Jerry Springer the WHAT???

Ok. As far as harbingers of doom go, pestilence, war, famine, and death are the Big Ones, and they arrive via men on color-coordinated horses. But tradition is adamant that there are just the four, which makes them easy to identify and send up flares. So we are left with no warning, really, for what I heard just now on the radio. And I heard it on NPR, so it must be true.

Jerry Springer the Opera.

Thank God it's only snowy, not icy, or I'd have probably lost control of my car. (When I'm listening to the radio, and I do a 'double-take', what exactly am I supposed to look at?) Or maybe, given that it's December, I should stick with Christmas carols.

I didn't feel comfortable trusting that my non-morning person ears really could have heard that (and the music that went with it) (yikes, operatic singing of 'talk to the hand'... Criminy, there are almost no words for this!) so I looked it up online.

It's got its own Wikipedia site. There's a wealth of information about this production, both at Carnegie Hall and in London. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.

Amazon UK has DVDs of the London production for sale, and you can bundle it with a CD of the original cast recording to make your purchase complete. They're selling it on Amazon, so it must be true.

Now, here's the thing. We've been warned about all sorts of other things. The books of Ezekiel and Daniel have more to say about the end of times than the Revelation of John (Revelation being the more familiar one). Nostradamus nails his prophecies about as often as a one-armed bandit shells out a life-changing bonanza in Vegas. Those odds aren't terrible, we just don't figure them out until after the fact because he fancied himself a cryptic poet as well as seer. Where was the heads-up about this? If Jerry Springer getting an opera doesn't rate one of the Apocalyptic Horsemen, shouldn't there at least be precision pigeons in formation? Considering bird flu, that puts him directly under the order of Pestilence. I don't think anyone would argue with that.

I'm labeling this "hockey", because, to paraphrase the late, great Rodney Dangerfield: with all the fighting we can expect onstage, I think we can also expect a spontaneous hockey match...