Disasterous!

Just as I was finally getting over my survivor's guilt from Tuesday's devastating earthquake, I start hearing all this noise about Hurricane Irene coming up from the south for a historic weekend visit. Two rare East Coast natural disasters in one week? Would somebody please take their cat off the keyboard with the disaster menu open (when will I stop making esoteric SimCity 2000 references? Maybe when a giant alien comes down and attacks me). I have a sinking feeling that this upcoming hurricane won't be as mild as Tuesday's earthquake (then again a light rain on Sunday morning would have been a stronger display than Tuesday's earthquake).

Even at this point, the prospect of the storm has shuttled one of my plans, my friend's yearly summer bbq party near the Jersey Shore, from what was looking like an unusually busy weekend. I still have three more social obligations (facebook invites, so you know it's serious business) that have specifically alerted everyone that they will still go on despite conditions, so I'll have to see how things pan out.

But really, you didn't come here to read about my weekend plans. When the concept of an earthquake and a hurricane (or typhoon, for those of you in the Northwest Pacific Ocean west of the dateline) working in tandem to cause great destruction, you, like I, immediately thought about the great former WWE Tag Team champion team of the late John "Earthquake" Tenta and Fred "Typhoon" Ottman; better known as "The Natural Disasters". As a kid, I thought this team was just about as powerful and unstoppable as their respective natural disasters. You pair the two biggest and heaviest wrestlers of the pre-Yokozuna era and really who could possibly stop them? Certainly not a pair of jobbers like Kato and Barry Horowitz. Every time they had a match, young me was legitimately concerned about the lives of the members of any tag team foolish or suicidal enough to agree to fight them; I think we all knew where we were that dark day when Earthquake nearly killed the Hulkster with his repeated "Earthquake Splashes" (seriously what young Hulkamaniac would not be shaken to their core after watching a non responsive Hogan being taken out by paramedics). While they did cut an impressive path of strained ring ropes and squashed wrestler on the way to winning the tag championship belts; in the end their existence as a team surprisingly turned out to be as brief as they were destructive, lasting only 2 years.

So I guess the lesson here is always have flashlights with fresh batteries for emergencies in your home.