Leaderboard

That will teach you for letting off party poppers.

Aye, and a Merry Christmas to all of you at home too, as William Hartnell once said.

Good to see a new member jumping straight in, with a 50 name list and both feet tied to large rocks... Best of luck with your list.

Well, it's even bad enough that BBC just did a brief report on it. And usually they are filled with thinly-veiled contempt for America and would never bother covering something unless it was Katrina-esque. Whenever I hear of bad weather in places like Texas, I'm so confused. I just don't fucking understand how a place that is so normally associated with scorching hot deserts filled with fucking rattlesnakes and shit like that can get such icy death-weather just because it's December. It's one of those things that will always be a mystery to me, like...... how people find American football entertaining, and other stuff like that. I don't have an answer for the football, but I can answer the weather question. North Texas is in a part of the US called the Great Plains. This area of the world has the highest instance of violent weather in the world. Convection is fed by the warm, humid air rising from the Gulf of Mexico combined with a large variance in temperature with altitude. Adding in a high propensity for wind shear driven by high pressure systems to the east, lift from upper level troughs and the air that comes off the Rockies and large,powerful, unstable thunderstorms will produce hail and tornadoes in the spring. Large ice storms in the winter and compounded by large cold fronts that come down from Canada with absolutely nothing to stop them. When the circumstances are perfect, which they are sometimes, these cold fronts hit the moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and ice storms result. If we are really super duper lucky, we get ones like we had this month. In the summer, a high pressure system will descend on this part of the country and basically park. These systems remain intact for months, stopping all other weather systems from coming in. Temperatures rise. And rise. And rise some more. And the total lack of movement in the air does all kinds of wonderful things with the pollution. And then there's El Nino. TL;DR - Texas has the perfect geographic location to be tornadoed, hurricaned, blown around, hailed and iced to death. We love it. Except when we don't. So it's all Mexico's fault. Yeah I should have guessed that one

Well, it's even bad enough that BBC just did a brief report on it. And usually they are filled with thinly-veiled contempt for America and would never bother covering something unless it was Katrina-esque. Whenever I hear of bad weather in places like Texas, I'm so confused. I just don't fucking understand how a place that is so normally associated with scorching hot deserts filled with fucking rattlesnakes and shit like that can get such icy death-weather just because it's December. It's one of those things that will always be a mystery to me, like...... how people find American football entertaining, and other stuff like that. I don't have an answer for the football, but I can answer the weather question. North Texas is in a part of the US called the Great Plains. This area of the world has the highest instance of violent weather in the world. Convection is fed by the warm, humid air rising from the Gulf of Mexico combined with a large variance in temperature with altitude. Adding in a high propensity for wind shear driven by high pressure systems to the east, lift from upper level troughs and the air that comes off the Rockies and large,powerful, unstable thunderstorms will produce hail and tornadoes in the spring. Large ice storms in the winter and compounded by large cold fronts that come down from Canada with absolutely nothing to stop them. When the circumstances are perfect, which they are sometimes, these cold fronts hit the moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and ice storms result. If we are really super duper lucky, we get ones like we had this month. In the summer, a high pressure system will descend on this part of the country and basically park. These systems remain intact for months, stopping all other weather systems from coming in. Temperatures rise. And rise. And rise some more. And the total lack of movement in the air does all kinds of wonderful things with the pollution. And then there's El Nino. TL;DR - Texas has the perfect geographic location to be tornadoed, hurricaned, blown around, hailed and iced to death. We love it. Except when we don't.

Yer Swedish? Love your nails... regards, Hein