather events became Omaha touchstones for "just about as bad as it gets around here."

ABOVE is a 1985 TV report on the 10th anniversary of the great storm -- the F-4 twister, not the paralyzing blizzard. We'll call that the "short version" of what befell Omaha on May 6, 1975.


THIS IS what we'll refer to as the "long version" of Omaha's tornado horror story, produced back in the day by the City of Omaha.

IF YOU really got into those 16-millimeter Encyclopedia Britannica educational films in grade school and junior high, you'll love this. Lots of useful information, but it's kind of like a filmstrip, only without the "Booong!"

You may be too damned close when. . . .

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This KFOR-TV storm-chasing crew's first indication it might have been just a little too close to a killer wedge tornado Tuesday came . . . when?

Not only should you not try this at home, you shouldn't try this professionally, either. This is one case when "killer video" almost really was to die for.

As it were.

As this recent outbreak of deadly weather so painfully points out -- again -- you have to have guts to live in Oklahoma. That's not a football insult coming from this Nebraska fan, either.

God help the Midwest

The Storm Prediction Center, a weather service division, said a repeat of the deadly April outbreak across the South could be setting up, with a possible large outbreak on Tuesday and bad weather potentially reaching the East Coast by Friday.

"This is a very serious situation brewing," center director Russell Schneider said.

-- MSNBC

Every picture tells a story

If, as it is said, every picture tells a story, the book on what has befallen the small city of Joplin, Mo., will not be one of happy endings -- not anytime soon.

It will read as a tragedy, an almost unspeakable tragedy.

Early reports from the tornado-ravaged city put the death toll at 24. The Joplin Globe says officials fear the death toll will surpass 100, this in a city of just over 49,000. The stories of scores of lives in that corner of southwest Missouri will read as tragedies -- tragedies that climax in terrifying and horrific fashion.

What story does the above photo of St. John's Regional Medical Center tell? A shattered building once filled with the sick, and with doctors and nurses. A crumpled, upended medevac helicopter, tossed into a sea of crumpled cars -- this symbol of mercy and hope turned into one of devastation and mayhem.


WHAT STORY did the camera capture here, amid the rubble, the flames and the newly homeless? How many stories does this one news photo tell?

How great is our illusion -- our human delusion -- that we are in control of anything in this life. Just a day ago, a self-important hack "theologian" in Oakland, Calif., had the world focused on an Apocalypse that never came. On a Rapture that lifted no one unto heaven.

Today, this apocalypse came in an instant, unheralded and unforeseen. The "Rapture," in a real sense, came for many in the twinkling of an eye when hell touched down upon God's country.

Where is Harold Camping and Family Radio now? Can we recover the $100 million a vain and foolish man spent on spreading false prophecy and apply it instead toward God's mercy upon a small city in a far corner of Missouri?

LOOK HERE. What story, this?

All the king's forces and all the king's men . . . reduced to two brave souls, a sole injured one, a salvaged mattress and a commandeered pickup truck?

How a disaster can come so suddenly and be so big as to overwhelm the capability of civil society, or municipal government?

The ingenuity and grace of citizens in the middle of America amid unthinkable horror and unending devastation?

The triumph of the human spirit?

The desperate fight for life?

Every picture tells a story. Some tell several.

A new, horrible chapter in the story of Joplin, Mo., is being written before the camera's eye. May God have mercy on those who climbed out of the rubble . . . and on the souls of those who did not.

'I make my living off the evening news'

April 9, northwest Iowa. The day 60 percent of
Mapleton, Iowa, disappeared beneath one of these.

You want to know what I hate?

I hate it when storm chasers shoot video of tornadoes -- which they peddle to the evening news, because nothing sells better than video of s*** getting blown to Kingdom Come -- and all you hear on the soundtrack of the tape is these "meteorological professionals" yelling stuff like "Awesome! Look at that! Beautiful . . . we got a beautiful funnel here!"

Listen, I know it's exciting and all, almost getting yourself killed for 30 seconds of video you can sell for big bucks. I get the adrenaline rush.

Still, I think there's a point I need to make here. That being "F*** you!"

SEE, in the middle of that "awesome, beautiful" vortex, s*** is getting blowed up good. Decades of blood, sweat, toil and tears is disappearing in a matter of seconds. Gone with the wind, as it were.

In many cases, underneath those "awesome" storms, people are being hurt. Some killed.

Killed dead. And dead is forever, which goes on a lot longer than the minute and a half any particular annihilation of worlds (and trailer parks) gets on the network news. In the latest tornado outbreak across the South on Thursday and Friday, 17 people are dead so far.

Awesome. Beautiful.

One can only hope a storm chaser got long-range footage of their deaths, so at least these poor souls will not have died in vain . . . right? It's kind of like the thrilling end of Howard Beale in Network, only without the moral complication of paying Maoist guerrillas to deliver the ratings.


HERE'S ANOTHER thing wiped out by the savage winds last week -- history. Physical manifestations of a region's culture. A man's life work. Maybe jobs, too . . . for good.

Never heard of Malaco Records in Jackson, Miss., that chunk of history and culture that bought the farm in the big wind? I'll bet you've heard what came forth from there.

WLBT television in Jackson reports:

A piece of Mississippi history was virtually blown away by Friday's destructive storms. Internationally acclaimed Malaco Records on Northside Drive in Jackson was almost reduced to rubble and now the owners are wondering whether they will rebuild after 44 years.

It was 3 years ago this month that Malaco Records was honored with an official marker recognizing it as a Jackson landmark along the Mississippi Blues Trail. The company was founded in 1962 and located on Northside Drive in 1967.

Now, that marker is almost the only thing left standing. A powerful tornado shredded two of the three buildings in the compound. Wolf Stephenson, one of Malaco's founders, was inside with about 15 employees, winding down for the weekend.

Stephenson said, "We started seeing limbs and debris flying through the air and decided we better take cover."

(snip)

Stephenson says the warehouse can probably be saved. As for the rest of Malaco Records:

"Well, the buildings are old. It's a real tricky question as to whether or not it's worth rebuilding.", said Stephenson.

IT'S just awesome when we get a whole tornado outbreak to make our day, right?

Cue Don Henley. Again.

As red as the driven snow

It's a windy, snowy and frosty night in Omaha, where the Midwest fades out and the wild and woolly Plains take hold.

A night like this, here in the rolling hills of eastern Nebraska, reminds one of being a Who, safely stowed away in Horton's icebox. A day like the one preceding this February prairie night reminds one of . . . being a Who, safely stowed away in Horton's icebox.

With the light left on.

Horton, by the way, never defrosts his icebox. He probably should take care of that.

He probably will . . . this spring.

WHENEVER I MENTION life in the Gret White Nawth to family and friends back in Louisiana -- particularly the unrelenting rituals of the dead of a Nebraska winter, like braving the blowing snow . . . dressing in many layers . . . shoveling the snow . . . reshoveling what's drifted -- the reaction is nearly universal. Horror is what it is.

People think I'm nuts. People think the North Pole must be pretty close to Omaha, and that nobody in his right mind is gonna live at the damn North Pole.

And regular snowfall is a sure sign of God's wrath upon the terminally stupid.

Of course, this reaction comes from a state where the last white Democrat will change his party registration to "R" by 2013. That is, if the world doesn't come to an end in December 2012, all life extinguished by a rogue glacier sliding southward from somewhere near . . . Omaha.

Maybe St. Paul. All dem places up Nawth is all de same, cher -- cold, cold.

Frankly, I think the Republicanization of my home state somehow may the be source and the sustenance of the Southern horror at all things cold and snowy. Snow, after all, is socialist.

Think about it: It matters not a whit whether one has the finest, most meticulously manicured lawn in the entire upper Midwest or whether yours is a yard ravaged by crabgrass and unsightly patches of dirt the same shade of dingy brown as a 1950s Soviet apartment block. When the snow comes, it's all the same.

IT'S A PATENTLY leftist redistribution of beauty -- No Yard Left Behind. Every yard is covered by a uniform, regimented blanket of socialist snow.

The finest yard is brought down to the proletarian level of the most humble, and the most meager of lawns is -- via some sort of meteorological affirmative action -- lifted up to the same level as that of a McMansion.

Snow ain't white; it's pink. As in "pinko."

Not only that, ice is a communist plot, too, socializing the placement of asses over heads without regard to socioeconomic status, skill, income, educational achievement or race or national origin. A broken bourgeois foot is pretty much the same as a pretzeled proletarian one.

Stuff like that really pousses the cafés of the class-conscious capitalists back in the Gret Stet.

Likewise, the Northern embrace of socialist ice -- like that of pinko snow -- renders useless the advantages of a solid, upper middle-class Cadillac Escalade over that of a poor-white-trash '82 Chevy Caprice.

While the Escalade may get started quicker on an icy surface, neither it nor the Caprice will fare any differently trying to stop at the traffic light at the bottom of a long hill. Arguably, the advantage here goes to the cash-strapped mope driving the Caprice -- if he T-bones, say, an Escalade . . . so what?

ASSUMING liability coverage, the Caprice driver is out nothing but a crappy old car. The bourgeois pig in the Caddy is out . . . well, he's out the monetary difference between a heavily depreciated, really expensive Caddy and what it costs to replace it with a brand-new one. You could buy, like, six '82 Caprices with that.

Remember, it ain't "black ice" that's your problem, Buster, it's "Red" ice.

And the dictatorship of the Gret White Nawthun proletariat laughs at your pretentious capitalist illusions of superiority, Bubba.

A vortex of suck in Sarpy County

The Omaha Royals -- which, by the way, are no longer actually in Omaha -- are changing the minor-league team's name to the Omaha Storm Chasers?

Really?

YEAH, really, says the Omaha World-Herald:

Alan Stein, president of the Omaha Royals, unveiled the club's new name Monday night at the Embassy Suites Convention Center. The switch was made as Omaha's Triple-A baseball team makes the move to Werner Park in Sarpy County next spring.

Since 1969, the team has been named the Royals, the team's major-league affiliate, for all but three years, when it was named the Golden Spikes (1999-2001).

Martie Cordaro, general manager of the Storm Chasers, said the process of changing the name began in May 2009. The club hired Plan B Branding, a branding and logo company from Las Vegas, to research the Omaha area and hold focus groups on whether a name change should be made. The Royals polled the public on its website for name suggestions and then had the public vote on the top three choices.

Cordaro said the fans named the team, while Stein and the staff approved it.

"I'm very pleased," Stein said. "It's an extremely perfect name for Omaha. It will be a lot of fun. What I like about it is being able to get into the area schools and talk about science and weather safety with kids."

I DON'T KNOW about you, but the first thing I think about when it comes to Triple-A baseball is creating opportunities to tell kids about weather safety.

What's to tell about weather safety? "Hey, kids! When the siren goes off, run to the basement. And don't drive Mommy and Daddy's car into swiftly moving water during a flash flood!"

For God's sake.

Why not use the team's new identity to do some real "safety education"? Why not the Omaha Crack Hos? Or maybe -- and this one is a real hummer -- the Sarpy Syphilis.

No, really. I think the Sarpy Syphilis has a certain ring to it -- on so many levels, it just works, don't you think?

Call the new mascot Clappy (and, if you think about it, the same mascot could work for either the Sarpy Syphilis or the Omaha Crack Hos), and tell kids to "avoid the clap." And he/she/it could go to schools and pass out those condoms that look like candy coins.

