American Idol nearly kills us all

Dear Bro,

On April 25th as you and your wife were concentrating on the two bundles of joy that entered your life earlier in the month, an event occurred that could have resulted in the end of humankind as we know it.

It was a normal spring day. The newspapers were all aghast over the pet food poisoning scandal, kids were coming out of their homes to play after a long winter, Regis was still recovering from his heart surgery, and the highest rated TV show in the US, "American Idol" was airing a fundraising show for a charity of their choice.

As part of this show, a well known Canadian singer named Celine Dion performed a "duet" of the song "If I Can Dream" with Elvis Presley. The show's host, Ryan Seacrest, announced it as follows: "Celine Dion is travelling back to the year she was born, 1968, to sing with the man who is and always will be the worlds Greatest Idol".

Now personally I was not aware that the producers of American Idol had managed to obtain the technology to permit time travel, but between you and me I could think of better uses of a time-space portal then sending an over-hyped Canadian vocalist to crank out a number with a adorn long dead American icon. Things like stopping Lee Harvey Oswald (or the guy behind the grassy knoll for the Oliver Stone crowd) or making some arrests at airport checkpoints on September 11th come to mind. Even forgoing the obvious there are greater consequences that these publicity hounds didn't think of...

For if you spend any amount of time listening to Ms. Dion's body of work, it will become quite apparent to the average listener that she is the closest thing to the "anti-Elvis" that exists on this planet. Mojo Nixon claimed that Michael J. Fox was the "anti-Elvis" in his song "Elvis is Everywhere", but that was only because Ms. Dion was not yet well known enough at that point to attract Mr. Nixon's attention.

Now, a quick browsal of Wikipedia provided the following information:

"In particle physics, antimatter extends the concept of the antiparticle to matter, whereby antimatter is composed of antiparticles in the same way that normal matter is composed of particles. For example an antielectron (positron) and an antiproton could form an antihydrogen atom in the same way that an electron and a proton form a normal matter hydrogen atom. Furthermore, mixing of matter and antimatter would lead to the annihilation of both in the same way that mixing of antiparticles and particles does, thus giving rise to high-energy photons (gamma rays) or other particle–antiparticle pairs. The particles resulting from matter-antimatter annihilation are endowed with energy equal to the difference between the rest mass of the products of the annihilation and the rest mass of the original matter-antimatter pair, which is often quite large."


So, to put this in perspective, if Celine had made skin to skin contact with Elvis during this performance there is a theoretical possibility that a better part of the northern hemisphere of the planet would have been rendered into Dante's Inferno from the ensuing conversion of the "Elvis" - "Anti-Elvis" into pure energy. Not that the producers of American Idol would have cared. They could then claim to be the number one show of all time after emerging from the fortified bunker they must have been hiding in during the show, a claim that would have been true for a long time as we would in all likehood return to the stone age....