Storm chasers capture video of a tornado touching down in Bowdle, South Dakota.

A rare fire tornado has been seen in the Brazilian state of Sao Paolo. A whirlwind of flame, spiralling several metres high, danced across burning fields, bringing traffic to a halt on a nearby highway. This unusual phenomenon has been caused by a combination of wildfires and strong dry winds following weeks of drought in the country. Authorities in Brazil are struggling to contain the fires and have banned farmers from burning waste from the sugar cane harvest.

On Monday, BNVN Weather Paparazzi Eric Treece was chasing one of the several tornadoes that formed in eastern Colorado along Highway 71 south of Brush, CO. In the footage, Eric is standing underneath a rope tornado that is less than a quarter mile away from him on the ground and rises up and extends over him as it goes up to the cloud base. The video pans back to the ground and back up to the cloud base to show how large and how long the tornado actual is. As you watch this footage, note that the tornado from the clouds does extend to the ground but there is rotation on the ground. The condensation funnel of the tornado is invisible until it touches the ground and throws debris into the air. To license this footage, contact www.bnvn.com

www.UltimateChase.com EXCLUSIVE video up close as a tornado rips through the countryside in South Dakota. Watch as a church get spared by less than 100 yards. Video shot by Mike Theiss while driving for Cloud 9 Tours. The power of nature up close and personal can be rewarding at times but other times disturbing and sad. While chasing Tornadoes we never wish to see these tornadoes affect peoples homes, etc…. We estimate this tornado crossed the road about 200 yards in front of us. It was hard to keep the camera steady in 80+ mph winds being sucked into the tornado. Want to see something like this is person with experienced chasers ? Check out http to learn more about chasing with our team….

June 3, 2008 www.youtube.com www.wdef.com Chattanooga Tennessee Here you see some amazing video from an ATM camera in eastern Iowa from last weekends devastating tornado. The camera caught the E-F5 tornado as it ripped through the bank. In the footage you can see the tornado breaking windows and flying glass inside the bank… then it starts to peel apart. Just another example of the awesome power that nature can dish out.

Now, I know a lot of you are concerned about the Mississippi tornadoes and all.

But how about we did a test here on R&S?

What if we were to get as many R&S ladies to post nudies of themselves for us?
How do we KNOW that Seattle won’t be blown away tomorrow in a massive twister afterward?

This is some newly found footage of the Hesston KS F5 Tornado from 1990 It’s the 20 year anniversy

Dramatic escape as farmer films an approaching tornado destroying his equipment in Australia. . Follow us on twitter at twitter.com

Tornado touches down in the small town of Elie, Manitoba Canada. Elie is located 25 miles west of Winnipeg. There was extensive property damage but miraculously there were no fatalities and only minor injuries. This was the strongest reported tornado in Canadian history. Environment Canada weather office rated it at an F5. There were 7 confirmed tornadoes in southern Manitoba that weekend. Recorded June 22, 2007

In June, 2007 Elie Manitoba, is hit with an F5 tornado - it was the strongest tornado to ever touch down in Canada. Wind speeds reached over 400 kms/hr. While a category F0 will see minor damage and has a relative frequency of nearly 40% a category F5 will cause severe damage, hurling objects such as automobiles through the air like missles and has a relative frequency of less than 0.1%. Miraculously, in the Elie tornado, no one was killed. Pictures set to Eli’s Coming - Three Dog Night…

www.wdef.com Chattanooga Tennessee Here you see some amazing video from an ATM camera in eastern Iowa from last weekends devastating tornado. The camera caught the E-F5 tornado as it ripped through the house across the street. In the footage you can see another house’s roof slam into the home… then it starts to peel apart. Just another example of the awesome power that nature can dish out.

Pepita Gonzalez lied to 20 million girls, women and too-curious men every day. It was okay because she lied to herself too, and she got paid to do it.

It was 2:15 in the morning and Pepita stared at her desktop, guzzling her coffee and savoring the remaining moments of sanity before the emails would start pouring in.

This week, her desktop featured a tornado, the funnel looming over the photographer like a drunk, abusive parent. Pepita heard that the photographer, who died moments after snapping the picture, had dreamed of becoming famous for his weather photography. His tragically romantic death resulted in his dream coming true.

Pepita loved this story, even though she knew it was partially untrue.