You couldn't buy enough advertising to get that kind of publicity.

June is bustin' out all over . . . Doppler radar

Welcome to June in the Midwest.

This, in particular, is how the last month of spring is being ushered in here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska.

You have your dark, ominous clouds. You have the weather radio going off. You have the local television stations dropping everything to track the storms and relate an ongoing stream of thunderstorm and tornado warnings.

And you wonder what you might have time to grab just in case you have to make a mad dash for the basement.


Yes, dogs, you are on the list of things to grab.

Another weekend in paradise

From the Omaha World-Herald:

Golf ball-size hail took care of the golf tournament scheduled for Sunday morning in Schuyler, Neb., but that was the least of the worries for residents of that city.

A barrage of hail that hit around 10 a.m. and lasted for at least five minutes battered crops, broke windows, dented vehicles and caused "millions" of dollars in damage, according to a Schuyler insurance agent.

"We got hit big-time," said Steve Bailey of Folda & Co. in Schuyler.

"I was born and raised here, and this is the worst I have ever seen," Bailey said. "I couldn't even begin to estimate the damage, but it has to be in the millions. Car dealerships, government buildings, school buildings, crop damage . . . ."

Hail was reported from two miles north of Schuyler through town, said Becky Griffis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Valley. Hail one inch in diameter was reported in Crawford, Neb., but no major damage had been reported there.

Bailey said he was attending services in St. Augustine Catholic Church when the hail began to pound on the roof and sides of the building.

"I didn't want to look out," Bailey said. "When I opened the door to my car, the front seat had hail on it. I couldn't figure it out until I saw the rear window was broken in and the back seat was covered with hail."

Bailey drove to the viaduct over State Highway 15, gazed down 10th Street toward town and said it looked "like a January ice storm had just hit."

"I really feel for the people in our area," Bailey said, noting that the May 30 flooding of Shell Creek had caused previous damage to the town and farmers.

"Now they get back on their feet, and this came."

FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, about Iowa's fun start to the workweek:

Thunderstorms battered Iowa with winds as high as 100 mph early Monday, knocking down trees and power lines and blacking out more than 200,000 homes and businesses across much of the state.

No injuries were reported, and there were only a few reports of structural damage, including a roof torn off a small building at the state prison for women in Mitchellville near Des Moines.

The storms didn't produce a lot of rain, but a wind speed of 100 mph was reported at Dawson, a town of about 150 people 30 miles northwest of Des Moines, the National Weather Service said.

About 177,000 customers of MidAmerican Energy lost power from Sioux City on the state's western edge to the Davenport area on the east. Iowa's other large utility company, Alliant Energy, reported 31,000 customers without power.

"It started about midnight in Sioux City. One of the unique things about this storm was that it never really broke up. It just moved across our entire service territory," said Ann Thelen, spokeswoman for MidAmerican Energy.

Thelen said the major problem was "an enormous number" of trees on power lines. It could take three days to restore power to some areas, she said.

OK, THAT'S IT. It's you and us, God. It's time for a showdown!

Let's play Omaha Storm Slam!

It's summer in Nebraska . . . and the spring storm season never left.

What's a body out here on the Plains to do?

I'M GLAD you asked! It's time to play the Midwest's newest and craziest TV game show . . . it's time to play Omaha Storm Slam!

Here's how we play: Keep a close eye on the Channel 7 live radar (click on the picture above). Soon enough, you'll see a line of storms approach the Omaha metro area.

Now, when the big bright-red, severe thunderstorm cells hit the Omaha city limits, everybody yells "Storm slam!" and chugs a PBR. When a contestant gets sick or becomes too intoxicated to enunciate "Storm slam!", that person is eliminated.

And the last contestant standing wins the game!

First prize is dragging all of your falling-down drunk opponents to the basement when the tornado siren sounds. Now, let's play Omaha Storm Slam!

In color.

