18th
In Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, a novel about how the remnants of humanity spend the months between the bombs’ falling across the northern hemisphere and the lethal fallout’s reaching their southern latitudes, many characters are outraged that invasive rabbits’ thick fur will allow them to survive. As the characters take their government-issued suicide pills or are felled by radiation sickness, the rabbits begin to roam unchecked across Australia.
This would have made for a much more promising sequel to Watership Down than that lame collection of short stories.
Google News presented me with the headline “BP: Cap could keep oil from flowing until well killed.” But of course I read it as “Cap could keep oil from flowing until we all killed.” So I imagined rioting, looting, a white-hot flash, a mushroom cloud, crumbling skyscrapers, asteroids, the sun…
