RAD!!!!

So there's a Thunderstorm going on outside. I am sitting at my computer with my speakers plugged into my laptop, but no music playing (even audiophiles need a little quiet once in a while). The silence is broken by a brief crackle of static over the speakers. This is followed a second later by the sound of distant thunder! My only assumption is this: the speakers picked up the electromagnetic pulse emitted by the lightning bolt at light speed, and the thunder followed at the relatively slow speed of sound. How cool is that? Whoa, it just happened again!

This reminds me of another story that my family members will appreciate: When I was signing up for the Navy, I was at the recruiter's office filling out a mound of paperwork. When they asked me my religious background for burial purposes, I said Mormon. This elicited a round of cliche' Mormon jokes from the salty dog recruiters. Just then lightning struck close enough that we saw and heard it at the same time. There was a brief period of silence in the room as the backup generator kicked in and light was restored. Needless to say, the recruiter was without irreverent comments for the remainder of the afternoon.

It also reminds me of the blessing of a certain newborn nephew of mine, whose invocation invoked lightning from the heavens, and killed power to the microphone, necessitating the shouting of the rest of the prayer.

But this whole idea of lightning being the power of God is probably just a holdover from the pagan faiths of the Greeks and Romans, so I'm just going to enjoy the fact that modern technology allows us to hear the EMP fields of arcing electricity through household speaker systems.

P.S. If you have any doubts that I am my father's son after reading this, you must not know my father.