A Natural Disaster I Know Nothing About

I am an avid reader of the news. In fact, I probably spend more time on CNN.com than I spend doing pretty much everything else in my life with the possible, but not likely, exception of sleeping. And so perhaps it comes with the volume of news I consume a day, but I have noticed a significant percentage of natural disasters lately. And no, not just some of the pantsuits Hillary wears, or the fact that 12 million people chose David C over David A, and not even the fact that ABC picked up Scrubs for its fall schedule (I mean, come on, that show won't die!). But no, for once I am actually referring to the true meaning of my words, literal natural disasters. Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and cyclones seem to be hitting the world one right after another.

I'm only a moderately religious person, but a series of natural disasters, especially the prevalence of earthquakes (for no apparent reason) makes me surmise that it's probably getting pretty close to the end of the world. I don't mean to alarm you, but I think it's pretty much a given that multiple earthquakes in a short amount of time is merely a harbinger of the End Times. (To be fair, I think this every time and it hasn't happened... yet.) And so the question that inevitably comes to mind is why? Why is this the end of the world? (And why are you wasting your time reading a blog when you could be out doing something you've always wanted to do?)

Now, I'm not a religious scholar by any means, but I think I'm on the right track with this one. And really, when has being unqualified to answer a question ever stopped me before. I think there is probably not one real reason why the world is going to end soon, but that it's more a series of events that have led up to God just calling it quits. You know, like when you have a really bad day and then you come home, step up to the door to put your keys in your lock and you drop them, and also it's raining, and that just becomes the one thing that sets you off? So what was it? What is the one thing that caused God to throw up his hands and say, "me damn it!"?

Did his TIVO forget to record Lost? Did he go for the last box of Girl Scout Cookies only to find that Jesus had gotten there first? Kids today!

These seem unlikely choices, but really there's no way of knowing what that one little tip to the iceberg was. Fortunately, I have a number of theories.

The first and most obvious reason the world is about to end is because we have a lady and a black guy competing to be the president of the United States! This is obviously a catalyst for the End Times, which, actually, you might already know if you listen to conservative talk radio. Think I'm wrong? Remember those freak tornadoes we had earlier this year here in Kentucky? When did they happen? Super Tuesday. I'm not wrong. I specifically remember, as I ran for the bathroom under the stairs, turning the tv channel away from the election coverage to the weather coverage. And that is why God spared me.

Another potential reason the end is near is America's Got Talent. Because, let's face it. America doesn't. I mean, is it a coincidence that all our favorite bands are British? For those of you who haven't seen the show, it takes socially awkward people performing things they've described as a "clothes-changing magic act", dummies performing with dummies who think they're ventriloquists, and a bunch of family bands, and puts them up on stage to be judged, somewhat ironically by two British people and David Hasselhoff, who is only considered to have talent in Germany.

Did anyone beside me see that they discovered the purpose of Stonehenge today? Archaeologists have been searching for decades because science has long been concerned Stonehenge would turn out to be that most detestable of things: art for art's sake. But this week, they've discovered. Stonehenge was... wait for it... a cemetery. I'm sure that you, like me, felt an understandable let down. Is there no mystery left? What's next? The Lost City of Atlantis will be discovered just east of Cleveland? But you know what, I'm totally fine with the world ending. Because who wants to live in a place where all the lost things are found and we only have unmysterious stone circles?

One word: wikipedia. Wikipedia is clearly of Satan. It might be hard to see why this ubiquitous source of all the potentially true information in the world as updated by dubious sources could be evil. Well, that is simply because I have a thirst for random, useless trivia about celebrities and historical figures. For example, I just wikied the entire life story of Christopher Knight, best known for his role of Peter Brady on the Brady Bunch. (In case you're wondering, he actually is still married to that girl he met on the Surreal Life.) So, you're reading about something really important like that, and then suddenly there's a link to read the entire life story of Florence Henderson, everyone's favorite tv mom. So then you see that Florence Henderson was in a Pepsi commercial with Ozzy Osbourne and you wonder, "gee, what has Ozzy Osbourne been doing since he had a reality show?" Then you see that he was once invited to the White House Correspondent's Dinner by Greta Van Susteren. And then you realize you don't really know anything about Greta Van Susteren. And then suddenly it's tomorrow. (It's for that same reason that tv shows on dvd earn an honorable mention spot on this list.)

And then, there is, of course, roller derby. Popular sport of the 1970's, you just don't see it anywhere anymore. And God, like me, feels that no roller derby=no reason to go on.