People who say, “I’m not a prude, but…” are 100% locks to be prudes.

I can imagine some completions to that sentence that would falsify your observation, but I guess it's an open question as to whether or not those sentences have ever been said.

I'm not a prude, but $20 is $20?

I'm not a prude, but I hosted an orgy in the bathroom of my wedding reception.

.

lollllll

Hahahahaha Tom you slay me.

“I’m not a prude, but…”
...dude it's plum rude to not prune your own plumbing after a dry dust and powder

Missed you Howard

May-day
(insert funny "lol people living in a severe weather region" joke here):

How many of you actually go to their basement or storm shelter when the tornado sirens go off? Does it matter if it's 12PM or 12AM?

No basement or storm shelter here, but if I'm awake or the siren wakes me up I'm heading to the laundry room.

I used to dismiss all that stuff. Then in 2005 an EF-4 trucked through our yard--luckily not on the ground. Fortunately, it missed our house, but it downed a couple of dozen trees and totaled a car. It had already killed three people before it got to us. It was the most exciting ten seconds of my life. I am now a believer.

Yeah, a tornado ripped half my grandma’s house apart in the 90s. People who ignore severe weather are idiots.

My stepdad will stand on his porch with hands on hips, because he’s an idiot.

I've never seen a tornado, so I could be one of those idiots outside looking around while the sirens are going off.

Did it sound like a freight train?

I just went ahead and moved where there's not tornadoes. Among the many, many, many reasons Denver is better than Des Moines.

Not to me, but that's how many people describe it. Perhaps I haven't been at the prime vantage point of listening to roaring freight trains.

Best comparison I can make is the sound you hear when you are seated in the rear of a jet plane (with engines on the wing--not the ones with engines on the rear of the fuselage) at takeoff at full throttle.

You could probably even add "while seated next to a crying baby" if you want to consider the sounds of the people with you. In retrospect, the chaos in our house just before it hit was comedy gold. I was stumbling out of bed pulling my pants on, and my wife and two kids were (inside) running toward the tornado (past three large plate glass windows) to get to where I was.

It passed directly over the house of our neighbors across the street. Their roof stayed on but the rafters in their attic were twisted! It crossed the street at the point where our son met the school bus at that time every morning (except during strong thunderstorms etc). I have no idea where that school bus was at that moment, but those kids and their parents will probably never know exactly how lucky they were.

Almost ashamed to say but we have a finished basement that has the kids playroom and my home gym. No question we would have gone downstairs if it was 6PM but at midnight I didn't want to wake up the rest of the family.

Based on the weather map on TV we weren't in the direct path and there was no reported touchdown anyway. In fact not even our trampoline blew over which is something that usually happens if wind gets very strong. Next morning I found out it went past us like a mile to the East with 100 mile wind speeds so I guess it could have been dangerous had it touched down? Daycare provider just hardcore when she asked how our daughter handled the storm and I told her she slept through it. I guess next time I'll wake up the family.

My attitude used to be far worse than that. If I'm asleep I'm going to sleep through most things, and I get very grumpy if I'm awakened. When my wife used to wake me up about the weather, I'd say "let me know if you hear a freight train" and just turn over. The morning ours hit, I was supposed to meet a gambling buddy a few hours away for a trip, but it was storming so I was in no hurry to get up to make the drive. She was getting the kids ready for school and woke me up to tell me about the weather around 6:30. I'm sure I said something flippant.

A few minutes after 7 I either woke up or was already half-awake and noticed that the noise didn't sound right, so I started getting out of bed. It was only a few seconds later that I could see leaves and stuff blowing horizontally outside so I decided pants would be sufficient and I'd better go get the others. I was still pulling my pants up when they nearly ran over me coming into the bedroom. I pushed them onto the floor between the bed and a dresser, laid across them the best I could, and stuff got crazy immediately. The window where I had seen leaves blowing was now revealing trees coming down. All I could think of was how much it was going to hurt my back when the roof and attic gave way. I was pretty happy when that didn't happen.

The three deaths that storm caused was the impetus for our county to install sirens county-wide because there was a furor that those folks got no warning when sirens had been available for a while. These days I'm almost always checking the TV for weather coverage if the weather starts getting dicey. Sirens are nice, but now I want all the information I can get. If I'm in the path, I'm going to hide whether the tornado is on the ground at the time or not. Those things can bounce up and down like a rubber ball or they can just stay on the ground for miles.

They tell you to have a safe spot picked out. Our house really doesn't have a good safe spot, but it has two areas that seem less bad than all the others so we settled on what seems to be the better of them.

i know for sure small oklahoma towns in teh 80's had early tornado warning networks, sirens and all
sometime even interrupting jerry falwell

when horns went off we hunkered down in the same unventilated underground bunker where younger brother and i conducted our lab experiments
melting plastic models of the uss enterprise by sticking electrodes from a model train power source into a D cell battery

One time, I saw someone attempt a joke. And then the other person, without laughing, offered a forced smile and said in a gentle and polite tone, "Good sense of humor."

These were just two randos. I knew neither of them and have no mental image of what they looked like. But that reaction lives on in my head 15 years later because I truly believe that it would be impossible to get a more painful reaction than that when you crack a joke. Obviously no self-respecting person wants their joke to receive a courtesy laugh, and this was essentially a courtesy laugh minus the laugh. The worst of all worlds.

If you're going to fail at a joke, there's a clear preference ranking for how it goes.
1. Person offers an unoffended groan/negative reaction
2. Person gives you absolutely nothing, but you can tell they got the joke
3. Person gives you absolutely nothing, and you're not sure if they got the joke; they might just think you're ****ing stupid/weird
4. Courtesy laugh
5. No laugh, but some sort of verbal pity

Unfortunately, I cannot find the clip of Jerry from the Roommate Switch episode offering up a joke and having his girlfriend flatly say, "That's funny."

The thing with the interruptions of regular TV programming is that they do it for everything that's severe thunderstorm+ in a TV market that's pretty big area-wise so at least 90% of the time it doesn't even apply to you.

Usually our living room TV isn't even on in the evening after the kids go to bed because I'm working from my second office (aka the kitchen table, "main office" is in the basement, too) while my wife streams stuff in the bedroom. Monday night for some reason the TV was on ABC and I was listening from the distance to Jimmy Kimmel when they interrupted for weather news. At that point I was actually a little upset because I thought it was another random storm 30 miles away like they did for hours on the third day of the draft. Minutes later my phone went off with the tornado warning followed by the sirens. At that point I moved to the TV to see what happened.

Yep. This used to annoy me to no end, but not so much any more because I will watch it if I may be affected even an hour or two later and there are so many options of other things to watch if I don't want to watch the weather. Around here, when one local network affiliate interrupts their programming for weather coverage, all the local networks do the same. But cable, the internet, and On Demand replay makes it palatable to me most of the time. The glaring exception is live sporting events, but even that you can find some coverage on the internet even if it isn't streaming.

One of the most amusing local station coverages I've seen was a few years ago when they were tracking a confirmed tornado through the area. When they had a good idea the path was going to go through a particular development, the local talking head turned the broadcast duties over to his assistant and began frantically dialing his cell phone saying he had to call to warn his wife to take shelter. Apparently he didn't think she was watching his weather coverage. LOL!

What’s the deal with tinned fish?

you paid too much for that
but worth it
what a haul

good sense of humor