Well, it’s finally happened. After two years and twenty-nine weeks the inevitable has buried me like so many rusty Underwoods tumbling from a dumpster. After 133 (less two reprints for last summer’s “vacation”) unique blogs totaling some 200,000 words. We have at last come to the one, um, shall we say, “issue” that I have so far managed to avoid.
No, it’s not that.
But neither is it death, taxes (one of the benefits of being a writer), nor even a final surrender to the wily predators seeking to make the microfarm a thing of the past.
No, faithful readers, finally, for the first time in all those things up in the first paragraph…
I have nothing to write about.
While some of you are dancing with delight over this development, the more foresighted among you have realized that the words continue to flow past the bottom of your screen like so much rain in…in… I don’t know, someplace – not here – where it rains a lot. You’ve already figured out that the blog is not over but we’ll just wait a few for the dancing fools to come to the same conclusion.
There. Better?
Anyway, I have nothing to write about this week because nothing is figuring so prominently in the world around us.
To get the inevitable out of the way first, there was of course the news that Earth narrowly dodged a bullet as the cleverly-named asteroid 2012DA14 flew by just 17,000 miles overhead. While, by cosmic standards, this was a baby asteroid at either thirty, forty, or fifty meters in diameter (depending on your news source), it would have packed a punch equivalent to the Tunguska event of nineteen ought something-or-other which leveled some 830 square miles of subsequently uninhabited terrain.
Had 2012DA14 wobbled just a bit prior to its final approach, or smacked into one of the many satellites whose orbits it crossed on its way by, then it would have been a different story. And one that we would have seen the preview of just a day earlier.
And seen over and over and over.
I am, of course, talking about the meteor that came zooming into Russia and exploded near Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains. That event, unlike Tunguska, was captured by the seemingly infinite number of Russian drivers who record every moment of their day with dashboard cameras.
Now this meteor was a mere space embryo at ten thousand tons and fifty feet in size – half the size of 2012DA14. But, as you can see here – Spoiler alert: only click if you don’t want to sleep for, say, the rest of your life – meteor strikes are nothing new. On that map you can see all 35,513 strikes that have been recorded in the past 4,300 years.
But that tiny Russian space rock, slipping into Earth’s atmosphere and exploding about twelve miles up, was still enough to damage – or destroy – some 4,000 buildings and injure about 1,000 people. And it didn’t even hit anything.
It was like the vast majority of the other 35,512 impact statements filed by the cosmos in the past few thousand years. It wasn’t there. And then BOOM! It was. Like it had popped out of nothing.
Now, some of you might think, as did I, what might have happened had the aforementioned meteorite blown up in a more populous – more important – spot like, say, Washington D.C. You can image the devastation as 4,000 buildings at the nation’s heart were damaged or destroyed. 4,000 buildings, packed to the rafters with the lawmakers and their staffs who are desperately fighting to save the Union and the world economy as, once again, our government rushes up to the giddy brink of the fiscal cliff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what you were whining about last week.
You have a point. But, atypically enough, so do I. That point being a fact of which I was unaware when I wrote last week’s blog. The damage in D.C., unlike in Chelyabinsk, would be exactly nothing.
That’s because nobody’s home. Or rather, everybody’s home. You see, despite the arguably important issues afoot in the capital, our elected officials, Democrat hand-wringers, Republican re-messagers, and Tea Party lunatics alike, have all fled the place.
Yes, a mere six weeks after the 113th Congress and the unnumbered Senate had convened, they’re gone. I guess after introducing such block-buster legislation such as the Do Your Job Act, the Expedited LNG for American Allies Act of 2013, and the Fairness in Firearm Testing Act – to pick a few from D, E, and F – the representatives and senators were so exhilarated that they had to rush home to find out what the people who elected them wanted to do next.
I know. I know. They’re really all off dealing with their major campaign contributors; playing golf, nibbling on soggy canapés at fundraisers, and basically trying to figure out how John McCain ended up owning a $4.7 million condo, a compound nestled among the New Age wack-jobs in Sedona, Arizona, and six other properties all of which require an annual expenditure (in 2007) of nearly three-hundred grand just for the help, and having never worked for anybody except the government.
So they’re all gone. They left Washington last Friday, the 15th, and are due to return this Monday, the 25th. And, as you remember from last week, we next plunge over the cliff this time on Friday, March 1st.
Again.
So, hell, they’ve got three full days to sort it out, right? Shouldn’t be an issue, right? I mean, how difficult can it be?
As you can probably guess, none of those things will really matter because, as you can also guess, on March 1st exactly nothing will have happened. Sure, there will be all the chicken-little, wolf-crying, arm-waving nonsense from the newsamusement industry. But congress will do nothing. Not this time, not next time, and not the time after that.
And how do you know, smart-ass?
Because nothing is what they have been doing since they started “fixing” the problem.
In 1985.
I know none of you follow the links I put in, but they are real links with – despite my reputation – real information behind them. And, last week, had you followed this one, you would have seen that the act that had been modified to keep us from plunging over the cliff back in January was the “Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.”
For the past twenty-eight years, all the Bozos in DC have been doing to keep the government going is relying on the legislation that empowered them to keep the government going when they couldn’t agree on anything. They just keep changing the dates.
This time will be different, we’re always led to believe. This time the _______________ (President, Republicans, Democrats, Tea-baggers, Public, Everybody) will _______________ (compromise, stand their ground, do what’s right, do nothing) and everything will ___________________ (be the same).
I gave you a hint on that last one.
So on March 1st, I fully expect that nothing will have happened and nothing will have changed.
Except.
There was one other bit of nothing news this past week that caught my attention, and that concerned the famous Higgs boson. The Higgs particle, as you know, is a quantum tidbit that, until recently, had been unproven but widely speculated to exist and comprise the vast majority of mass (some 83%) and nearly a quarter of the energy contained in the universe. To produce one it takes roughly the energy environment present at the time of the Big Bang – AKA: a lot – and, once created, exists for mere nanoseconds before it does some Mysterio-wormhole-phase-shift and drops back into nothing.
Unable to leave well enough alone, physicists in Europe spent billions on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in their quest to create a Higgs boson. In the LHC, protons are accelerated around a seventeen mile circle to a speed close to light’s – AKA: pretty darn fast. Meanwhile, anti-protons are accelerated to a similar speed but going the opposite way – hence the “anti” – and when all these little bits of mass are all pumped up – from a relativistic perspective as you know from the Lorentz transformation calculations you had to do in high school – they are diverted into a collider where they smash into each other head first, exploding the very fabric of the universe.
Well, they did this, and, sure enough, out popped a Higgs boson. Because they’re scientists and all, they’re calling it a “Higgs-like particle” just to cover their butts, but it fits all of their theories including the one that says “if the mass of the Higgs boson is so-and-so then the Universe is inherently unstable” (emphasis mine). Since the mass turned out to be exactly so-and-so, this means that a Higgs boson could – someday – go all quantum wobbly on your ass, yo, and in a flash the universe would be sucked back into the bubble of nothingness that “it prefers to be in.”
According to calculations.
Of course, the physicists tell us that this won’t happen for billions of years, but there’s no guarantee that it won’t happen tomorrow. Thus armed with this new insight on the fate of the universe, what did the scientists at the LHC do?
They shut that bitch down.
For “maintenance.”
For “two years.”
Yeah, right.
That’s about all there is when there’s nothing to write about. Giant space rocks appearing from nowhere. The Universe spontaneously collapsing into nothing. The U.S. Congress doing something other than nothing. All fates too horrible to contemplate. But at least one of those we can be absolutely certain we’ll never see happen.
And you already know which one it is.