TEOTWAWKI? Unlikely.

If I seemed to be waxing apocolyptic previously, blame the times. I consider most of the "crash" scenarios to be low-probability. If things do go all wonky, a slow slide is a lot more likely than a sudden fall. This is not to say we might not some day find ourselves in a bad way -- but I expect to have a chance to push back and I expect your shoulder to be against the wheel, too. Modern Civilization offers us too many good and useful things to give it up without a struggle!

Other things, we just get, free for nothing. Leaving the Skunk Works Wednesday evening after a hard day of coping with the sad loss of Something Very Important (see previous entries) and the increasingly-faint hope of that device ever working again, I was greeted with an impossibly pink arch of fluffy clouds against a brilliantly blue sky. Colors so intense that if an artist had painted them, no one would find it realistic! It lasted perhaps ten minutes, tops, and then faded away. By the time I turned down my own alley, neon extravagence had given way to a determinedly inky Autumn evening, punctuated by the same low clouds reflecting the city's lights and the moon trying to peek through them.

If human civilization or just Western culture does manage to go belly-up, one with the-glory-that-was-Rome, the sun and sky will keep on producing such shows, each one different. Might as well look up and savor them!
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