The sun is just going down, and I have to say it’s doing a bang-up job of it today. A bank of dark, ominous clouds has moved in, and the sun, which is sinking fast, is fighting them for dominance.

I AM THE SUN AND I WILL NOT PERMIT YOU CLOUDS TO MAKE CONNECTICUT DARK.

So these incredible golden rays are lighting up everything: the new red buds on all the maples are just glowing like they’ve been touched by fire, and there are big slabs of yellow light laid down across the rocks, trees, petrified dog poop, and hay-colored grass in my front yard.

So I have been writing my novel all day long, which means that I have been going on Yahoo every hour or so to read the news just in case something needs my attention. Like maybe global warming has been discovered to be coming even faster than predicted and soon it will actually be warm here. I have also had to check my horoscope for next week, where I discovered that I (and the other Tauruses) would “love to bring a certain process to a swift conclusion, but have no choice other than letting it proceed at its own pace.”

See? That’s the problem. We have no choice. And here’s the real kicker on this horoscope, the thing that almost made me turn off the computer and go to the movies: “Your efforts to speed things up only seem to be delaying matters.”

It is good to have confirmation on that.

But in the meantime, I have discovered that perhaps it’s my imagination, but the news is just filled with some of the weirdest stories ever. I feel as though most of the time I am reading The Onion, when really it’s Yahoo news.

Like Keith Richards apparently snorting his dad. Under what planetary alignment did that seem like a good idea? And what happens when children go around snorting up their parents? Slate has an informative guide for those of us who are contemplating such a thing, called, “Should I Snort My Dad? The Dangers of Inhaling a Cremated Parent”, which I think has to qualify for some kind of  headline-writing award. (In case you’re standing by for the verdict, doctors feel it’s okay every once in a while, but not if you make a habit of it.)

Then there is the fact that a U.S. billionaire has paid $25 million to be shot into space on a Russian space launch, which is already weird enough–but then it turns out that he just might possibly be engaged to marry Martha Stewart who spent the hours before his launch riding a camel, after which she made and packed a lunch for the crew consisting of quail roasted in Madiran wine, duck breast confit with capers, shredded chicken parmentier, apple fondant pieces, rice pudding with candied fruit, and semolina cake with dried apricots. (Did they have Tang with that?) Oh, and he peed on the tires of the bus that transported him to the launch site. Of course he did.

There is more, naturally, only much of it isn’t as fun as snorting up your dead parents or riding into space eating duck confit.

An airline pilot started screaming obscenities into his cell phone while customers were boarding the flight, first in the cockpit and then taking the phone into the bathroom where he could be heard shouting like a madman. When the customers started asking what was wrong, he then started screaming at them–all the way up until law enforcement officials came and walked him off the plane, and the airline put everybody up in a hotel until a new flight with a sane pilot could be found for them.

Perhaps his lineage should be looked into. He is possibly related to the McCoy clan, of the dreaded Hatfield and McCoys–who, it has now been discovered, wanted to fight all the time because many of the McCoys had a genetic disease which caused them to have hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts. They had headaches, high blood pressure, racing hearts and too much adrenaline–all caused by tumors on their adrenal glands. Some of the remaining McCoys don’t want this all blamed on genes–as one of them says, “It’s probably due to inter-marrying.”

Yeah, not related to genes at all.