Gifts Jack Rabbit Split Pea
Sat, 01 May 2010 12:06:03 +0100
|4.22.10 @ 4:35PM|#
Little government (with direction from big government) can be even more obtuse. Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution is a reality TV show about a British chef attempting to bring decent food to a small town school system. In one particularly delicious outbreak of government bureaucracy, the county administrator wouldn't allow him to serve his 7 vegetable pasta dish, because they didn't have enough vegetables. Meanwhile, they served hamburgers and french fries to the kids because fries counted as a vegetable and the salad that nobody was taking counted as a vegetable. They showed plate after brown plate going out of the line with a plain burger and a pile of fries and not a hint of color. The administrator said she didn't see anything wrong with that. Cut to a picture of his highly colorful vegetable pasta dish, obviously full of different vegetables. Cut to her looking at him disapprovingly as he stands open-mouthed. Really fun.
Actually, I highly recommend this show for this website's crowd. In another stupendous moment, Jamie tried to put out a freshly cooked meal in the elementary school. The school cooks and administrators huddled together and voiced an objection: we don't have enough silverware for this. Seems they only give the kids a spoon. They were absolutely aghast at the notion of providing knives and forks to elementary school kids. Jamie repeatedly asked them, "are you kidding me?" and they were equally perplexed. The principal finally asked him, "do they give knives and forks to the kids in England?"
"Of course!" came the reply. The principal actually asked for a reference on that. He really couldn't believe it. He didn't seem young enough to be that naive. I mean, how old do you have to be to have been given knives and forks when you were in school? They can't have killed that off before the mid-nineties.
Hi, FARK!Hi, Reddit!
(Note: All photos get super-biggified (850 pixels wide) in a new window when you click them.)
Well, yesterday caught me by surprise! I was back in Kearney, visiting the fam, when Darren Addy called me at around 4PM and asked me if I'd been watching the weather. I hadn't. :) But a quick check of the surface obs and the RUC hinted that if I was willing to drop just a bit south into northwestern Kansas, it might be a fun day. So, I quickly got the car ready (you've never seen me Rain-X so fast!), swung by to pick up Darren, and off we went. We dropped south from Holdrege, and as we did, we could see that the cap had definately broken to our southwest. As we approached the storm that was east of Hill City (at around 6PM, IIRC, though my timeline is fuzzy), the sky was putting on one heck of a mammatus display:
We sat in Norton for a little while watching the storm split. The left split was more or less just sitting there spinning like a top, while the right split, which was quite questionable at first in terms of prospects, soon took off to the east like a jackrabbit and exploded. We took the right split. Now, of course, we were behind and just north of the storm by this point, so we ended up having to punch it. But by that point it seemed very clearly outflow dominant and was transitioning to a something more linear. Darren managed to nagivate the pea hail and crazy winds that were lofting enormous amounts of dust to our north. Eventually, we punched through and got east of it, and holy cow, was that an incredible sight. The storm had developed a HUGE roiling shelf cloud followed by a boiling mass of really dark clouds caused by the outflow. All the pictures below are from after we got east of it. We also ran into a bunch of people on the road who were from Canada and Michigan -- we didn't have much time to talk as the storm was closing in at a rapid clip. If you look close enough, you can actually see one of the Canuakistanians standing stage left in one of the pictures below. :) I never got a chance to give them my name and number like they wanted -- if any of you are reading this and need to get in touch with me, my email is ryan at digicana dot com.
No tornadoes, but WOW what an incredible looking storm! Seriously, it looked like something out of Independence Day! Most of these shots are taken as we race east past Phillipsburg and Kensington.
(a note on this last picture: in order to get the shot with the cemetery sign readable, I had to horizontally flip this photograph in photoshop. Props to Darren for seein' this photo!)
Wanna buy prints? Just click here!
