Brother-in-law of doom

Yep, its the first week of September, and like clock-work, my brother-in-law is here for the week, and so are the horrible catastrophes and we’re waiting for a famous person to die.

This happens every time he visits. We, at first, thought that catastrophes and horrible things only happened during vacations. How many times does your hotel have to burn down before you begin to think its a family curse? The second one had us wondering, but after the third, you pretty much realize that it can’t be a fluke.

We narrowed it down to the amount of family members gathered in one small area determines the rough magnitude of destruction and bad mojo. If its us and Brother-in-law, then typically a natural disaster occurs, and a famous person dies. If its us, Brother-in-law AND my in-laws, then very horrible things like terrorist attacks, a natural disaster AND a famous person dies.

Don’t worry, this year its just Brother-in-law, which explains Gustav. I’m glad to see the call for mass evacuations, unlike the year he came to visit and Katrina hit. Yes, that was his doing too. He was no where near us during that whole Tsunami thing... actually my mom was here, but we haven’t quite correlated the effect of my relatives visiting and horrible natural disasters. I may need a grant to study this phenomena.

This seemingly odd happenstance causes my somewhat rational friends to giggle happily and submit guesses for the celebrity death pool. Nobody guessed Princess Diana, that was a huge surprise (and yes, he was here), and Steve Irwin, that was totally out of the blue (yep, day 2 of his visit). We get the usual guesses of old celebrities that should have died years ago, and some people will go for the not so obvious (although for some reason I felt that Marie Osmond was a bit cruel in some way).

So, people of the gulf coast region, I’m very sorry that my brother-in-law is in town. We have no way of directing his odd power of natural catastrophe and celebrity deaths, so its nothing personal or anything.