"You Never Know Which Way The Wind Blows"

The thing about tornados is that, there's no actual season for them.

A tornado can strike and unexpectedly any time of the year as long as weather conditions as just "so-so". And that's what happened in a town about 8 miles from where I live, day before yesterday.

It sat down right on the historic section of the edge of town and stuck around 15 or so minutes, miraculously not killling anyone, but causing a few million in damages. People were, for the most part, sleeping when it hit, so it could have indeed been much worse! In fact, the tornado warnings went off here as well (even tho' it didn't strike here) but I never knew anything about it until the next day. Half the people around here never heard the sirens. All I knew originally was that obviously the power had been knocked out by a storm around 12:30 AM, and power didn't come back on until around 7 AM.

After personally seeing the amount of damage this tornado did to that town: partially destroying their city hall, some damage to an old courthouse, flattening a gas station, blowing part of a roof off a grocery store, much damage to several houses and several trees uprooted and much more, it makes me wonder if some higher power didn't step in and protect the people there.


And, on to other things.

Tomorrow is my mother's 81st. Birthday, so here's an early Happy Birthday, Mom! My mother is still very active and is a librarian here in town. She still drives, grocery shops, or whatever mostly she wants to do at this age. More power to her!

Wish I could say the same for my dad, who is 85. His health has gone way down just in the past 6 months, losing a considerable amount of weight and numberous doctor visits and tests. He's having to walk with a cane most of the time now. I mentioned this in an earlier blog about the doctors thinking his liver may be failing, and his "regular"doctor can't seem to find out what's specifically wrong with him (outside of plain ol' "old age"). I think it has a lot to do with the fact that he's simply worn himself out in those 85 years. This is someone who has worked some sort of manual labor job all his life. Naturally, not being able to be as active as he was when he was younger is a constant source of aggravation to him.


And, here on the home front, I got in several items I'd won on various auctions yesterday: around 11 comics, which were really a hodgepodge of comic book history from the silver-age to present. They included such books as Sgt. Fury #67 (1969), to some bronze-age Marvel reprint titles, to the current series of Doom Patrol (#15) from just this year. Reading thru them, it never ceases to amaze me how much imagination has been spent by those who have created comic books since their coming into existence in the mid 1930's. I really can see "why" it's so difficult for anyone to create something new and different these days because in the past 70 years or so I believe every field, every character and every "super power" has been used for various heroes. Every concept has been explored from humor to romance to war to western to super-hero to sex to fantasy to sword & sorcery to mutants to ultrahumans. They've been explored the same way with different characters. Comics have had about every conceivable merchandicing play their companies can think of from enhanced covers to cross-overs from even other companies, from revivals of older popular characters to trying to completely change an iconic figure, etc.,etc.,etc.,just to make them new.

Although I surely love the comic book, I'm certainly happy we DON'T live is such a universe. Otherwise we'd been in constant fear of mad gods destroying the planet or some evil super-powered villian either doing the same or conquering the world, alien invasions or having to put up with animals which speak or dress as humans, or the like. If the Gardner Fox concept actually exists that such ideas may be drawn from actual occurences from other dimensions, God Help those peoples! Me? I'm content to live in a world where I can seperate such fantasy from reality, read their fantastic adventures and be happy with a few minutes per book as pure entertainment.

And, while I'm on the subject of comics here, yes indeed I shall be writing a review of the current Doom Patrol title soon; in fact, I've already started on it. But from what I understand, this series will soon be discontinued (perhaps with #18), so I may wait and review the entire run when it's finished rather than just the first year now, because the storyline is pretty much continuous throughout the run.