I decided to stay inside and draw today because it’s raining outside but for real rain we have to go to the US because everything is as they say “bigger in Texas” with the possible exceptions of tax rates and tolerance for firearm legislation. This week Hurricane Harvey has been doing far more damage to Houston than North Korea could ever hope to. It’s a real shame that Kim Jong Un didn’t just dress up like Blofeld and put out a videos claiming that he was responsible and that they’d developed a weather machine, he’s already got that Bond villain vibe going on.

But back to the storm, the last Houston that went underwater was Whitney and that ended pretty badly. There’s been 51” of rain and that’s settled to leave more than 8 feet of flooding in some places. As a result there’s been people killed, billions in property damage, a curfew put in place and two reservoirs are close to bursting. More worrying though, President Trump has come close to losing control over the news agenda, I imagine he was set to make a big announcement to rile up the left but even he can’t influence the weather. Or the house republicans either to be honest.

Amusingly I saw an online activist pointing out that Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy and Harvey were all supposedly 100-year flood events yet they’d all happened within a decade. Uh oh, must be man made climate change. Except that those are 3 completely separate areas, that’s how risk-frequency modelling works, and the previous ‘worst ever’ hurricane in the Houston area was the 1900 storm, about a hundred years ago. Offering up a radically different theory, some folk have claimed that the rain is biblical punishment from above for electing a homosexual mayor. I suppose that if electing LGBT politicians screws with the weather then it would at least explain why Scotland has such awful weather, oh no wait Kezia Dugdale just resigned. I’m visiting Glasgow this weekend so I suppose I better put away that umbrella and pack some shorts.