ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997 TAG: 9704070109
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Geoff Seamans
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS
THE COMET Hale-Bopp apparently was the catalyst for a cultic suicide whose strangeness surpasses the strangeness standards even of Southern California.
Against that debit, however, I'll have to credit the comet with three points in its favor:
It didn't crash into the Earth.
You can remember its name.
You can see the durn thing.
This isn't true of every comet that comes hurtling down the ellipse.
Oh, sure, comets don't collide with the Earth every day. The Heaven's Gate belief that the cometic end is nigh has turned out, so far anyway, to be no more accurate than other apocalyptic frenzies that have periodically gripped portions of the American populace.
But "nigh" is relative. If your time frame is not 250 years but 250 million, then comets may indeed spell trouble for Earthlings.
Scientific evidence is beginning to accumulate that our planet collides every few hundred million years with extraterrestrial objects, comets perhaps, big enough to cause serious damage - as in catastrophic climate changes that any species more complex than your average cockroach has trouble surviving.
Hale-Bopp, however, occasioned no global catastrophe, and for that we can be grateful.
Moreover, Hale-Bopp's name is easily recalled. This, too, is not always the case.
On the one hand, the names of some comets have a ring that's unfamiliar to English speakers. Remember the comet Kahoutek? (Or was it the comet Khomeini? Keokuk maybe?)
On the other hand, Hale-Bopp isn't so overly familiar that it breeds contemptible error.
Eleven years ago, my wife reminded me last week, the comet Halley put in its once-every-75-year visitation. If you were like me, you put in a great deal of mental effort reminding yourself that the name was "Halley," not "Haley" or "Hailey."
Plus, with Hale-Bopp you can just think "Hale Boggs," only sub "pp" for "ggs" at the end. Easy, at least for those who remember the longtime congressman from New Orleans.
(For those who don't remember him, Boggs was House majority leader when he was killed in a 1972 plane crash in Alaska; husband of Lindy Boggs, who held the congressional seat for another 18 years; and father of Cokie Roberts, the broadcast journalist.)
Finally, Mr. Hale and Mr. Bopp discovered a comet you can actually see.
Kahoutek was a flop. To catch the Halley show back in '86, my wife drove up to the Devils Backbone overlook of the Blue Ridge Parkway. I saw ... well, a dim speck of light that, if it was a comet, you couldn't tell by looking at it.
Hale-Bopp is different. Even in the middle of the city, with its ambient light, you can see the comet, tail and all. In the country, of course, you can see it even more clearly.
Still, not once have I spotted that rendezvous starship trailing in Hale-Bopp's wake.
LENGTH: Medium: 63 linesby CNB