A Tornado Warning is Up for So Cal - NOW you can panic!

(((Pretend you hear the Emergency Broadcast System sound effect)))

In the words of Mike The Cool Person, this is actually very serious! The National Weather Service has issued a Tornado Warning for a good chunk of The OC and South LA County. A Warning is different than a Watch, because a Watch means a tornado could possibly happen. A Warning means a spinning cloud of destruction "has been seen or picked up by radar." Someone get Helen Hunt on the phone!


The best part is the Warning says the best place to be in a tornado is in the basement. Uh, ok, last time I checked Sparky, no one in So Cal has a freaking basement! They tend to fill with debris during those shaky things we get here.

All joking aside and as a service to my massive readership, at least one of you is in the area affected. Plan accordingly.

(((UPDATED)))

Um, yeah, ok, so no joking, apparently they are urging people to get off the beaches (what the hell is wrong with you people who are there!?!) and Newport Beach is getting 72 mile per hour wind gusts. In the words of Philip Seymour Hoffman, "it's the wonder of nature, baby!"
(guitar solo at 1:52 by Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple, "Child in Time" because I know that is exactly what you were needing to know right about now.)

(((UPDATED again)))

A car was flipped, windows smashed, and a chunk of roof taken off by "probably" a tornado says the National Weather Service!?! Oh good, well, at least it wasn't a Cloverfield attack. Sheesh.

Kangaroo Tries to Drown Man - Rolf Harris Unvailable for Comment

Forget about a zombie apocalypse or robots taking over. What you really need to fear is the killer kangaroo! While I've never been to Australia, I'm rethinking ever wanting to go there. Besides the ginormous great white sharks, bird eating spiders and roving gangs of leather-clad dudes driving cars with no body panels, now there are murderous kangaroos afoot!

This is Chris Rickard. He got pwned by a kangaroo while trying to save his dog from a dam. Not only did Rickard get the holy tar kicked out of him by the startled roo, the presumably cute marsupial tried to drown him by holding him underwater!

Apparently the old Australian stockman of whom this song speaks meant it when he said to tie his kangaroo down, sport!

We are one step closer to being ruled by robo-cats!

Dear Smart Guys, you built a computer (and a freaking monster one at that!) for the sole purpose of simulating the brain of a cat? Yes, yes, I know its all in the name of science, but a cat? You realize that cats are vastly smarter than you give them credit for right? They are only a prehensile tail or opposable thumbs away from claiming their rule over humanity. Heck, it was you smarties who figured out that cats control humans already! As someone who is routinely awoke at inappropriate hours so that She Who Must Be Obeyed When She Wants Noms can eat, I think you have gone about this the wrong way. Why not build a computer dog brain? That way when the AI gains sentience it only wants to play and lick your face! So, I am going to be the first to turn my back on the humanz and sign up to have whisker and tail implants for the impending Catbotpocalypse.

(In case you can't read binary, the lol-puter above is saying "I can has cheezburger?")

GIANT BIRDS STALKING NEWS READERS!

Australia has giant spiders and giant sharks, but nothing comes close to the giant seagulls!

Nooooo, my Precioussss... Gollum Found Dead on Beach!

Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee unavailable for comment

OMG! What is that, thing!?! I tell you what it looks like, is everyone's favorite corrupt Hobbit, Smeagol, better known as Gollum! Whatever it is, it allegedly came out of a cave on a beach in Panama and freaked the hell out of a group of teenagers who saw it. The "news" report says the kids threw rocks at the thing and tossed the body in the ocean. It wasn't until adults came back and found the bizarre corpse washed up on the shore that we get these pictures. Now, to be fair, let's consider the source, and the fact that for some reason, every time some creature that everyone freaks out about washes up on a beach somewhere, the corpse somehow vanishes. The original article doesn't say what happened to this one, but in my opinion, if you have a ring of power lying about anywhere, keep it secret, keep it safe.

PAX Swine Flu Outbreak Update: 100 confirmed cases of Hamthrax

Um, well, ok, this is, how would you say? Zomgwtfbbq! Everybody panic! Run to the hills! Get a surgical mask! So the people at PAX have come out and said there are 100 confirmed cases of swine flu amongst its attendees. As someone who has contracted what was heretofore only colloquially known as "Nerd Flu" (now lovingly being glossed with the epithet "H1Nerd1" virus) I can honestly say that being in close quarters with thousands of people at a convention, makes it exceedingly easy to catch something airborne.

That said, it will be interesting to see where this goes and how many people will end up getting sick or distributing the piggy sniffles to others. Granted Swine Flu could be much worse than it has been so far, it is still nothing to sneeze at (hey-oh!). I will say that I believe the fashion trend for the rapidly approaching Tokyo Game Show is going trend into the area of geek-tastic and fashionable surgical masks, something which could even spill over into next year's E3. So, unless the minority of convention goer's who insist on going when they are ill don't change their mouth-breathing tendencies, your booth babes may start looking like this.


Hey wait, not too shabby actually!

