With hurricanes building to catastrophic levels off the coast of Africa and the annual 9/11 memorial terror attacks looming, it’s officially pseudoevent season. Analysts expect this year’s rapid-fire Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas, and New Year’s holidays to be “bigger than ever and full of surprises.” The terror alert level has been ritually escalated by government officials who also gave a stern warning to citizens, “Do not leave your homes unless it is necessary. Stay tuned to news reports, and stay safe. First Lady Michelle Obama will be holding a press conference this evening and may twerk for cameras after a moment of silence for those brave men and women who died a year ago in Benghazi.”
Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador, media theorist, expects more crossover pseudoevents similar to Richard Reid’s Christmas shoe-bombing. Dr. Troubador told reporters, “I’m expecting bigger pseudoevents than ever this year. We’ll probably see something unimaginable like a Thanksgiving Hurricane or a cyberbullied young girl turned Al-Qaeda suicide bomber. Personally, I’d like to see a child celebrity meltdown turn into a school shooting or Gangnam Style dance trend.”
Meteorologists, hoping to draw more attention to their reporting, are using a new naming system for hurricanes and tropical storms which appropriates names from pop culture. Spokesperson for the Storm Naming Association, Harold Harrison, says, “A recognizable name will make sure the average person has a harder time forgetting about the existence of impending chaos. Tropical Storm Miley is already making big waves both in the Atlantic and on Social Media sites like Twitter!”
Because the public craves increasingly astounding stories, Dr. Troubador tells us the pseudoevent season is becoming longer. “One day all events will be recorded on some sort of media or another and fed directly into a permanent database, shattering the very fabric of reality and ultimately destroying all possibility of freedom. The best we can hope for is an acceptable simulation of what life once was.”
