Dirigibles and Meteorites

The Editor has returned - and although he didn't say a word about the Staff's last effort, he was somewhat frustrated by the lack of output from the office over the weekend. We tried to explain that there were, in fact, other projects to tend to for the last few days. He didn't really care and if our memories serve us correctly, he mentioned to us in a loud voice from across the room that "you lazy bastards better get something written or you're all fired!" None of us had the juevos to tell him that we do this for free...

At any rate, in our frantic search for slightly obscure news this beautiful mountain morning, the Staff did find this article from about three hours ago from the Russian news agency Itar-Tass. The AP also ran a story on it. I'll save you the suspense: somebody reported a meteorite crashing into a Latvian's field...smoke and a crater and scientists and what have you. Big news.

Except the Big News turned out to be a scam. Someone dug the damned hole with an excavator, lit some pyrotechnic material on fire at the bottom of it and screamed "Something landed in my field from outer space!" (We're not sure what the exact pronunciation would be in Latvian but we are sure that there's an App for that.)

Now, saying that your six year old child is hurtling over the plains of Northern Colorado in a homemade Zeppelin when he really isn't is 1) purely sick,  2) grounds for being institutionalized and 3) a reason to hit a man named Richard Heene in the gonads with a three iron.

But trying to pull off a freakin' meteorite crashing into the face of the Earth requires an entirely different brand of self-confidence altogether. As crazy as the idea is/was, we were fairly impressed with the undertaking of it. I mean, hell, if one wants to dupe the media, one might as well go for the gold medal.

"To hell with Balloon Boy! I have a crater made by a space rock in my potato patch!" (Again, we are unsure of the Latvian version.)

Like we stated the other day: there's just not as much hooplah this Fall, is there?

** BREAKING NEWS **

This just landed on my desk, from our West Coast Correspondent: a band of clouds stretching from Portland to Phoenix has been reported to be raining drops of pure gold the size of bunny rabbit poop! Get your spare buckets out of the shed, boys, this is it! More on this story later.