In the MAD Magazine parody of Airport ('Airplot,' I believe), Helen Reddy as the guitar playing nun is depicted as singing 'Oh, we're all gonna die and go to hell some day, the devil's gonna come and take us all away.' This was the image that came zinging through my cerebral cortext when I heard that an asteroid the size of a football stadium came within 175,000 miles of the earth on June 14th. Zowie.

My take on the (probably inevitable) terrorist strike on NYC: it's random; there's nothing you can do to protect yourself from something random; thinking about it will just make you nuts. Sort of the same thing with asteroids. The dreadful thing about a 'dirty bomb' would not be loss of life, which would be minimal beyond the immediate vicinity of the explosion. Rather it would be the fact that The Big Apple would be irradiated and would have to be abandoned. Yeah, this is way selfish, but I've got a condo in Florida, and there's not much in the way of material possessions that I couldn't bare to part with. Somehow I don't think that Fort Lauderdale would be very high on the list of targets.