Astral Pet Peeve
As news came of the meteor crashing in Russia, NASA sent out a press release that the meteor had absolutely nothing to do with Asteroid 2012 DA14, which came within 20 minutes of Earth.
Oh, sure, it was a smidge over 17,000 miles from our planet, but it’s more dramatic when measured in freakin’ minutes.
Anyway, everyone was still wigging out, and the one thing that really made me boil was…. the name.
Asteroid 2012 DA14
The hell?? I understand that we are rather limited in our English language and that NASA and the Astronomical Naming Union have certain guidelines for naming celestial bodies. But really, there are about 6,500 spoken languages, of which roughly 4,000 are spoken widely, and there are other alphabets we can use. Tamil has 69 characters in its alphabet! Heh, I typed ’69′. Anyway, with all the brou ha ha over the Mayan calendar, why not name it something way cool to scare the hell out of everyone? They were tracking it since February of 2012. Seems to me they missed the perfect opportunity to name it….
MAYAN DEATHWISH
See? How awesome would that have been??
I swear, if they let me name astral bodies, I would do it for free.
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SMOD
I think this blogs focus on earthly astral bodies is more than adequate, thank you very much.
“Rupert”
Well, that’s ArmedGeek’s focus, Jack. Not mine
I wasn’t pointing fingers. For the record.
How about Reagan’s Revenge for one on target to hit DC or San Francisco (or Chicago)? Maybe the Big One would just be God’s way of saying, “I got your gun control right here! Guns don’t kill people, big honkin’ asteroids steered by a pissed off Me kill people.”
Pokemon. Gotta catch ‘em all.
Demhoroid. Combined with the horror of Democrat rule, death loses its sting in the bargain.
’14 Rabbit Mountain Breaker’ would be a better ‘Mayan’ name.
“…why not name it something way cool to scare the hell out of everyone?”
How about naming it Obamanomics? That scares the hell out of me.