Morning Babble 10

Early minutes of Friday morning, and I find myself half-watching a movie on the tube called 'Last Night', about a group of people making their way through the last few hours until the end of the world. Not an edge of your seat flick, and not cathartic in any sense other than a reaffirmation of the mystery that is Canadian film. 

It made me think though.  If the world was really ending, would we pay as much attention to the 'news' that floods us from LCDs, plasmas, speakers, and (yes, still) paper?  Could we, in our last contemplative hours of existence, give any time or credence to news stories like ...

Prehistoric Big Snake Ate Crocs - It seems they've found the vertebrae of a 43-foot long, 2500 lb 'Titanoboa' in the Amazon.  They postulate it ate crocodiles and giant turtles while slithering about the hot tropics about 60 million years ago.  Snakes had been around during the dinosaurs, but once that dominant crew were wiped out by the meteor, the serpents crawled out from their bomb shelters and grew into the top predator role.  But that's not the best part.  The discoverers believe the sheer size of the snake indicates that the tropics were much hotter than previously thought possible, upping the limit on possible mayhem global warming could do to that sensitive habitat in our time.  They say that it had to be hotter to allow a snake that size to keep warm.  But, wait - isn't it true that animals tend to get larger in colder climates, and not warmer?  After all, the larger an animal gets the less surface area it has in relation to its mass, reducing heat loss.  True, it's tougher to warm up too, but it's a big leap to conclude the tropics were a broiler without further study.  But then this wouldn't really be acceptable nature news without some scary global warming tie-in, would it?

Aquaman gets off the box - In the wake of a pic showing that Michael Phelps, Olympian extraordinaire, does indeed inhale, Kellogg has dropped Phelp's from his contract to flog cereal.  This is a huge mistake.  It occurs to me that those who actually inhale on a regular basis ought to be the most rabid consumers of the kinds of cereals and snacks Kellogg makes...

Eight is NOT enough - Just a few days after releasing the heart-warming Guinness-friendly news of the birth of octuplets to a southern california woman, the press sheepishly and belatedly told us that a) she's single,  b) she already has 6 kids at home, and c) they were all conceived using fertility drugs.  Aside from the sheer sad horror of a system that supports such a freak show, what the heck happened to fact-checking stories before reporting them?  Seems accurate vetting isn't a problem reserved to just President Obama's appointment team...

Would any of these stories hold the same interest if the world was about to end in, say, 15 minutes?

Would I have watched a Canadian film?