Wednesday, February 19, 2003 6:06 PM Joe Coluccio

Help, the sky is falling! I know because a chunk of the Andromeda Nebula is sticking out of my roof!

They’ve gone too far. The news people, the weather people, those little fashionably dressed would be icons that sit in front of desks designed by copy cat surrealists out of Scandinavia. After they soften you up with traffic congestion. Serious faces suggesting that you need to “exercise caution” (I looked in vain for the caution machine at the health club. One device informed me that I shouldn’t stick a pinky into any of the many whirling gears or wires or pulleys) this morning as you “find” your way to work.

Comes the scandalous weather line. Grave face, impeccable tie, hair swept into a glazed tsunami like front wave, the weather giver (PC are they ever) speaks. The temperature is 75ºF this morning, but with the wind chill it is -454º Rankin, close to absolute zero when all molecular motion stops. You might want to give yourself an extra hour to reassemble your pulverized car windows.

Then of course the several thousand murders that have been committed in almost every village in the US and Australia and some mountainous parts of North Eastern Asia.

A moment or two for the good news. Grove Department Store is having a sale on indoor cement ponds this weekend. New Honey Oat Buncha Gran Sugar Flops are more nutritious than two slivers of tofu and the new Alera Bravada will get you six miles to the gallon highway better than any of the new military issue tanks.

After the onerous North Eastern snow fall this week, which was sufficiently scary on its own, thank you (winter precipitation here in Pittsburgh is now measured by milk, bread and toilet paper sales at the local supermarket), came the word of the possibility of floods. Cute little news babes, red nosed with long knit scarf hats, sit on the bank of the Monongahela River and warn of the impending disaster that floods will bring. If, of course, they happen. Hence, the flood watch is born.

One station had the absolute genius to supply us with a list of things we would need in a flood. Sand Bags. Wouldn’t be caught wet without them. Plywood and nails. So we can build a raft to join Huck and Jim on our way down the river? 3 gallons of bottled water. No brand names mentioned, but a nice flavored designer mineral water is probably best as you munch on one of the many bloated dead fish that leisurely float past you while you lounge on the roof of your house.

I and most of the residents of Western Pa, live so high above the river level that if there were a flood on our collective properties, the world would be in serious need of Noah and his boys.

My mind shudders. What next? There are so many things missed by these news mavens and only a viewing of 50’s horror movies and their rabid imagination can predict and prepare us for the next conflagration.

A plague of goats. Large roving bands of monstrous free range chickens pecking at the tops of trees and television towers. A skyful of whoopee cushions floating fearfully to earth making that dread noise as they splatter in a noisome puddle on the moist ground. Rampaging bowls of Mother’s Oats, sticking to people’s pallets like pasty peanut butter as we try mightily to swallow. Cascading mounds of pre chewed gum sticking together the very gears of civilization. A raging virus that actually makes our computers work correctly.

I think I’ll tune in early tomorrow. Seldom have I been so genuinely entertained.