What have we done to earn the merciless wrath of Mother Nature? Why has she sent her minions out to send portents of doom, as when the first albino barking deer in recorded history gave birth to the second albino barking deer in recorded history?

And if they're not sending such dire signals, they're attacking us outright. Even beloved Florida governor Charlie Crist is not immune. The good governor is currently nursing a spider bite from the infamous brown recluse. Ever seen a brown recluse victim, ace? It looks like a harmless mosquito bite at first. But after a few days, the area around the bite starts turning purplish, like a bruise, and then black. Finally, the skin starts simply rotting off the bone. Necrosis. Living death. Charlie Crist is part zombie now — or at least he was, before they cut a large chunk out of his leg, to prevent the necrotic growth from spreading.

Currently visiting Israel, Crist said that his nurse was less than enthusiastic. "She said, 'I think you are going to die,' " Crist said. "I said, 'Thanks. That's a great way to start a trip.'"

Ho ho! Good to see the governor can keep a sense of humor, even in the face of turning into a member of the undead. These little brown recluse spiders are a damned horrorshow. Weird that the governor was apparently bitten in Marathon, though. The brown recluse is not native to these lands:

Brown Recluse Range Map
Dark Shaded Area = Brown Recluse Range
Light Shaded Area = Range of other recluse species

In any case, I deeply sympathize with the governor. At one time, I had a fairly mild case of arachnophobia, which stemmed from a time in my young childhood when I was assaulted by a tarantula on the California-Mexico border. After that, I couldn't stand to be around the little eight-legged bastards. I had to have someone else kill them for me when I spotted them indoors. Total fear. And then I moved to Missouri for college. Have another look at that map, ace. In the God-forsaken state of Missouri, where the summers are blistering, the winters are a struggle to survive and fall and spring last five days a piece, the brown recluse spider is about as common as your average garden spider. They are everywhere. I lived in a house in Columbia with a roommate who was something of an amateur horticulturist. Plants all over the house. And that meant bugs. And that meant spiders. Immersion therapy. I learned to overcome my fear of spiders quickly when I had to kill half a dozen of the little hellspawn in my own garage every morning, each one of them capable of turning me into something out of Night of the Living Dead.

But enough of that. I got off on a very lengthy and personal tangent. We were talking about Mother Nature's attacks on the human race. I should point out that some of us are doing our part. In London yesterday, Yoko Ono ate a dog. Take that!

Of course, this all ignores the "whys" of the situation. The most obvious one is that this is all self-defense. NASA reports that we are a mere decade away from permanent, irreversable climate change, a tipping point that will eventually cause catastrophic destruction on a global scale. And what do we do, instead of trying to solve the problem? Why, we go back to the beginning of our abandonment of environmental policy. We actually entertain the notion of a conservative, half-bright actor becoming President of the United States.

My God. Have we truly come full circle? Is the fat really in the fire? Or is there someone out there who takes the upcoming destruction of the Earth seriously enough to implement major, widespread changes in an effort to save us from ourselves? I mean, how many years did I say we have left?

Right, 10. Thanks Al. Hey, Al, by the way...