By now, you’ve probably heard about the “Aflockalypse”.  It started with thousands of blackbirds falling from the sky and 100,000 drum fish washing up in Arkansas around New Year’s Day.  This quickly became a global phenomenon with reports of 2 million dead fish in Chesapeake Bay, 150 tons of red tilapia in Vietnam, 40,000 crabs in Britain, 1,000 turtle doves in Italy, 100 tons of sardines and catfish in Brazil and the list goes on.  There’s even a google map which is keeping track of all the recent mass animal deaths.

Experts say this is nothing unusual.  Turns out this is pretty common. The causes are usually attributed to disease or cold weather, or in the case of Arkansas, fireworks trauma.

To feed the fuel for conspiracy theorists, however, I find it odd that most of the reports and pictures show mass deaths of only one particular species.  If it’s really cold weather, as most of the recent deaths have been attributed to, how come not all the sea life in a particular region are dying?  Most of the reports and pictures show just one type of crab or just one type of fish or one type of bird.  Why is that?  And fireworks go off all across the U.S. every New Year’s and July 4th, so shouldn’t we all know about the falling bird phenomenon by now?  Shouldn’t we be used to seeing all kinds of birds falling en masse around those times across the country?  How come only now it makes the news? 

I prefer to check out what the conspiracy theorists are saying because frankly, their ideas sound a lot more cinematic. Their reasons range from UFO collisions with bird flocks to magnetic field imbalances. And of course, there’s always the good old-fashioned coming-of-the-Apocalypse theories.  In fact, we have two upcoming Apocalypse dates to look forward to in the near future.  You’ve seen/heard of the movie “2012”.  That corresponds with the Mayan predicted end date of Dec 21, 2012.  Even sooner, there is also a May 21, 2011 Judgement Day coming upon us.

Either way, it’s probably not too early to think about how I’m going to get on that billion- dollar-per-seat Chinese megaship.

After doing some research, I’ve discovered that it may end up being the Russians, not the Chinese who build the ark that saves mankind from complete annihilation.  In fact, it’s even named the “Ark”.  Russian architect Alexander Remizov believes the Ark could be the answer to dealing with climate change and natural disaster.  It’s designed to withstand floods, earthquake and tornadoes, can be scaled to house up to 10,000 people, floats, and looks curiously like a slinky.  So far, I have not been able to find any numbers regarding how much it might cost for a ticket on the slinky ship ride out of disaster.

But chances are, with my writer’s salary, I won’t be able to afford the slinky ship.  No, my ship will look more along the lines of this: