Thursday, December 15, 2011

I don't call this a pet peeve

Because that makes it sound like something I would enjoy being annoyed by.  I don't enjoy being annoyed by anything, and in fact this is one that always makes me want to slap someone really hard, preferably while wearing a chainmail glove.

From The Telegraph:
An avalanche of more than 100 apples rained down over a main road in Keresley, Coventry on Monday night.
The street was left littered with apples after they pelted car windscreens and bonnets just after rush-hour. 
The bizarre downpour may have been caused by a current of air that lifted the fruit from a garden or orchard, releasing it over the junction of Keresley Road and Kelmscote Road.
[...]
Jim Dale, senior meteorologist, from British Weather Services, said: "The weather we have at the moment is very volatile and we probably have more to come. 
"Essentially these events are caused when a vortex of air, kind of like a mini tornado, lifts things off the ground rising up into the atmosphere until the air around it causes them to fall to earth again.
Items falling inexplicably from the sky is my favorite strange phenomena.  Every time--every time--it happens, the first excuse the "experts" come up with is a "vortex" or "mini tornado" or some such thing.

And yet it was only apples.  No leaves, no twigs, no other items that could just as easily have been swept up along with the apples.  Only apples.

Every time I've seen a report of, let's say, falling frogs, it's only frogs.  The excuse is that they were swept up out of their element by atmospheric phenomena, and yet it isn't a rain of frogs and the water they were living in along with a bunch of small fish and other debris.  It's only frogs.

I'm not saying it isn't because of some unknown atmospheric phenomena.  It's just that the intentional blindness of these people to the lameness of their own excuses always stuns me.

3 comments:

  1. My money's on those darn kids hiding in the orchard throwing apples onto the roadway.

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  2. Kids or those mean trees from the Wizard of Oz.

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  3. I hated those trees.

    And those damn monkeys.

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