The Texas Clouds are Booming & Pete Delkus is Twittering

That was what the sky looked like today around noon, up at Sprouts Farmers Market in Southlake. By the time I left Sprouts thunder was booming. As I headed south I was in a downpour, but I got ahead of the rain, barely, by the time I got back here.

The clouds today are the strangest thing I've seen above me in Texas since I saw a Space Shuttle streak across the night sky.

The clouds and rain caught up me with soon after I got back here. About an hour later I was consuming lunch when lightning started up, with several hits directly above me. It has been booming ever since.

So, I turn on the TV and see that all the local TV stations are in Heavy Duty Weather Drama mode. The most dramatic of the local Weather Drama Queens is this guy on WFAA, that's the ABC affiliate, named Pete Delkus. He gets way too earnest about these storms. It's one of my few pet peeves. I figure if you are watching TV, you are safely out of harm's way.

If a tornado cell has formed then I figure it is a legit thing to tell people if they are in that cell's location, to seek a safe place. But what they do instead is if there is a storm brewing, or moving, the Weather Drama Queens will interrupt regular programming to repeat what you've been reading crawling across the bottom of the screen over and over again.

That crawl will run and run. And then stop, replaced with a Weather Warning in an upper corner of the screen. Then there'll be a beep or a buzz and the crawls starts up again. And then they break in, first with an annoying announcement that they are breaking in, which takes up time. If the announcement is so damn important why not get right to it?

So, this afternoon Pete Delkus is pointing out the various storms and the direction they are heading and at which speed. Then he points to Tarrant County and says it is drizzling slightly there with the thunderstorms yet to arrive. I hear this as I see bright flashes, hear loud booms and watch a lot of falling water. And I am in Tarrant County.

Such is the high quality of our weather reporting.

Oh, another thing. At the end of Pete Delkus' Weather Warning Report he said he'll be twittering throughout the storm, so you can keep updated on the ongoing storm by going to Pete's TV Station, WFAA, Twitter page. You'll have to join Twitter first before you get to read Pete's weather tweetering. For me, I think I'll just get my weather info by looking out the window.

Pete Delkus is in Wikipedia. You can read all about him.