1300 Days

I have a doomsday countdown thingy on my home page. I noticed that there are 1,300 days left until The Big Poof on Dec. 21, 2012. The Big Poof may come a little sooner than that if somebody doesn't slip a little Thorazine into Kim Jong-il's tea. Dude is a little psychotic. Needs to have a heart-to-heart chat with Hirohito about history and the side effects of souped-up atoms.

When I read what North Korea is up to a scene from an old movie sifts up from the gray matter. The name of the movie is long gone and I don't remember any of the actors. The plot is that some kid hacks in to The Big Military Nuclear Missile Computer (TBMNMC) using an old boatanchor of a computer that isn't even capable of running Pong. TMMNMC goes on the offensive to launch a nuclear strike. It plays a zillion games of Tic-Tac-Toe, the runs a zillion nuclear strike scenarios.

The nuclear strike scenarios are what stick in my brain. On the wall is a huge map of the world. Arcs of light run back and forth between the continents, over and over and over. Somehow I can see that happening in real life sometime soon. Bright red arcs going east, bright orange arcs going west. Big blobs of color obliterating all the continents. Humm....

In the end the computer decides from playing all those games of Tic-Tac-Toe that it is pointless to play because there is no winner. Therefore, a nuclear strike is pointless because there would not be a winner either. The computer goes from DEFCON 5 back to DEFCON 1. The world is saved from nuclear destruction.

I think this movie should be translated into Korean post-haste and shown at video night next Friday in Mr. Kim's palace.

Now is not the time for the military to be kicking out any nice gay Korean-speaking linguists who can run a VCR.