v2, d247: I know I'm always the last to know about things, but...

...apparently a lot of birds just died.  Pretty much at once. Like, thousands of them.  Just falling out of the sky.  (You already knew this, yes?)  And, despite the fact that it happened over Arkansas, Scientists believe it was not the high levels of Arkansasity in the air that killed them, because today a whole bunch more died in Louisiana. 

My first thought is: it's that bird flu thing Kim was talking about once. I don't want everyone I know to die.  Well, not yet, anyway.  And not like in The Stand.  Which was an amazing story but would be a horrific experience.  Which is why it was never made into a ride at an amusement park a la Back to the Future (buttheads!) or Harry Potter (much shorter than any of the actual HP books) or even Mr. Toad (seriously.  It has always bothered me that you are IN HELL at the end of this ride.  Always).  Or one of my sister's creepier nightmares, for that matter. 

Great. Now I'm trying to figure out what a ride based on The Stand would be like.

Anyway, Scientists are not saying that this is bird flu related.  (Of course, that's  how The Stand starts, too, and this blog will be historically significant if it does end up being...oh, never mind)  But the world seems to agree that it is, at the very least, weird.

Here comes the facepalm, though: World-Renowned Reporter and Channel 1 Alum Anderson Cooper was trying to get every angle on this strange phenomenon.  He decided there had to be a Christian End Times Left Behind explanation.  Everyone else was claiming the world would end, so surely most Christians are in on it, too.  So he gets himself an expert: Kirk Cameron.  After all, Kirk was in the Left Behind movie!  He also had that fairly quack-ish banana "proof" for the existence of God and is therefore always a good representative of silly Christian people. 

Anyway, from what I can tell, Kirk actually did a decent job dealing with the ridiculous nature of the question. 

From the Vancouver Sun: "The former "Growing Pains" actor admitted he wasn't "the religious conspiracy go-to guy" and admitted that "it's really kind of silly to try to equate birds falling out of the sky with ... some kind of an end-times theory. ... People get all excited about Nostradamus prophecies, 2012, and, of course, biblical prophecy has really been a topic of fascination for thousands of years. So I think people... love to define codes and signs of future events and see if they can decipher them before anybody else. But birds falling from the sky? That has more to do, I think, with pagan mythology and the way that and the directions that the birds flew told some of the followers of those legends that the gods were either pleased or displaced with them. But I think people just have a fascination with the religiously mysterious."

That's honestly a pretty good answer. But it seems fairly ignorant of AC to have thought "I'll bet the Christians think dead birds means the end of the world!"  Granted, I didn't catch the report in question, but I can't imagine why else you'd think you'd need a "representative" of the born-again community to talk about a bizarre avian massacre.  Isn't there somebody on staff at CNN you can ask a quick "Hey, does the Bible say anything about a bunch of birds dying meaning Jesus is coming back?" who can answer with a quick "Wow, that's dumb" and be done with it?  

I mean, is it just me?  Or is anybody else completely baffled at why A) an expert on Biblical end-times theories had to be brought into the discussion, and B) why CNN decided that Kirk Cameron was the most credible expert they could find on Biblical end-times theories?  

Bah.  Whatever.

Hey, check out former-Aero Clayton Stoner's first NHL goal.  Ended up being the game-winner. 

I'm out.