infinite improbability

A. its not full of irony
B. He's being honest about the excitement he and so many folks (including yourself) get when they see a hurricane coming.
C. There's nothing explicitly pretentious about his little article. Its rather insensitive, absolutely, but the article itself isn't pretention. Now James Wolcott may be a pretentious person, and perhaps is in his other writings, just not in this one.
D. You're grossly, grossly mis-critiquing the article. I think you're being unintellectual because you're out to lunch on your reading of his article and you think his post is uh, inflammatory, smug, pretentious, full of crap. You wouldn't be out to lunch if you thought his post was hasty and a bit immature. Of course, I think the same thing about your silly Hurricane blog posts, and so do a few others. Hurricanes aren't going to cause any serious damage to a big solid-structure city like Tampa, its the trailer-park worlds like Punta Gorda that have something to fear, and you didn't even think about how your "oh me oh my not TAMPA!" posts would sound like to people from those areas. Especially when, I surmise, deep down you know you and yours have nothing to fear, but you just enjoy the drama of the whole situation. If anything, you and James Wolcott would get along quite well, if you were honest.

One, the main reason that I put in what I did about it trying to be witty and ironic was as a premptive strike because a lot of the sites that blogged about him claimed that anybody who didn't like what he said wasn't witty and intellectual enough to get the joke.

And, to answer your points, sure, it's pretty darn easy to act excited and hope the storm is a category 4 or 5 when it makes landfall if you're up in Manhattan working at Vanity Fair, it's quite another to root for the storm to make landfall as a major hurricane when you are in it's path. And yes, hurricanes are exciting, when they are a relatively fast moving category 1 or 2 that isn't going to cause major damage, but not when it's the second or third in a month, and not when they are category 3, 4, or 5.

Further, you are seriously underestimating the strength of a major hurricane. This would likely be because TV loves to show the most dramatic shot, and the most dramatic shot is twisted masses of sheet metal that used to be trailer parks. It's not just trailer parks that have damage, my aunt's son in Punta Gorda sustained major damage to his house, and although it was built pre-Andrew, it definitely wasn't a trailer, and it certainly wasn't the only solid structure that sustained damage.

As for what would happen if a storm hit here, sure, the houses build post-Andrew would hold up pretty well, but the vast majority of homes and businesses are not post-Andrew construction (and there are as many trailer parks in this area as there are in points south), and even if they were built post-Andrew, in a lot of the Tampa Bay area a huge worry is storm surge. If Charley had hit where it was supposed to, Pinellas County would have been mostly under water, all of downtown Tampa would have been under water 1-2 stories deep, the barrier islands from Longboat Key north to Tampa Bay would have had all but the strongest structures washed out to sea, and basically, it would have looked like a bad Jerry Bruckheimer disaster movie.

The problem is, you along with most of the United States, has never come anywhere near a real honest to goodness hurricane, and while my blog entries may not have sounded completely serious to you, I, unlike you, do not think hurricanes are a laughing matter. It's not just one big rainstorm with some wind, with the stronger hurricanes its like a tornado sixty miles wide swept through and wiped out almost everything in it's path.

(and, I didn't even go into the way that the idiot says that the current crop of storms is some sort of cosmic message to the brothers Bush)

And, I wouldn't call what I feel before a hurricane "excitement," it's more of an adrenaline surge stress reaction.

I'm a genius, & i am also "hot" to look at.