Kiss My Asteroid

I am not what you would call a worrier. People have called me other things:

nerd
jerk
a**hole
four eyes
moron
smart a**
lazy
know-it-all

But never a worrier. I tend to not get too worked up about things. Even when everyone else is in panic mode because a buffalo trampled the neighbor's car, I find myself wondering if I still have any pizza in the freezer for tonight…and if buffalo flesh would make good pepperoni.

AMC! This is not a joke!

However, if I ever decided to become someone who does that…and by 'that' I mean panic, not someone who makes pepperoni out of buffalo butt…I figure there actually is plenty to worry about. The unemployment rate is higher than it was during the Great Depression, Burger King has been serving its unsuspecting customers horse meat, Nickelback is about to start touring again, the New Madrid fault line could cause a massive earthquake in the Midwest at anytime, Daryl has left the group to rejoin his loser brother Merle, America-hating North Korea is developing nuclear weapons, every year there is a new supervirus threatening to wipe us out, Breaking Bad is in its last season and our own satellites fall out of the sky.

AND as if all these things here weren't bad enough, now even outer space is trying to kill us. Have you seen this video?

This video says there were no confirmed injuries, but since then about 1,100 have been reported. Then, just a few hours later, a football stadium sized asteroid buzzes by the earth. It came within 17,150 miles. All the space geeks were trying to control their excitement since this was the closest a rock of that size has ever been recorded.

SERIOUSLY!?!

They got that excited about a rock that flew right by us when just 16 hours earlier, we had one that was over 17,000 miles closer. While the one that flew by couldn't even be seen by the naked eye. The one in in Chelyabinsk, Russia couldn't be missed. It shattered windows, caused structural damage, injured over a thousand people and left a crater.

On top of that, the scientists say these two events are unrelated. UNRELATED!!!

Consider this scenario: If you live within a mile of a large zoo and one day you come home from work to find an Asian elephant giving birth in your swimming pool while a kangaroo is molesting your birdbath, are you going to assume someone's pets got out of their cage and jumped your fence or there must be a circus in town missing an opening act?

No! Your first thought is going to be the zoo…and you would be right.

We have a huge rock hurtle by our planet closer than most of the orbiting satellites we put in space. That never happens. Like never. Less than 24 hours before that event, a rock falls out of the sky and sucker punches Russia. How often does that happen? Almost never. These two events happen within a day of each other and they are unrelated. I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it.

I'm just waiting for aliens to come crawling out of that crater in Russia, give the all clear and then the 'rock' that sailed by will return and actually come down this time, buy up all the Iraqi currency and disappear again until it has risen in value to equal the Kuwaiti dinar and then retire in Florida as multi-gajillionaires. The massive stacks of funds they bring into the area combined with their delicate digestive system will cause Jamba Juice stock to skyrocket. However, due to their implorable table manners and noxious body odor, human retirees will relocate to New Orleans causing it to become the osteoporosis and Viagra capital of the United States. Jazz dies out and the Saints relocate to Omaha, Nebraska.

Having nothing to do in Nebraska but eat corn and concentrate on their games, the team wins the next five consecutive Super Bowls. Other teams take notice of this winning strategy and begin to relocate to cities with less amenities. The Chicago Bears move and become the Boise Spuds. The Philadelphia Eagles cross the country to Walla Walla, Washington and the Patriots renounce their citizenship, move to Canada and become champion Olympic curlers.

Their subsequent gold medal causes curling to become the national past time and ESPN jumps on the bandwagon and only televises similar sports. Twenty-four hours a day of curling, shuffleboard, and bridge tournaments. The alien retirees, no longer intimidated by the slow and quiet lifestyle that has spread through the country begin to spread to other states opening Jamba Juice franchises in every major city.

The overabundance of juice being made creates a fruit shortage and the entire country gets scurvy due to a lack of vitamin C. The scurvy-driven joint stiffness causes our world class curlers to lose the Olympic gold medal to the Russians whose team training has been financed by the wealthy aliens now residing in our borders and destroying our society from within.

