Because the guy who wrote it was singing about his wife who'd just died?

But I didn't know that when I was little, and the song still made me super sad! Of course, so did Grover's "I'm So Blue".

(Also he was the Gov. of Lousiana.)

Holla!

So, I haven't been bombarding folks with this in thread (if you're my FB friend, you get enough of that) but I've picked up two beer writing gigs - one starts in August and is every other month, and the other is weekly, and is on the local weekly's blog. It will be every month and called Brewsday Tuesday. [link]

Hubby wanted to know why there aren't storm shelters in schools, especially in a place so prone to tornados.

I thought there were and that's why the children sheltered in place. Javachik told me that the land there is mostly rock, so it would be hard to build a lot of basements. But that doesn't mean schools can't have stronger design.

Zen mentioned that most storm shelters couldn't withstand a category 5 tornado anyway.

That reminds me that my school was a fallout shelter. I never knew where we would hide from fallout, though, because I never saw a basement. I used to have nightmares about what might be there and also the whole town having to be in there.

Congrats, Nora! That's awesome.

Hubby wanted to know why there aren't storm shelters in schools, especially in a place so prone to tornados.

I don't know about those specific schools (at least one report I read mentioned the kids sheltering in a basement, though I believe that was actually where several children died), but I know that M, who grew up in OKC, says almost none of the houses he spent time in as a kid had a basement -- not his house, not his grandparents' houses, not his friends' houses, etc.

Javachik told me that the land there is mostly rock, so it would be hard to build a lot of basements.

That was my guess -- some kind of geographical/geological impediment to building basements.

Woohoo, Nora!!

When I was a kid a big tornado destroyed my hometown's high school. They rebuilt it like a fortress, with huge oak tree-sized metal columns reinforcing the exterior (and also named the school teams the Hurricanes). That's where I'm headed if anyone starts shelling the city with artillery.

In my junior high building, the places we would take shelter from tornados was segregated by sex. The place where the boys were to take shelter had scalding hot water pipes above it.

Yeah, what I heard last night was that wind speeds were the highest ever recorded, and it was something in the neighborhood of a mile wide. I don't know that that's fact, but it suggests that it may have just been beyond what shelters could handle.