Gettiing Back In Whack

Good Night

I Just came back from a quick trip to our favorite diner with my Lady Wonder Wench. It's in a college town nearby. I couldn't figure out what was going on. Out of 13 couples we saw, only one couple was holding hands. That seemed very much out of whack. My mind often jumps from one thing to another, so I started wondering what is this whack some of us are so often out of. And I got one answer when I sat down here in my big, manly, comfortable black leather poppa chair in my living room and started thumbing through Astronomy magazine. Some astronomers call the formation of our moon, "The Big Whack." They figure something very big smacked the earth a long time ago, and the stuff that flew off the earth eventually became the moon. Evidently that kind of thing happens a lot more than we know. One day about 66 million years ago a 6 mile wide asteroid slammed into the earth off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The explosion was as powerful as millions of nuclear bombs. It kicked up billions of tons of vaporized rock, filling the sky with dark clouds that blotted out the sun for decades. Temperatures around the world dropped by around 50 degrees. That killed off the dinosaurs because there was nothing for them to eat. Their disappearance led to the rise of mammals...which is a fancy word for creatures that eventually became...us. Timing is everything. The smart guys in the white lab coats tell us that if that big rock had fallen just 30 seconds earlier or later it would have landed in the deep part of the ocean, and it wouldn't have created that cloud...which means most dinosaurs would have survived, and we probably wouldn't be having this conversation right now. Because mammals probably wouldn't have happened.