In the 20th century, 158 hurricanes walloped the United States.  Leading the pack was Florida with 57, Texas came in second with 36, and we have a tie for third place between Louisiana and North Carolina, each boasting 25 landfalls.

So what’s a bored, decadent, hurricane-free state like California to do?

Install photo-booth size Hurricane Simulators, that’s what!

(I wonder if they have Earthquake Simulators in Florida, Texas, Louisiana and North Carolina?)

I stopped in at one of our higher end outdoor malls, Bay Street, to redeem the Banana Republic gift card my mom had gotten me for Christmas, when, on the way back to the parking garage, I passed this little Hurricane booth.

I got to my car, unlocked the door, and was about to sit down when a couple thoughts flitted through my mind: did I really just walk past something called a “Hurricane Simulator?”  What would it feel like to be in a telephone booth sized hurricane?  And, has it really come to this for American culture?

Don’t ask me why, because I don’t understand it myself, but somehow, amusement parks get a pass from me, but this little booth, this little kiosk thing, which charged two bucks (I didn’t have cash, so I used my credit card – so not only was I paying to experience a sanitized version of the misery visited 158 times last century upon our east coast friends – but I was borrowing at the usurious rate of 18+ percent for the privilege to do so.)

So what did I get for my two bucks?

Basically it’s a giant hair dryer.  You step in the booth, close the door, an overhead fan blows air on you, and a display monitor tells you how fast the wind is blowing.

That’s it.  From what I could gather, the “fun” of the experience would be to go and watch your friends have their hair messed up.

Thirty seconds of wind and I was done.

I guess it was the fact that they had installed this thing in a mall which sold pricey trinkets (Coach, bebe, Godiva, Sephora) to the well heeled that irked me.  If I saw the “Hurricane Simulator” just sitting on a random street corner somewhere, its absurd presence might have charmed me.  Had it been buried in some forgotten corner of Magic Mountain, then it would just seem like a slot machine in a Reno gas station – an inevitable part of the landscape.

But here, in the beginning on the 21st century, in a high end mall, it seemed like the wafer thin mint that might cause American civilization to burst.