We've seen fire, and we've seen rain

God ain't through acting yet.

I refer not to "acting" in the dramatic sense -- though our recent weather certainly has been that -- but instead in the legal sense. For example, when lightning hits your house and burns the sucker to the ground, it's an "act of God."

Or when a hailstorm comes and busts your windows and beats your crops to a tangled mess, that's an "act of God." And when the big wind comes to lay flat the corn, soybeans and backyard-garden tomatoes, that too is an "act of God."

FOR SOME FARMERS in eastern Nebraska and Iowa -- the ones who've had their corn and beans pummeled, then blown flat . . . and then had what was left pummeled and blown flat again two and a half weeks later -- that's a lot of "acts of God."

If you're living it, it's high drama. If your crop insurance isn't enough to cover the carnage, your finances have just become high anxiety.

If you live in the big city and think food comes from the Safeway plant or the Kroger factory . . . never mind. Rest highly assured it's the Boogie Man hatching yet another nefarious plot to empty your wallet and screw up your life.

And rest safe in the knowledge that "flyover country" means nothing to you or your less and less comfortable life.

On the other hand, maybe God is acting, in addition to "acting." If that's the case, Broadway just went west, young man . . . and Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Missouri are trying out for the chorus line.

HERE'S OUR latest audition, held in and around Omaha, by God, Neb.:

The lightning and heavy rain from the storm that hit the Omaha area Tuesday night sparked house fires, knocked out power to thousands of homes and flooded basements, streets and farm fields.

Hail knocked out several windows in the farmhouse of Junius Lentell, an 87-year-old retired farmer who lives east of Valley. The surrounding farm fields that he rents out to his grandson were flooded, and one of the metal sheds on the property was partially pulled from its footings and thrown atop a tractor.

The storm, which left behind 5 inches of rain on Lentell's property, plus the one that hit June 27 were the worst of his 62 years on the farm, he said.

“This is about the craziest living I’ve ever done,” Lentell said.

Other spots also were hit by heavy rain: About 4½ inches was recorded at 196th and Douglas Streets, and more than 4 inches was recorded at 201st and Farnam Streets, said David Eastlack, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Valley.

A rain gauge in northeast Papillion had 3.7 inches, nearly 3½ inches of rain fell at Boys Town, and Offutt Air Force Base collected 2.75 inches.

One-inch hail was reported in parts of Omaha, Eastlack said.

In an hour, 3 inches of rain pounded Morse Bluff, and in Ceresco, 1½ inches of rain fell in 30 minutes. Both towns are in Saunders County, Neb.

Tuesday night’s storm featured a tremendous amount of lightning.

“It would just flash every few seconds — lightning after lightning after lightning,” said Valley resident Ken Wild, who got 3.2 inches of rain at his house.

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In Sarpy County, lightning strikes caused two house fires — at 10236 Emiline St. near La Vista and at 14211 S. 65th St. near Bellevue.

In Douglas County, firefighters extinguished a lightning-caused fire at 5101 N. 196th St. in the Elkhorn area.

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Ed Schmidt, Douglas County 911 operations manager, reported 518 calls from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Tuesday. During a normal weeknight, 911 will handle 100 to 130 calls, he said.

Flash flooding caused cars to stall and required that police direct traffic at 208th Street and West Maple Road about 11:30 p.m., the Weather Service said. Many roads were temporarily closed or underwater in western Douglas County, according to the weather service.

Much of Valley was littered with downed trees. Some streets were covered with water.

The King Lake community and Rainwood Road north of Valley were particularly hard-hit.

Volunteer rescue workers temporarily closed 264th Street near Rainwood Road because strong wind tore a roof from a nearby building and flung it into the road. The building had once been part of a hog confinement facility but had been empty about 10 years.

AND WHAT'S IN our local forecast for tomorrow night and Friday?

Rain. Lots and lots of rain. Some of it in strong storms.

We can't wait.