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The strange weather tales in climatologist Randy Cerveny's Freaks of the Storm (Thunder's Mouth, $15.95) are not so much Twister-type disasters, but more like the last reel of Magnolia: frogs falling from the sky and other meteorological anomalies. Some highlights:
· In 1955, a 9-year-old girl from South Dakota was riding her pony when a tornado appeared, carried her over a hill, and set her down safely 1,000 feet away.
· The record for a piece of debris carried the farthest by a tornado — a personal check that traveled 223 miles from Kansas to Nebraska in 1991.
· Between 1942 and 1977, park ranger Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times. He took to driving around with a bucket of water (to douse himself) and eventually committed suicide.
· About half the deaths associated with an 1819 hurricane in Mobile, Ala., were the result of turtle and alligator bites received when the animals were washed into the city.
