Monday, July 18, 2005

Life imitating art or art imitating life?

A short time before I came to Canada, I was watching television. The program was demonstrating how a satellite could hit and blow up a meteor in space. It looked like news, (it seems that no matter what country and language, the news shows always have a 'look' to them). I thought to myself, "That's pretty cool". I was intrigued, but because I can not read or understand Japanese (other than a few useful sentences such as "I hit my head on the toilet door") I could not be sure. The detail of what I gleaned from the foreign TV screen was sketchy at best. I was at a loss as to what was going on. Was there a comet hurtling toward earth? Was this some kind of stop gap measure to keep the earth from being destroyed? Were we being attacked by an other worldly race of tiny green men (or more plausibly a race of dark, supersized yet muscular, armour bearing and batleth wielding beings with bumps on their foreheads)? Or maybe it was a rogue faction of the former Soviet Union with a spectacular 'star wars' type secret weapon of mass destruction, attacking the rest of the world looking to prove that Karl Marx wasn't all bad. I did not know what was happening and to be honest with you my imagination can be pretty active at times.
After I returned to Canada, I was talking with a good friend of mine and he was telling me about this thing NASA was doing, sending an interceptor to a meteor and blowing it up. It is the stuff of Hollywood. As we chatted, I connected the dots with what I had seen at that time and was able to put it all together. It seems there was a plausible explanation after all.

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