We are all about to die!

I am not panicking about Hurricane Joaquin, which appears to be on a trajectory to head away from us. Why would I worry about something like that when the entire PLANET is about to be DESTROYED?!

It's true and I know it's true, because Cablevision, my cable company, told me. Jim Dolan would never lie. I know he loves us, too; we get the cable bill first, ahead of all the other bills, every single month, and unlike our other utilities we have to pay prior to consumption of services. That's devotion. They're just scared that we'll leave them!

But we may all be leaving soon. Here's what the e-mail says:

Between October 4 and October 13 you might notice a very brief interruption in TV service due to sun outages. 

Holy crap! The SUN is going OUT?

Screw the TV service -- if there's a sun outage, there will be a permanent interruption in US! 

So if the sun goes out, how long until we all die? We would have a grace period of about eight and a half minutes before the light stops coming to us, and apparently that would include the heat as well. I don't know if we'd get any data that tells us the sun went out in that time. If we did, it might give us just seconds for NASA to instruct us to kiss our butts good-bye. Then WHAM! Frozen ice ball.

Now, it may seem a bit odd for a guy who endorsed the SMOD 2016 campaign to fret over a thing like the sun going out, but if the sun is just going to puff out like a candle, there won't be a lot of time to prepare for the end. With SMOD, at least we'll have some warning. 

Anyway, I went back to the e-mail from Cablevision to see if I could pinpoint when the sun was supposed to go out. 

As the sun’s path across the sky gets lower each day, there are times when it goes directly behind a TV satellite and its radiation overpowers the satellite’s signal. This results in what is called a sun outage. 

Oh. 

Damn.

I guess I have to pay my cable bill after all.