Dan's Papers - September 26, 2008

Have you ever noticed that Europe never gets hit with any hurricanes? Here on the East Coast we spend the whole summer and fall worrying about whether one of these monsters is going to come across the Atlantic to Long Island. We see devastation in Florida, South Carolina, Galveston and New Orleans from these hurricanes. Europe just goes about its business.

Come to think of it, Europe never seems to get hit with anything. Have you noticed this? I'm no expert but I'm pretty up on the news. Here along the East Coast we have hurricanes. In the Midwest they have tornados and floods. On the West Coast they have earthquakes and forest fires.

And when there are disasters in the rest of the world, they're STILL not in Europe. Volcanoes explode in Sumatra. Tsunamis crash into Thailand. There are earthquakes in China and the Middle East. Bangladesh gets walloped with just about everything, and there are typhoons in Australia and the Philippines.

Meanwhile, Europe just stands there, cunningly wedged between Africa and Asia, and gets nothing. Why can't we get the hurricanes, which form up over Africa and barrel across the Atlantic to the west, to form in the Caribbean, charge across the Atlantic the other way and wallop Lisbon, Dublin or the northwest coast of Scotland? Never happens.

Oh, I know my theory about Europe is not quite perfect. There are a few volcanoes in Italy and Greece that sometimes get worrisome. But if you think about it, Greece and Italy hang down off the underbelly of Europe like udders hang down under a cow, so they are the exception. That's not really Europe. And of course the Rhine does overflow from time to time. Big deal.

By the way, I can PROVE this theory. What happens when there's a tornado or an earthquake or a hurricane? Things get knocked down and flattened. Now, where is it in the world that things that are very old are still standing? That's right.

Nothing matches the antiquities of Europe. Oh, we used to have antiquities here and there - the Gardens of Babylon, the Lighthouse of Alexandria and so forth and so on, but you know, there was the whatever it was that came through and knocked them down. So we just have these few columns lying in the dirt and these line drawings. But that's it.

I was watching Steven Spielberg's movie, Deep Impact, on TV last night. There's a scene in it that was filmed out in Amagansett as this giant meteor heads toward earth. It might hit anywhere, right? But this scientist and his daughter stand on the sand and look at the meteor as it is coming into the earth's atmosphere, and swallow hard.

Is it headed for Paris? London? Berlin? Oh no. It doesn't take but a minute or two to get through the atmosphere. Wham. It hits 50 miles off Napeague, and the resulting tidal wave kills everybody in the Hamptons, and half of everybody up and down the East Coast from Cape Cod to North Carolina. It knocks down skyscrapers in Manhattan and turns over the Statue of Liberty. But by the time the big wave gets to Bordeaux, France, it's just a little one-foot-high ripple.

"Sacre bleu," says a Frenchman, stepping back, so as not to get his footsies wet.