Around the tornado curled a picket fence, like white railroad tracks navigating through the debris. It had been taken directly from a video game ad that Pepita’s design agency had designed.

Still, she told the story of the twister’s photographer to her friends. Just because the fence wasn’t real didn’t mean the story was false. To her, it was like a movie: just because the characters were fake didn’t mean she couldn’t feel the emotions of the story.

An incoming email made the inbox flash at the bottom of the funnel cloud. Then there were three new emails. Four. Pepita clicked open her mailbox, covering up the twister.

There were six high-priority emails, each with a single attachment: a high-res photo of a gorgeous underwear model. Gorgeous, covered with acne and moles, staring with vacant eyes and posing with protruding ribs. Pepita had a lot of work to do…

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If you’re interested in more, you can read the rest here:
http://www.worthyofpublishing.com/chapter.asp?chapter_ID=9395

If you aren’t interested - tell me why!

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If you read the rest, let me know what you think. Were any parts confusing? Did you have to re-read anything a few times to figure out the meaning? Do you have any questions about it, or personal insight on the subject?

Thanks for the feedback!
Yeah, Lynci, this is an edit of the first draft - the previous one was a little meandering and unfocused… more of an exercise… and this one was rewritten to focus more on a point.

It feels more like a short-story to me, than a full story… but now that I think about it, I could develop her character and throw in some conflict. I mean, she totally broke the law, sending out the pics before retouching them… what would happen if she got caught? Or worse, what if the designer sent the wrong files to the printers, and all of the finals ended up in the magazines and the billboards? Hmmmmm…. Possibilities….

This is a video clip from the DVD program “Storm Chase 1990-1992 by Robert Prentice.” This is a damage survey of the devastating F5 tornado damage at the Andover, Kansas Golden Spur Mobile Home Park shot on April 27, 1991. This internationally famous event has been featured in many documentary and news programs. Oddities include mangled cars, de-barked trees and a bent spoon embedded into the ground. Some scenes contain flattened homes as far as the eye can see. Sobering video that forces us …

Scary stuff, here is the video. For more info, visit www.eibuddy.com

I was doing a quick 45 minute exercise from a book, and the goal was "write what you know" - well… this is what I know! Now let ME know if you’re interested in the topic or how you feel about the writing. Thanks for the feedback!

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Pepita Gonzalez constantly lied to 20 million girls and women, but she knew it was okay because she was one of them.

Her work inbox jumped at the bottom of her desktop with a new email.

Three new emails. Four.

Pepita’s mouse cursor soared towards the inbox icon across her huge monitor. This week, her desktop was a photograph taken by someone looking up at a gigantic tornado. Pepita heard that the photographer who took the picture had died and the camera had been recovered nearly a week later. She liked the story, even though she could see that several pieces of the photo were not real.

The picket fence, for example, which snaked like dreamy white train tracks through the debris, was taken from a video game poster of a 747 crashing in a neighborhood. Pepita’s design agency had helped make that game poster. But Pepita still told people the story of the twister’s photographer anyway. Even if the fence wasn’t real, there might have been something real in it, right?

Pepita made her cursor loop around the tornado like a piece of debris before clicking on her inbox.

Waiting for her were six emails with the final shots from the agency’s photo shoot. There was also a friendly "hurry your ass up we’re already behind schedule" reminder from her art director.

Like she had to be reminded why she was at her work computer at 2:30 am. In a few hours the designers would start screaming for the 6 final photographs so that they could begin designs for the magazine and poster promos.

If the designers didn’t know what the models poses were like, they couldn’t put the words in the right place. Pepita didn’t really understand this. Was it that hard to throw a Victoria’s Secret logo and tagline onto a photo?

Logos and taglines wasn’t her job, though. Her job was to study the photos of the starving, almost-naked underwear models, and make them look even more fabulous than the art director or lighting director or makeup artist could.

Pepita forwarded the 6 photos to the designers. She wasn’t supposed to. The models’ agents had it under contract that only Pepita was allowed to see them before they’ve been retouched.

"Who cares?" Pepita thought. "Let them start designing. The poses aren’t going to change… even though everything else is."

The first one was simple. A silhouette shot on a jungle green background. Pepita grabbed the green color from the background and erased the slight muffin-top on the model’s hips. It didn’t matter if a model was 100 pounds and 6 feet tall, elastic is elastic and it causes a bump. But people didn’t like when elastic looked real… they wouldn’t buy the underwear if they saw what it really looked like, so it couldn’t look real.

