popular thinking

THE SKY IS FALLING? CHICKEN LITTLE/LITTLE CHICKENS

This weekend you can choose your poison: Go to the movies to see Chicken Little warn that the sky is falling, or stay home and hear the media squawk about a deadly flu spread by little chickens.
Harmonic convergence or Catch-22?
Hollywood conventional wisdom says it’s just art imitating life.
The fall TV schedule includes plenty of fictitious threats to humanity, from the Category 7 miniseries that airs tonight and Nov. 13 to the series Invasion and Threshold.
But what of past “real” signs of the apocalypse? Where are they now? For optimal conditions, read this while listening to REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).”

The Unabomber - He could strike anywhere, anytime, until 1996, when he published a manifesto in The New York Times and Washington Post, and his brother exposed him as a deadly math nerd from the hills of Montana. Now his nom de bomb has been resurrected by a poker player who dates Jennifer Tilly. Wait. That is kinda scary.

Mother Nature (December 2004 to November 2005) - Tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes, all in the past 12 months, have people thinking they’re living Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”: “Thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightning, wee!” What in the h-e-double-hockey-sticks is going on? Eggsactly. Yet meteorologists say it’s all a coinky-dink. Makes you long for El Nino, doesn’t it? (Blogging update: And now a fatal tornado crosses Indiana and Kentucky this morning? C'mon now. We hear you loud and clear, Mother Nature.)

Gay Marriage - Still scaring the beJesus out of old-fashioned folk who believe divorce is a sacred institution reserved for a man, a woman and their teams of lawyers.

Y2K - Technology was supposed to cause a massive malfunction when electronic clocks hit Jan. 1, 2000? Didn’t happen. The Herald's computers still think it's 1977. Who, us worry?

“Spectacular” terror attacks - Remember when an orange alert meant you had to duct-tape your windows? Do you even know what color we’re on today? Our guess: Jaundiced.

SARS - What was that again?

Anthrax - Its new CD title says it all: “No Hit Wonders.”

Related: Story as it appears in the Boston Herald.