Not Tonight, Dear, I Have a Hurricane

As if it weren't bad enough that Texas is getting back-to-back hurricane action, I really take issue with the names. Dolly isn't even a real name (it's a nickname for Dorothy), and I'm sorry to report that some of my dearest friends were reduced to making terrible Broadway jokes. As for Tropical Storm Edouard - that's a good enough French name; but this morning, half the people in my office couldn't figure out how to pronounce it.

French, and headed for the eastern Texas coast? I do believe that'd be a Cajun weather system. Sacrebleu, y'all! Couldn't we at least get two letters of the alphabet off?!

Here's a better idea, for you brainiacs at the National Weather Service: How about you name the first tropical storm of the season Zelda? That way, you know, you can't have any more. How hard is that? It's meteorology, people, not rocket science.

Failing that, the names we're coming up with here seem to suggest we're running low on good ones. Why not switch to car models? Or would Ford sue the NWS if Hurricane Escape wiped out the Florida Keys? Perhaps the concern is that, if a Category 5 hurricane named Yugo were aimed straight at Mobile, everybody would just laugh and not evacuate.

But what happens if, in these strange and climatologically shifting times, we run all the way through the alphabet during a single hurricane season, and (taking a page from Excel's workbook) have to start over again with AA? Hurricane Aaron is perfectly respectable, but all the others would have to be named after Welshmen.

And the way things are looking, they'll have tropical storm action of their own to worry about.