The second one was a full color body. Pepita groaned. It needed a lot of work.

She started with the usual stuff… she grabbed the "blur" tool and attacked every pore on the model’s body. She isolated the whites of the eyes, made them whiter. She grabbed the "saturate" tool and made the model’s eyes even greener, to match the jungle theme. She added another highlight to the eyes, to make them dreamier. Pepita whitened teeth, erased moles, covered blemishes, and then completely erased the model’s awkward half-outie/half-innie bellybutton and replaced it with a prettier bellybutton from a previous model.

The model was a skinny, and needed the joint-treatment. It was a lot easier than the movie stars or (god forbid) average-Jane contest winners, who needed major reshaping. No, the skinny models were the right size in the flesh, except for their joints. Their knees were so knobby, it looked like the bones were constantly trying to escape the tendons. The elbow joints were square, rather than triangular, as if there were accidentally one too many bones devoted to bending the arm.

Pepita had to make the joints look normal. She copied pieces from a different model, until she relized that the lighting simply wouldn’t allow the two images to merge. The knees and elbows had highlights that didn’t match - it was like merging photos of a house at night, with a different house photographed in the daytime.

Eventually, Pepita had to copy and paste different pieces from the model’s body and construct a new knee and elbow.

The art director asked about her progress. Her eyes itched - it was 3:30 am. 4 more photos to go.
One after another, Pepita turned the models from amazing into fabulous. Fantastical, but fabulous. These models lived in a world where there was no gravity and their underwear stayed on without elastic, in a world where there was never a crease of skin between the bra and the armpit, in a world where there were no pores and where joints and flesh meshed into impossible combinations.

Pepita knew they weren’t real, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to be them. It was like the picture of the twister - if she made herself forget what was fake, she could pretend that the story was true. After all, a picture of a real tornado wouldn’t be nearly as fabulous.

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That’s it! Obviously, not much on character development or story… those weren’t really my goal for this exercise. Just writing what I knew. Thanks for reading!

This compilation featuring the Wichita/Andover Tornado of April 26, 1991 features many rarely seen videos of the storm. This segment originally aired on KWCH-TV in Wichita on May 4, 1991.

Another video recorded by a local Colony of the F5 Tornado in Elie, Manitoba that hit on June 22nd, 2007. Video Credits go to them. This video gives clear evidence of F5 Rated Winds

Here is a video of Canada’s first F5 Tornado (upgraded from F4) taken from one mile away that devastated the western part of Elie, Manitoba on Friday June 22nd, 2007…the video ends with a second tornado (F3 Rated) near Oakville. This one was on the ground at the same time as the Elie tornado, but I didn’t catch it until the Elie one lifted and I was driving towards Elie to see what happened there…I turned around and tried to intercept it, but it got rain-wrapped and fell apart after …

Looks like Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” as it ropes out. From Roger Hill: www.stormchase.net.

Extreme tornado video footage clips of the violent and deadly Oklahoma and Kansas tornado outbreak on May 4, 2007, the same day Greensburg Kansas was hit by a violent F5 tornado. This footage was shot in NW Oklahoma just hours before the Greensberg twister. Storm chasing journalist Warren Faidley shot this tornado video footage. Extreme Weather Journalist Faidley as seen in VOA TV special. Faidley, recently called America’s “Top Storm Chaser” by MSNBC, is one of the few journalists and …

Storm Chaser Jason Boggs from KAMR-TV in Amarillo shared this video of the Clovis tornado that ripped through Clovis Friday night.

(Un)famous video of tornado on 26th April 1991 that passed by just next to people hidden under overpass.

This amazing EF2 tornado was the 3rd intercepted by Hank Schyma just east of Grand Island Nebraska (approaching Aurora) on June 17th 2009. At one point it was a 1/4 mile wide and destroyed a families home and barn. 6 people escaped into the basement seconds before their house was ripped apart. BTW, RFD= Rear Flank Downdraft… Big hail, Strong wrap-around wind, torrential rains, muddy roads, and flying monkeys! Often storm chasers on the back side of the tornado try to maintain possition …

Video featuring stock footage of various tornados tearing large parts of the US midwest to shreds. Music: The Prodigy - ‘Climbatize’.