Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for July 18, 2016

You might want to lower the metal clippers, too.

It does happen, too.Sometimes even from what looks like a clear sky.

My friend was struck dead by lightning five years ago….I was told the storm was miles away. He was walking his dog on his farm in NC.

@Egrayj sorry for the loss of your friend… Mother Nature doesn’t play fair

It rains on the just and the unjust.

Light precipitation is the worst. The charge builds up slowly and that first free shot is common. All of a sudden… BOOM!

On two occasions, I have been within one hundred feet of a lightning strike.

Didn’t get to finish. Both times, I gave up all of my bad habits. At least for a week or two.

Janis is walking slowly, and Arlo is just starting to walk. Must not be that big an issue.

The lifetime odds of dying, as an occupant, in a car crash in the US is about 1 in 600. The odds of being killed by lightning in the US is about 1 in 174,426. Yet you casually (in good weather) traipse out to the car without a thought.

Once I was stopped in traffic and just glancing around at the surroundings and happened to be looking at a light pole when it was struck by lightning. It was LOUD. And I got those bright spots on my retina like you get when you look at a lit light bulb. Oddly, it didn’t affect the traffic light I was stopped at.

Lewis LinsonThat could be more common than you think. I have too. The first was a tree in the front yard of a house I was in. The second hit an old Conalrad antenna behind the museum I worked, and it was a cloudless blue sky out the front windows (but not the back!). There may have been more as building strikes are not always noticed by those inside with a high background noise level.

I was sleeping when lightning hit the roof of the house next door, about 10 or 15 feet from me, and started a small fire in the next door attic. And I saw a moving car get hit in the parking lot as I was looking out of an office window. I’m not sure if the occupant of the car even knew what had happened. They just kept on driving.

I’ve heard that when several people are hit by lightning, leave the hurt alone and save the dead. They are the ones who need CPR, or some stimulus to bring them “back to life.”

I’ve only seen lightening strike close to me once in my life. It happened about 25 years ago outside of our second floor rented office space. The day it happened a rather nice female IRS agent was conducting an audit on our business and was sitting at a desk near a window when the lightening struck a power line about twenty feet away exploding a transformer which killed the power to our office. I couldn’t help myself, I rushed into that office where the IRS lady was looking pretty nervous, slid open the window, stuck my head out, looked up and yelled, “About thirty feet to the left God!”.

Yeah. Many debate which god (or gods) is/are the true God(s).But if we were all to agree that there are no gods, there would be no reason to argue about which god or gods didn’t exist.

@javogadro#1“Which deity? “God” isn’t a name or a pronoun.”.Sure it is.Try not to tell people what they can use for names; not polite.

@pearlsbs“Since there are so many they need to stick to their names. I have met many believers who know less about their religion then I do!” .Telling a person what his or her religion is assumes each on is distinct and invariant.Tell a Sunni Muslim what all Muslims believe and then tell a Shia Muslim what all Muslims believe and they will probably agree on one thing and it might not be comfortable.

Take your pick Night Gaunt.

I could have just as easily said, “..to the left, Cloud” and the point would still have been made. BTW, the IRS lady got a good laugh out of it too.