Wiiiiiiilllll-maaaaa!!!!!

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Hurricane Wilma, which looks like it will probably hit Florida, is now the most powerful Hurricane on record. The names given to hurricanes go in alphabetical order every year, and for the first time ever it looks like we're going to run out of names and have to fall back on Greek letters (really, I'm not making that up).

I don't even want to get started on whether or not human activity is making hurricanes more common and/or more intense, or whether we are just living through a natural up-cycle in hurricane potency. I suspect it's both, but I really don't want to talk about that because it's one of those debates that swims in so much information, misinformation and wishful thinking masquerading as "expert" opinion that everyone pretty much just listens to whatever confirms their own personal preconceived notions (*cough*Fox News*cough*) and believes whatever they want to.

For now, lets just hope that the damage from this latest massive hurricane is as light as it possibly can be. Indeed, the one bit of good news is that meteorologists seem to think the storm will weaken considerable by the time it makes landfall in the U.S., so perhaps things won't be as bad as they might otherwise be. And maybe somewhere down the road we can start to talk about whether it's really such a good idea to build huge houses on barrier islands that have giant bull's-eyes painted on them.