End of World Especially Inconvenient This Year

 

What kind of scheduling is this? The end of the world is suppose to happen this year on May 21, 2011? Huh? How inconvenient! Not only is this two days before I'm supposed to celebrate my birthday (gift-givers, please adjust your calendars) but it's two days before Lady Gaga is scheduled to release her new album as well as two days before Lykke Li is supposed to appear at the Smart Bar in Chicago. I'm sorry but if they really want to end the world, they're just going to have to schedule it on a more realistic date.

No Points of Distribution

On the way home, I made a last sweep through our local Borders. I went through the bookshelves and magazine racks and wondered what exactly will be the extent of our access to print media when none of this is around any more. Is the publishing industry (no matter how vibrant or moribund) about to run out of outlets? 

Goodbye Cruel World

I think I’m going to jump off a cliff -- the lords of platitude have won: http://tinyurl.com/3yndb62

Total Bummer: Our Galaxy to Go Bust

As if we didn't have enough trouble:

"Scientists think galactic mergers are one of the primary ways galaxies form. Like heated wax in a lava lamp, two small galaxies can come together to form one larger one, or a blob of gas and stars might pinch off during a particularly messy galactic smash-up and, over cosmic time, the result evolves into a diminutive dwarf galaxy."

"Our own Milky Way galaxy is expected to collide and merge with its neighbor Andromeda in a few billion years to form a large elliptical galaxy some scientists jokingly call "Milkomeda" or "Andromeda Way." When that occurs, a black hole merger similar to that of NGC 6420 could occur." [Source: Merging Black Holes Observed in New Detail]

Keep It Fields!

 As anyone familiar with Chicago knows, changing the name of "Marshall Fields" to "Macy's" by Federated Department Stores is a sore subject around here.

Now the Chicago Tribune reports:

Wall Street is concerned that the loss this fall of some longstanding retail names such as Field's in the changeover of some 400 stores to Macy's by parent company Federated Department Stores Inc. has hurt sales at some locations.

Apparently they didn't get as much business as they anticipated over the Christmas holiday. And why would they? It was the name that brought people in -- and Federated went and changed that. So now they've fired the store manager but it's hard to see how that'll help. They've really driven the entire chain into the ground.