Good Heavens. The Sky Is Falling.

Do you remember the fable about Chicken Little who thought the sky was falling?

One day Chicken Little was walking in the woods when — KERPLUNK — an acorn fell on her head "Oh my goodness!" said Chicken Little. "The sky is falling! I must go and tell the king."

So, to cap the story, Chicken Little meets friends from the woods along the way and incites great fear about the sky falling. We had Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, and Turkey Lurky. (Birds of a feather .... heh) On their way to inform the King, they all get lured into the den of Foxy Loxy who claimed to know a short-cut to the King. Foxy Loxy was going to eat them all up! In the original version, they get eaten. In another version, the King and his hounds rescue the hapless feathered lot. From then on, the Chicken Little who survived carried an umbrella when walking in the woods. Moral of the story: If you're going to be an informer, you better carry protection. lol

I cannot find the original "author" of "The Sky Is Falling" fable. It's not Aesop. Some sources list the original telling as African folklore.




Signs, signs, everywhere the signs? Some fodder for the day:

By MICHAEL J. CRUMB, Associated Press Writer – Thu Jun 11, 4:40 pm ET
DES MOINES, Iowa – Looking out the 11th floor window of her law office, Jane Wiggins did a double take and grabbed her camera. The dark, undulating clouds hovering outside were unlike anything she'd seen before.

"It looked like Armageddon," said Wiggins,

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090611/ap_on_re_us/us_new_cloud




[meteorite chunk that punctured the roof of a home near Chicago, IL, 2004]

SPACE.com Space.com Staff
space.com – 36 mins ago

A 14-year old German boy was hit in the hand by a pea-sized meteorite that scared the bejeezus out of him and left a scar.

"When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road," Gerrit Blank said in a newspaper account. Astronomers have analyzed the object and conclude it was indeed a natural object from space, The Telegraph reports.

On November 30, 1954, Alabama housewife Ann Hodges was taking a nap on her couch when she was awakened by a 3-pound (1.4-kilogram) meteor that crashed through the roof of her house, bounced off a piece of furniture and struck her in the hip, causing a large bruise.

On October 9, 1992, a large fireball was seen streaking over the eastern United States, finally exploding into many pieces. In Peekskill, New York, one of the pieces struck a Chevrolet automobile owned by Michelle Knapp. Knapp was not in the car at the time.

On June 21, 1994, Jose Martin of Spain was driving with his wife near Madrid when a 3-pound (1.4-kilogram) meteor crashed through his windshield, bent the steering wheel and ended up in the back seat.

In 2004, a 2,000-pound space rock bigger than a refrigerator exploded in the late-night sky over Chicago, producing a large flash and a sound resembling a detonation that woke people up. Fragments rained down on that wild Chicago night, and many were collected by residents in a northern suburb.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20090612/sc_space/boyhitbymeteorite





[Jellyfish Lightning over France]

Strange Lightning Looks Like Jellyfish:

Jeanna Bryner
Senior Writer
LiveScience.com jeanna Bryner
senior Writer
livescience.com – Thu Jun 11, 6:37 pm ET

An eerie red figure flashed across the sky above a thunderstorm near the south coast of France, and then it was gone in the blink of an eye.

Atmospheric scientist Oscar van der Velde, standing on his balcony in Sant Vicenç de Castellet, in Barcelona, Spain, captured the sprite, as it is called, in spectacular detail on the night of June 5. He was more than 150 miles (250 km) away from the storm.

"It was the sixth sprite that night that I could capture, and the second one at this zoom level," said van der Velde, of the Technical University of Catalonia. "This type of sprite is often called a 'carrot.'"

When the kids were very young, they asked what the tooth fairy brought for my teeth. I told them carrots. They were aghast. But it made their 50 cents seem like quite a treasure. lol









Forgot one! [added to the downpour 6/13/09 at 4:44 . time was completely coincidental!]

Wed Jun 10, 3:32 am ET
TOKYO (AFP) – Meteorologists in Japan say the rainy season has just started in Tokyo, but residents in a small coastal town have reported a different phenomenon -- tadpoles dropping out of the sky.

An office clerk in Nanao said he first noticed the anomaly when he heard a dull thud in a parking lot last week, news reports said. Looking around, he saw about 100 dead amphibians splattered on car windshields and the ground.

More reports followed from bewildered residents in Nanao

Similar events -- in what is sometimes called the "Fafrotskies" phenomenon, short for "fall from the sky" -- have been reported around the world, with whirlwinds passing over water bodies and picking up frogs, jellyfish or other unfortunate animals before dumping them back to earth.

Fafrotskies??? lol! If that isn't a perfect word for it, I don't know what is!

[Raining Frogs by David Stoupakis]