In The Beginning Was The Turd And The Turd Was With God And The Turd Was God

I Have No Idea What Prompted Me To Report This Bit Of News On March 17, 1998, According To Ted Stevens' Interweb

Big Hairy Asteroid Gambols While US Investors Gamble

by Malcolm M. MacDour
Director of Cosmic Droogies
United Breasts International
Tuesday After Lunch

A huge chunk of interstellar detritus may eventually be scheduled to pass within 350,000 miles of Boring, Oregon at 11:15 on the morning of January 23, 2028, and it could result in the cancellation or rescheduling of Super Bowl LXII, according to a report released earlier today by a leading gastronomical authority.

Dr. Spencer Caprial, director of the Western Bureau for Gastronomical Anagrams at the Smithsonian Gastropataphysical Disauditory Perturbitory on Mt. Desolation Row in the Subgum Province of Abnormallyshrunk, Prefectorate of Misshapen and Frink, Plebiscite of Prefontaine, Amalgam of Silver, Third Door on the Right, declined to speculate on how accurate the timing and location of his prediction might be.

"We're talking 30 years down the road," Dr. Caprial stressed, "An event like this could obliterate Buxton and Manning and Banks if it came down a little before 11:15 or it could take out Brightwood and Sandy and Shorties Corner four-hundredths of a second later. It's like the difference between gold and finishing out of the medals altogether," he explained, noting that the consequences to American investors might be greater than winning or losing an event at the winter Olympics, which, coincidentally, are scheduled to be held in February, 2028, on Mt. Hood, a site within the betting confines of potential impact sites.

Odd-makers have set Boring, a small velcro-mining and sheep-shearing town 26 miles southeast of Portland, as the target to beat with a 6 mile bull's-eye radius and a plus or minus 3 megaton equivalent for blast intensity.

"The effects on the local economy could be quite devastating," Caprial stated. "It could also be enormously disastrous for the entire planet, if you want to know the truth," he continued and smiled ruefully. The as-yet-unnamed asteroid on a collision course with earth is believed to be more than a mile long and shaped somewhat like russet burbank potato.

Some scientists now suspect the eruption of Mt. St. Helens on May 17, 1980 was caused by the impact of a meteorite not much larger than a gnocchi that had been traveling through deep space for more than 600 million years, while most fuddy-duddies still believe the catastrophe was the result of terrestrial forces that began less than 38,000 years ago.

Many amateur gastronomers swear that dinosaurs and many species of tasty fungi were rendered extinct some 65 million years ago when a similarly-sized asteroid turned what was then a class II continent into what is now called the Yucatan Peninsula. The impact of an asteroid more than a kilometer in diameter would make long-term investment strategies seem silly.

While other scientists claim it is nearly impossible to figure the odds of impact, and characterize him as an irresponsible alarmist motivated by self-aggrandizement and olestra, Dr. Caprial is willing to put his money where his theories lead him: he is so confident of his hypothesis, he's wagered all of his assets on his conviction that life as we know it on earth won't last much beyond Tuesday, January 25th, shortly after lunch, a cosmic time in the universe, according to gastroencephalopodiatrist Dan O'Neill, who has also bet all he owns on the end of the future of our species.

Still, investment counsellors at T. Rowe Price and Smith Barney stress that other planets may have survived impacts by even larger asteroids even though we have no evidence to support such an absurd statement beyond “a whole lot of wishing,” according to unnamed sources.

In unrelated news, Al Nino, a retired pipe-fitter and self-taught villanelleist from Paducah, Kentucky, has filed a civil suit asking for nearly $2 million in compensatory and punitive damages after being blamed for climate change, “which has rendered my life a nightmare from which I may never awaken.”

NOAA has offered an apology to Mr. Nino, blaming an illegal immigrant dictaphone operator who mistyped El Niño in a press release that has since been reissued.