Hamthrax @ Pax! - Gabe & Tycho unavailable for comment

Everybody who went to PAX panic! Ok, maybe that's too alarmist. How about, my friend went to PAX and all I got was lousy swine flu? Seriously though, it has been confirmed by doctors that there was someone at PAX who had swine flu. There are lots of jokes made about video game conventions giving attendees what is colloquially termed as "Nerd Flu" but this isn't funny. Swine flu is nothing to laugh about, so if you were there or have been in contact with someone who has, and you don't feel well, you might want to call your doc and let them know.

"Icicle Deaths Eliminated By New Ice Melting Technology Gutter Guard"

Please note the first two words of the above headline from a new press release out today: Icicle deaths. Now I am not trying to make light of what is obviously a very real danger where there is snow, but having never lived in such climes, I had never really given much thought about it, till now. And frankly, hearing about it and seeing pictures like this made me think: icicles should be wiped out! Well fortunately, the good people at Gutter Glove can do just that, with their new ice-melting gutter guards! Whew, that was close. No need to panic. At least till it snows. And now I am going to go out and be a Svengali for a new death metal band I'm forming called Icicle Death. I think they could very easily open for Slayer and Megadeth. Just sayin'. (Thanks to John of You Are Hated for the inspiration!)

Twitter is Down! Again! Go to Defcon 1!

NOOOOOOOO!!! Screamed the Twitter-pated Twitterverse. It was as if millions of voices tweeted out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. Even the Fail Whale has failed! Great Caeser's Ghost! What does this mean?? Um, well, let's see. No updating on what lunch trucks we are eating from. No shooting off 140-characters-or-less missives about cats sleeping on our keyboards. Whatever shall we do??

UPDATED!

It's back up. Whew. That was a close one.

When worlds collide!

EVERYBODY IN THE PAVO CONSTELLATION SYSTEM PANIC!

In the words of Leeloo, "Boom! Big badda boom!" Smart people with telescopes have found that one planet got too close to another in the recent stellar past. Well, no, lets be accurate. One planet smacked the holy living heck out of another in a planetary collision that not even Michael Bay could possibly commit to film. Those same scientists say this is similar to how our Moon formed, when something the size of Mars smacked little baby Earth upside its newly formed noggin. My favorite quote from the article above is the description of the collision: "a huge fiery blast, over in the blink of an eye and full of fury," which reads like a Twitter-review of a rock concert.

TWITTER IS DOWN! EVERYBODY PANIC!

RED ALERT! PUT THE KETTLE ON!

ZOMG! It's the end of the world as we know it and I can't tweet! Twitter has been down since 6am Pacific time this morning. Good grief! What are we to do! How will we tweet about lunch plans? Or Michael Jackson? Or even, #irememberthefirsttimeidrankbeeratanamusementparkwithablindfold hashtags? It sounds like it is a denial of service attack. Nice. Why don't the people who do this grow up, move out of their parents' basements and kiss a girl. Just sayin'.

UPDATED

Looks like Twitter is back up or at least is running better. Stand down, no need to panic.

Russian Subs off the Coast - Sean Connery Unavailable for Comment

Ok, not sure how panicky I feel about this one, but it appears that we've got Crazy Ivans off the East Coast. At least two Russian subs were tracked to withing 200 miles of the coast. Not the really bad ones with things that go boom in large fireballs mind you, but still, they have things that could sink ships. This is both kind of scary and kind of cool, in a Jack Ryan sort of way. I would like to think they are just cooling their heels out there, listening to our rock & roll before sailing to Havana. One thing is for sure, the Cold War gave us much better movie villains.

Rogue Black Holes - Not Just a Good Name for a New Spinal Tap Album

Scientists say hundreds (HUNDREDS!) of massive rogue black holes are hanging out at the edge of our Milky Way galaxy. Well isn't that just spiffy.

But these same really smart people also say: "The Earth appears safe, however, with the closest rogue black hole thousands of light-years away."

Oh yes, I feel so much better now. So long as I get a cool floating robot to go with me when I'm spaghettified.

The North Carolina Sewer Creature

Here is your second stand down, no need to panic story in two days. The previously unknown lifeform found in a small sewer pipe in North Carolina has turned out to be colonies of tubifex worms. Still, watching this video is reason enough to instill a modicum of panic amongst people.

Here's your Sunday morning science lesson: These things not only can survive in oxygen depleted, rank and disgusting places (like sewer pipes) but they are delicacies for aquarium fish, as seen above, looking for all the world like annelid bullion cubes.

The Alaskan Blob

Well it seems the inspiration for starting the Everybody Panic! blog has been solved before I even post my first post. It looks like that 15 mile long "biological slick" off Alaska that no scientist has ever seen before (which, doesn't that just make you feel so much better?), is some sort of ocean going algae bloom. Algae? Really? That's all? It's not Gozer the Gozarian assuming a new form of The Destructor or some massive Cthulhu spawn? Ok, unless this turns out to be something more sinister, everbody stand down, there's no need to panic.