Tuesday 4 January 2011

Portents and omens

Astronomy was scuppered by meteorology today as clouds obscured last night's Quadrantid meteor shower and this morning's partial solar eclipse. To add insult to injury I didn't feel the 3.6 magnitude earthquake which hit Yorkshire yesterday.

We've had an uncanny number of portents and omens in the last month. In addition to meteors, solar eclipse and earthquake, we had an eclipse of the moon on the winter solstice which has not occurred in nigh on 500 years. On New Years Eve 3000 blackbirds fell dead from the sky in Arkansas, while 125 miles away 100,000 drum fish washed up dead. The end of days?

Today we're intellectually curious about these events, but in less enlightened days we would have been disturbed, fearful even, and looking around for a suitable sacrifice to appease the obviously angry Gods.

I might be hard pressed to pick just one person if someone had to be ritually slayed. We have so many figures we love to hate who would do nicely. Politicians are always firm favourites, and there are endless unlovable celebs. How would one choose?

We'd have to hold one of those "Top One Hundred" TV programs, detailing the lives and sins of the nation's hate figures, where obscure comics and commentators talk to camera about the candidates, interspersed with amusing archive footage.

This would need to be followed by a "I'm a Sinner, Sacrifice Me!" Reality TV series, where each week the public vote out the least obnoxious of the candidates, until only the most loathsome one remains. The "Top Gear" team could be tasked with designing the actual sacrifice, bringing to bear their inventive destructive skills which have been honed on poor innocent caravans for years.

Of course the whole scheme might seriously cheese off the Gods - who knows - maybe it was Reality TV dross that angered them in the first place. Still if mankind is to be wiped out, at least everyone would be able to die smiling, happy in the knowledge that the ultimate reality TV show was actually entertaining.

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