Maybe I watched TWISTER too many times growing up, or maybe my up bringing in the midwest instilled too much fear in me, but that was terrifying. "And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night!"
I love this movie :) It had a totally opposite influence on me. As a kid I wanted to go out there and experience expressiveness of nature in all its glory :)
I think you're talking about Ron White and I think the quote is "it's not that the wind blows, it's what the wind blows". The context of the joke was about some old guy who was tying himself to a tree during a hurricane to 'prove' his strength...
I flew over this area (going TX to WA) the day after this and saw a similar storm. It was absolutely mesmerizing. Discharges occurred every few seconds the entire time we flew around it--an even mixture of intra-cloud and cloud-to-ground. I've never seen anything like it.
On a related note, several days earlier, I flew from IL to LA ahead of a storm system in the Midwest and was in some roller coaster turbulence, so bad that the crew said it was rare for them. Not fun.
I've been trying forever to get my dad to go out and timelapse one with me. He wrote GBTimeLapse and GBDeFlicker (http://www.granitebaysoftware.com/) and I've always wanted to do this.
If you get the right lighting (early evening is best), such storms have even MORE vivid colors than that. As a child of the midwest, I love watching supercells and the amazing colors and textures they can generate. Not crazy enough to chase them, though. I once watched a tornado tearing through a treeline in the country, realized that it could have a buddy hiding in the rain behind me, and sobered right up.
If you enjoy this sort of thing you may like this: http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/