A Public Service Announcement

On its current trajectory, the planet will be in serious trouble this time next week.

• Volcanoes will erupt in every area code. If there are no volcanoes handy, they will spontaneously form and then erupt.
  
• The magnetic sphere will reverse itself, causing all of your FM devices to play only AM, and your iPods to emit soft jazz.
• The seas will rise, fall, and tango to the left.
• The jet stream will begin charging for extra baggage.
  
• Swords will be beaten into plowshares, and those plowshares used to beat armies into the ground. You can do a lot of damage with a plowshare if you try hard enough.
• Everything east of the San Andreas Fault will fall into the Atlantic Ocean, with the exception of El Paso, Texas, which will be vaporized by aliens beforehand.
  
• A drooling idiot will be placed in charge of the mightiest empire on earth and lead it into debt, ruin and chaos, betraying its founding ideals and crippling its future.

Wait, that last one happened in 2000. My bad.

The Philadelphia Eagles are in the NFC championship game. Yes, the same team that played to a tie with the Bengals. The same team that looked to be playing out the string six weeks ago. The same team that required a series of coincidences worthy of a JFK conspiracy theory just to make it into the playoffs. Yeah, that team.

Apparently, the jerseys worked.

Building on last week's success against the Vikings, Tabitha and I wore our jerseys for the entire game against the hated (well, not hated, exactly; more like "seriously annoyed by") New York Giants, and the luck did its thing. It was not a game noteworthy for elegance or grace, but then elegance and grace are over-rated as football qualities go. Having more points than your opponent when the clock winds down, though, that's pretty cool. Especially when your opponent is, arguably, the best team in the league.

Not today they weren't, though.

So the jerseys go back on the shelf, waiting for next week's game against the Cardinals. And if, by some fluke of time and space, they should win that, then it is off to the Super Bowl. I'm not predicting that - if any team can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, it's the Eagles - but simply pointing out an outcome that is, statistically, possible.

Rah, team.

First the Phillies, now the Eagles. You might want to think about investing in freeze-dried food and crossbows, for strange times are afoot.