Week 26 - Fireball

When we were kids in the Awana program, my sister and I would recite Biblical verses and be rewarded with candy. Simple Baptist programming to rapidly trick you into memorizing all 66 books and then a quick dump of sugar-high children on their parents until next week. But my sister always had a keen tongue for those atomic fireballs, and I only wanted pure chocolate. Given that chocolate is more expensive (as it should be), it was rare at Awana, and I chose fireballs often to give to my sister, or even my older brother. They became a subverted currency in the house - good news for someone who could get a lot of them but never really liked the afterburn taste.

With the fire raining down this week from the meteor in Russia, it made me think of the book of Revelation and all its dismal predictions. I got there from a happy hour discussion on the issue where one staff member mentioned that she had read about companies who mine these passers-by before they disappear out of range. This is, however, still false at the moment as we have not actually accomplished this. Even more worrisome is the discussion of intentionally bringing asteroids into orbit around the earth or moon - asking for trouble. That reminded me of "Armageddon", the 1998 movie where a lot of guys fly up to space to dissect an earth-bound meteor (spoiler alert) and most of them die. My wife's favorite scene is where the guy and his girlfriend are singing and dancing in the hangar before takeoff; luckily he shares Will Smith's later fate and returns home from saving the world safely to his girlfriend.

I spent a lot of time searching for decent video from the meteor in Russia, and I haven't really found anything superb (since nobody knew it was going to explode like that, there aren't a lot of well-planned videos), but this one I included really does a good job of showing the flaming glory, the civilian surprise and the "boom's" power. I wish everyone over there a quick recovery, and hopefully a rapid return to normality. This is amazing.

In other news, BBC reported this past week that fidgeting could be a very annoying habit of men to women, but a method of successful performance for men. I know that I was always a very fidgety person during exams in college, lots of head scratching, pencil braking, nail biting, hat displacing, etc. ... but I also never considered my performance on these examinations as more than average. Who knows, maybe that habit my wife is trying to break me of is the very reason that I am pretty successful at what I do?