MARK MY WORD: WHAT'S WRONG WITH THOSE WEATHER WIZARDS?

Don't let anyone at the National Hurricane Center name your baby.

Those meteorologists can track a storm, but they sure can't name them.

Take Hurricane Opal, for example. What kind of name is that for a deadly storm?

It's just not a threatening name. It's like naming a storm Fred.

Opal may sound like a sweet, old lady. But she turned out to be downright mean. She beat up on Mexico, the Florida Panhandle, and inland areas of several Southern states where Opal is a popular name.

Deadly weather like that should have been better named. Attila would have been more appropriate except that an A name was used up long ago in this hurricane season.

The weather watchers each year choose an alphabetical list of 21 names for that year's storms. They leave out Q, U, X, Y and Z because they can't think of any good names that start with those letters.

This means you won't have a hurricane or tropical storm named Yoruba or zinfandel.

After Opal, the weather guys tracked Tropical Storm Pablo.

Pablo partied for a while, but ended up too worn out to be a threat.

Roxanne has now taken root as the Atlantic's 17 tropical storm this year, leaving only four names left in this year's alphabet.

If we get past the W word, then additional storms will be named using the phonetic alphabet used in radio transmissions and Vietnam War movies.

There has to be a better system.

I don't know why we can't have a whole season of storms starting with the same letter. Whole families are named that way.

Someone needs to give these weathermen one of those baby books that lists 20,000 names.

Only 10 of those names are ever used by parents, which leaves a whole bunch that the weather wizards can use without ever offending any of their relatives.

Actually, I am surprised that the Feds still allow weather forecasters to use first names at all.

Some in Congress want to make English this country's official language. If so, does that mean there won't be any more storms named Pablo?

In addition, excluding certain letters of the alphabet would seem to me to be discriminatory. If I was a U, I'd sue.

And why is it that only hurricanes and tropical storms get named? Tornadoes, blizzards, avalanches and earthquakes go through this world nameless. They need names too.

I suggest we just name all the bad weather after the people who paraded across our television screens in the O.J. Simpson trial.

There's Lance, Johnnie, Marcia, Mark, Rosa, Kato, O.J. and enough others to name a whole slew of hurricanes and other meteorological monsters.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.