Now, too weak for us to do anything about it, the Russians admit that they invited the aliens here and this was part of their master plan all along. They become the world superpower and the United States sinks to the rating of a fifth world country (two spots below third world status) and the aliens move to China leaving empty Jamba Juices all over the country going bankrupt. We later turn them into museums and memorial centers, but they are only visited by hobos looking for a place to stay for the night.

Folks, these flying space rocks will be the downfall of our entire society, unless we pass and enforce stricter immigration laws to keep those aliens out.

I am not a worrier. I have a plan.

The Sky Is Falling!!!

All day Friday the TV screen was plastered with news about the NASA satellite that had fallen out of orbit and was going to re-enter the earth's atmosphere, plunging to earth, sometime in the next 12 hours. This satellite (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) known as UARS fell out of orbit in 2005 and has been wandering aimlessly around the cosmos for the last six years. Scientific speculation proposed that most of the 6.5 ton piece of metal the size of your average bus would disintegrate in the atmosphere before reaching the earth. It would be possible that 26 pieces may be large or dense enough to survive the journey. With newfound respect for the story of Chicken Little, many earthlings are wanting to tell NASA, "UP UARS!!!"

NASA officials estimated that the debris could fall anywhere between the latitudes of northern Canada and southern South America. Since basically no one lives north of Canada (who would want to) and there are only a handful of populated places south of South America, this prediction was of little comfort to 85% of the world's population. When asked why they could not narrow the path down more specifically so that portion of the globe could better prepare, the NASA spokesperson shrugged his shoulders and said, "What more do you expect? We're not rocket scientists!"

Then to add insult to possible, catastrophic injury, NASA puts out a press release reminding the planet's citizens that if you happen to find a piece of the satellite in your backyard or even lodged in your skull, you may not keep it. It is the property of NASA. Despite this warning, I have already decided what I would do with a piece of UARS if I do happen to find one. Depending in the size I find, I will either make it into a keychain, hang it off a necklace, or mount it in the front of my minivan. I overheard one person excited about how much technology could be pulled out of one of the downed chunks. I reminded him not to get too worked up about it for two reasons:

1. Any circuitry would be burned to a crisp upon re-entry
2. Your average run-of-the-mill smartphone has more processing power than even top-of-the-line government computers of 1991 when this space junk was launched.

Today, we are told that the satellite has fallen to earth, but the location of the debris field is unknown. These scientists either do not know as much as they would like us to think or the government has already set up classified forced quarantine areas and is currently in the process of sterilizing the scene and neutralizing any witnesses. Either way, we will probably never know the fate of this hunk of melted metal.

Those masks won't save you from falling space junk

I, for one, am proud to have survived another week of impending doom. Despite the odds, I am still alive and kicking after having lived on the New Madrid fault line most of my life, despite the earthquake that we keep hearing is one day going to kill us all. I live in Tornado Alley, which has the highest concentration of tornadoes on the entire planet. I have survived the SARS epidemic, the AIDS Armageddon, the asian bird flu, the West Nile virus, monkey pox and countless other diseases that were supposed to wipe our species off the earth. I am still here despite Y2K, the end of the world prediction last April, the Snowpocolypse of last February, the aligning of the planets in the 80's and the unexplained fame of Paris Hilton.

For years we cowered in fear, waiting for the terrorists to poison our water supply, blow up school buses, infiltrate our nuclear power plants, or blow up the Super Bowl. Now after successfully fighting for survival all these years, the government warned we could get hit by metal falling out of the sky. Our world has reached the point that no perceived terror is ridiculous. Putting all fear of what freaky sci-fi event will cause our eventual doom aside, there is something we all need to come to terms with. Anything can kill us and, in fact, one day will. Chuck Palahniuk wrote in his book Fight Club, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

Since we are all going to die anyway, how about we start to live?