We listen to a late night talk show host, George Noory on his Coast-To-Coast AM show quite frequently as we prepare merchandise for sale online. He has a huge following of cross-country truckers, insomniacs, starry-eyed cultists, Wiccans, Fundamentalists, New-Agers and a whole host more, who all call in as part of a decades long experience started by his predecessor Art Bell.

Art is no longer with us, (he does maintain a corporeal form offshore and makes contributions some weekend nights via  shows from Manila, Philippines as he puts it. We learned here from a born & bred native that it was Manila, in "The Philippines" but maybe we are just old-fashioned, maybe even a little colonialist, because the Philippines were a U. S.  territory at one time. Last we heard, Art was advising his callers to write the State Department, because he was having trouble with immigration authorities allowing his family back into the country.

Art is "retired" but still makes his presence known with his combination of sarcasm and blitheful, (blissful) indifference to the often contradictory claims of his usual call-in guests. George Noory carries on this tradition of listening in without censoring the beliefs of his often reality-challenged guests.

Topics include: alien bases on the moon, military bases on Mars & the moon, underwater alien bases, underground alien bases, secret Nazi flying saucers, ghostly apparitions,

Sometimes the stories we hear on Coast-to-Coast AM get pretty wild, and of course, right now the big story is 2012. This sort of time-based apprehension comes along every decade or so, it is never quite the same thing twice in a row. We recall the big panic about 1999-2000 when we were advised by our then-employers to unplug all electronics from the wall sockets before going home for the year-end holiday season.

They never explained why, perhaps a giant surge of voltage leap through the surge protectors and would cook everything. We came back after the New Years, and life had continued on its orderly course. Another big scare was the "Jupiter Effect" in '82, before the Internet was more than an experimental academic gewgaw.

Some guys got rich writing paperbacks about how Jupiter and Saturn and some other planets would line up in orbit in a dreaded planetary alignment would somehow cause a gravitational anomaly that would cause massive earthquakes and tidal waves from the (imagined) wrenching planetary forces. And even though astronomers explained that this alignment of the planets would not be anything more than a few ounces of pressure, people were convinced that they were not being told the truth by those in authority.

There was also a lady from Wisconsin, who may still be in business, who way back in 2003 predicted that a rogue planet would cause the earth to flip its poles, though we never were clear whether it was the magnetic poles or the poles that the earth spun on.

She had left her home on the West Coast somewhere because she was fearful of giant tsunami flooding the coastal areas. Supposedly people could seem some colored cloudy mass in the months leading up to the disaster, and of course the explanation was that government agencies were covering up the truth, so as not to cause panic amongst the unwashed masses.

And back in 1987 there was the Harmonic Convergence, the benefits of which we are still trying to ascertain. So now we are advised, on a nearly nightly basis, by the pundits of late night radio, that 2012 is the next big date. Well it is true that solar flares will peak that year, and occasionally during especially active periods of solar activity, large chunks of solar plasma are ejected.

So our rather dubious advice, based on healthy skepticism, is to have a few hard copy (i.e. non-electronic) books ready in case the power goes out, or the flare shorts out your electronics.

It is an undeniable fact that books have withstood the tests of the centuries, while the electronic media are still very much under laboratory test conditions when it comes to longevity.

We heard recently about the newly renamed (?) Carrington Event from 1859 also known as the Carrington Super Flare when telegraph lines were saturated with so much energy from a solar mass ejection that the operators were getting shocks from their consoles, which might have some negative effects on more delicate contemporary electronics if such an event were to occur in modern times.

Some people in the know are thinking that this might happen again in the near future, though why 2012 is being mentioned is anyone's guess. Maybe it is all those scary shows on the History Channel.

So stock up early on our dependable cellulose-based reading materials printed with ink, because we will probably be having problems with our on-line orders if the dire predictions were to come true, unless we get that giant concrete satellite dish to relay our orders via some hardened satellite uplink. We have not worked out the details yet about the ionizing radiation and plasma flows as of yet, but we will be setting up our observatory to keep watch on potential solar flares. We might start a network of trained carrier pigeons or semaphores in case things get out of hand.

Maybe, if book-selling revenues go up at My-Lynx Associates, we could buy a limestone cavern here in Central Texas and build a below-ground facility far beneath the earth to shield ourselves from any solar activity. One of our local broadcasters, who has a syndicated national show is touting our local hardware store, as a sponsor, which has stores of a special set of freeze-dried foods that will last a decade or more, and he claims that it is "insurance you can eat". That is never a bad idea for disaster preparedness, especially since we had a close brush with a hurricane a couple of years back that flattened Galveston. It veered to the North at the last minute, so we just got some cloudy skies and damp, windy weather.

The advantage we could see about relocating to a cave is that we might be able to stay cool during the hot Texas summers.