Friday, October 21, 2005
Seven Days Without a Blog Post Makes One Week
Yeah. Whatever. Today I was watching the 6PM news on a local channel. They talked about Hurricane Wilma, which reminds me of the opening of The Flintstones where Fred's been locked out by the cat and is pounding on the door shouting, "Willlllmaaa!" Anyway Wilma was for a few glorious hours the strongest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic basin, but now it's down to a Catagory Four. They were talking about it making landfall in Florida in a few days when it would "only be a three, maybe even only a two." Good heavens, total disaster eases back to only partial disaster and they sound genuinely disappointed.
We do like our disasters. How else to explain the perennial popularity of the "end of the world" stories that people manage to find in places like the New Testament, some ancient scrolls, the Mayan calendar, or those tabloids you can buy at the supermarket. The world has yet to end, in spite of many, many predictions of imminent demise over the millennia, where many a doomsday prophet has been shamed (not that they ever seem to notice) by the continued existence of, well, of everything. I guess it's some inate love for total disaster that makes people find such scenarios attractive. That, or we're all effing nuts, eh?
Well, anyone wanting Armageddon can take heart. As my dad used to say: the world ends for everybody eventually. And if you're one of those guys on the corner shouting about it, then I say, "Good luck with that."
We do like our disasters. How else to explain the perennial popularity of the "end of the world" stories that people manage to find in places like the New Testament, some ancient scrolls, the Mayan calendar, or those tabloids you can buy at the supermarket. The world has yet to end, in spite of many, many predictions of imminent demise over the millennia, where many a doomsday prophet has been shamed (not that they ever seem to notice) by the continued existence of, well, of everything. I guess it's some inate love for total disaster that makes people find such scenarios attractive. That, or we're all effing nuts, eh?
Well, anyone wanting Armageddon can take heart. As my dad used to say: the world ends for everybody eventually. And if you're one of those guys on the corner shouting about it, then I say, "Good luck with that."
