Okay, so after an inspirational chat with Chrissy regarding her now semi-regular "what I'm excited about today" blog, I've come up with a similar subject for one of my own, except that it's not stuff I'm excited about.

This is about crap that pisses me off.

In order for me to be motivated enough to write something, I've gotta have a little passion. And the best way to do that is to get really irritated, upon which point I can try to change the world for the better, which is more than I can say for the rest of you, who are too busy choosing which Starbucks drink to waste your money on today, but that's for another, future blog.

So here's what I hate at 10:43 this evening:

It's this story Chrissy asked me to do a graphic for about how one day, a long time from now, after we've evolved into superintelligent shades of the color blue (with apologies to Douglas Adams), the sun will implode and we will all be condensed into a piece of mildly glowing charcoal left to fume and grumble in our corner wasteland of the universe.

We get news of at least one of these stories a day, as though the dudes at NASA have some quota of ultimate life-as-we-know-it tales of destruction to churn out in order to maintain their government funding.

And every one starts the same way: They were looking through their telescopes and saw some star in the midst of its death throes.

They proceed from there and compare it to the sun, babbling on about how we're in THIS stage of solar development where everything's yellowish-orange and nice and right around room temperature but how eventually we'll be in THAT stage of solar development where everything's hellfire and brimstone and most decidedly NOT room temperature, not even close. Oh yeah, and won't THAT be a bummer when it happens?

Except — and they always love to save the little joke for the second or third paragraph — don't worry y'all, because it's 4 billion years off, give or take a few hundred millennia.

Ha-ha! Fooled ya. Continue going about your business. Go get your latte and just push that fear of galaxial annihilation from your mind, at least for this afternoon.

!?!?!?!?!?!

Why do we need to know this? We've been through this scenario so many times I could choke on it.

The first time you told us, it piqued our interest a bit. Then the notion of 4 billion years sunk in. (I'll admit it took a while, because most of us are not so good at math, but eventually, a little 4-watt bulb blinked on in the depths of our craniums.)

You see, modern science estimates the Earth's age at 4.54 billion years.

What that means is, after all this time, after all this coalescing of vitamins and minerals and really hot lava, after all this crawling out of the primordial muck, after all this dinosaurs getting bonked with a meteor and going extinct, after all this discovering of fire and the wheel and the Big Mac and all the wonders brought to us by Apple, after all of this ... WE ARE ONLY A COUPLE YEARS PAST HALF WAY TO THE END OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT!

We are barely middle age!

We are like the Tom Cruise of galaxies, and if you think how many more hours of our lives we have to endure his shenanigans, that'll give you a teeny-tiny idea of how many we have left on this rock.

Half way!

So enough with the studies and the distant examinations of stars and all the complex mathematical equations now being contemplated by members of the notoriously inept Caltech basketball team.

If it's not going to happen in the next couple centuries or so, don't even bring it up. I don't even want to know about it.

Write your articles and publish them in your dusty journals, but please, for the love of God as we imagine him, don't send out any more breathless press releases to bored reporters searching for ways to productively spend the last three hours of their Thursday afternoon.

Because while you guys may think stuff like this is preordinately nifty, the rest of us couldn't give a hoot.

Now, who's up for happy hour at the Regal Beagle?