I watched a weather report today and apparently the cyclone GEORGE is heading for Western Australia after battering most of Australia's Northern Territory. My first thought was that GEORGE must be a piss weak little cyclone and if it gets worse it will be renamed to a female name. Who names these weather phenomenon anyway? The cyclone GEORGE? If you got yourself a pet great white shark, you wouldn't call it DAISY, would you? No, you wouldn't! You'd come up with something that embodies what it can do to you - like MAIM, TERROR or perhaps SLAUGHTER. I find it rude to any person made homeless by GEORGE, who in the first place probably thought the name meant that it was a pretty lame cyclone that probably got wedgies all the time from the bigger more popular cyclones. What are they going to say? GEORGE blew my house away? I don't think so! If the cyclone naming department did their job, those poor people can at least stand with their heads held high when they tell their friends that the cyclone NINJA ENFORCER wiped their house from planet earth. On a more serious note, the practice of naming cyclones, first introduced by the Australian meteorologist Clement Wragge in the late 19th Century. He gave tropical cyclone names after political figures whom he disliked. By properly naming a hurricane, the weatherman could publicly describe a politician (who perhaps was not too generous with weather-bureau appropriations) as 'causing great distress' or 'wandering aimlessly about the Pacific.' Perhaps we should reintroduce that? Let's try: "Cyclone John Howard (no relation to existing persons living, dead or otherwise) is causing big distress as it's onlsught on people's livelihoods take monumental proportions. Unlike other cyclones, who tend to attack indescriminately, John Howard has decided to go after the opposition leader with fervour of bibilical proportions."
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