Daily Briefs: Golf-ball-sized hail and other terrifying portents

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By CHRIS PACKHAM

You might look at me now, with my very expensive pleated Dockers pants and my collection of Bass Pro Shops baseball caps, and think I’ve got a pretty good thing going. But it wasn’t too long ago that I was still pulling anthracite out of Appalachian mine shafts and repenting for my sins every Sunday in a one-room church ministered by an old blind man who preached little other than the book of Revelations. I came to Kansas City with a headful of biblical prophecy and a detailed mental geography of hell. These days, as I’m full-squat lifting 800 pounds, flaunting my detailed knowledge of Half-Life 2 in a loud, pompous voice or just casually tossing back a six-pack of Pat Robertson’s Age Defying Shakes, I might look like a fully assimilated urban sophisticate. But all it takes is one motherhuge storm accompanied by golf ball-sized hail for me to revert back to the Bible-based tribal superstitions I was raised with. “Frogs!” I shriek in a high-pitched voice, looking through the window of the car. “Frogs raining from the sky!”

“No, it’s just hail,” my girlfriend always tells me. Then she adds, “Dummy.” She’s a snob and hates it when my accent slips, but then she is a vile sinner who will boil for all eternity in hell’s infinite lake of hog entrails. After the jump, more evidence that the end of the world is nigh. Click here, or on this terrifying, speculative post-rapture photograph: