I just learned that we will be having a fantastic geomagnetic storm today. Some kind of solar flare situation that won�t hurt us humans but will probably knock out communications satellites and the like. The neato thing is that there should be some beauty in the sky of aurora proportions tonight. Meredith Viera is expected to try to have sex with it. This leads me to a slew of ridiculousness (as usual). Apparently there was another one of these wacky solar storms in July 2000. I have a feeling it was the same night my sister Mary and I stood outside of St. Gabriel�s Church (in beautiful Saddle River, NJ) waiting for my niece to come out of some churchy thing and saw aurora-lookin� action in the sky, yo. Everyone else there was in awe, thinking it�s all gorgeous and shit, while Mary and I tried to hold it together because we didn�t know what it was and we suddenly had flashbacks to our mom�s religious fanaticism stage, where she was reading all of this crazy shit on �The Three Days of Darkness,� where supposedly people would be �taken bodily up to heaven� and �those will be the martyrs� and there would be �a big red cross in the sky in God�s blood� and if we saw it we should definitely �come right home.� Now, of course we didn�t believe any of that craziness but she was all over that stuff when I was about sixteen, so you can imagine that it had some everlasting gobstopper effects on me. So my sister and I are looking up into this red sky and she�s trying to gather her daughter to her bosom and all that because we�re like, �Uh, was mom right about that jive?� Could it be that all of her scrambling around to procure �three white blessed candles for the apocalypse� wasn�t in vain? We ran home that night from the big white church and typed frantically into Google and any and all places that would have us, but To No Avail! So we just hoped (even though, you know, we knew it was crazy) that demons wouldn�t come to our door that night �in the shape of our loved ones.� And now, as luck would have it, it turns out that that sky shit is solar flares! Hurray for science! Combating religious fanaticism with every swoop of its golden rapier!

I think this foto by peth is hauntingly awesome and fits rather well right here:

�Marjoe was a preacher by the age of 4. From the documentary that bears his name.�

When I was very young I would fall asleep listening to the waves at our beach house hoping against hope that there wouldn�t be a tidal wave that night to sweep spindly Long Beach Island into the sea. It wasn�t until my sophomore year at BU, in my Beaches and Shoreline Processes class (with the incomparable Professor Duncan Fitzgerald), I learned of a little thing called a �wide continental shelf.� That�s what we have here on the east coast. The plates meet far into the ocean, so there�s virtually no chance of a tidal wave. The west coast has a narrow continental shelf. So does Japan. I had already figured that we weren�t going to have a tidal wave in Jerz by the time I took that class, but it was really nice to know why. Again, HURRAY FOR SCIENCE! (Oh yeah, and I also learned about drumlins in this class. And you know how I LOVE drumlins).

I have to lay off the Ho-Hos because I�m starting to get a wide continental shelf.