The deceptive beauty of the American landscape

ST. LOUIS, OCT 14--  Autumn weather brings remarkable and deceptive color changes to the American landscape. Few things are as beautiful or as misleading as an American university campus bedecked by the  golden, red, pink and yellow Fall leaves.
 
Washington University in St. Louis is sometimes called "The Harvard of the Mid-West." [Frankly, I don't think that Harvard is such hot stuff, but that's another conversation.] WASH-U with its red-stone castle motif is especially beautiful now after baking through a long summer. Leaving the Mid-Western oven, we now put aside polo shirts  and consider putting on sweaters for a few moments for a leisurely stroll to look at the gorgeous foliage, before stepping into snow boots. It looks like a beautiful scene, and that is very dangerous.

One day it was summer (95 F or 32-35 C) and the next day we had a blast of winter with a 40-degree (Fahrenheit) drop in temperatures. Then the next day we climbed back into summer, and there was a return of tornadoes to the Midwest?even as far north as Michigan, where two people were killed when they were sucked out of their house and thrown several hundred yards away.

Across the river in Illinois, two people were killed as their trailer went flying the length of a football field. Meanwhile, a three-month-old baby was thrown hundreds of yards from its parents, but was miraculously unscathed.
 
And they say Israel is a dangerous place to live.