Things Falling from the Sky

Oh, it came out of the sky
Landed just a little south of Moline;
Jody fell out of his tractor
Couldn't believe what he seen.
Laid on the ground and shook
Fearin' for his life,
And he ran all the way to town
Screamin', "It came out of the sky!" ~John Fogerty

In The Truman Show there's an early scene in which a studio light seemingly falls out of the sky and almost hits our hero. The inexplicable event threatens to shatter the idyllic bubble in which Truman has lived, but quickly gets explained on the radio, though the explanation is somewhat non-sensical. Studio lights aren't supposed to just fall out of the sky.

Remember the Coke bottle that gets dropped into Africa's backcountry at the beginning of The Gods Must Be Crazy? If you've never seen that film, find it on Netflix or Blockbuster. The bottle thrown from a plane sets in motion a whole string of unintended consequences.

Two news items that happened to share placement on the same page of yesterday Duluth News Tribune captured my imagination. The first was titled, "Wisconsin farmers tire of meteor hunters." Evidently a meteor successfully entered our atmosphere and broke apart over Wisconsin. The flameout was quite visible in the Midwest sky. Meteorite hunters soon descended on the region where disintegrating fragments supposedly reached the earth, and the farmers graciously allowed them to hunt for these frags.

The second story involved a laptop falling from the sky, with near catastrophic consequences. Here's but one version of the story, Laptop falls from helicopter, nearly hits boy. Evidently, the laptop had been left on the helicopter's skid. It was one of those LifeLink helicopters that service many of our hospitals today. We don't, as a rule, expect them to drop laptops on our heads.

Does anyone recall the trigger event that resulted in Chicken Little shouting, "The sky is falling!"?

On the (Duluth) home front, if you haven't already filled your evening with other commitments, you might be interested in Wine & Chee's, tonight's fund raiser for the Minnesota Ballet in the Depot's Great Hall.

The spread will include dozens of wines and select beers, with light hors d’oeuvres from six of Duluth’s finest restaurants. There will be both silent and live auctions for a variety of merchandise, including prints by Cheng-Khee Chee, who will be on hand for signing. Tickets are $25 in advance, $30 at the door.