Beware the Zombie Eclipse, courtesy of the Hyper-sexual Sun

Solar eclipses don’t excite me much. But you can make any natural event more interesting just by putting the words “Zombie,” “Murder,” or “Hyper-sexual” in front of it. Try it at home, kids, it’s fun.

In case you haven’t heard, the celestial bodies are hosting a “total solar eclipse” Monday at a North American location near you.

Apparently, this thing is all the rage. The New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today are all writing about it, people are having watch parties, with and without protective glasses (You’ll know who didn’t spring for the cheap sunglasses when you spot them staggering blindly like zombies from “The Walking Dead” in long lines at the optometrist Tuesday), and many schools are even springing the students out early so they can all go blind together watching the eclipse with their families.

My kid will be one of those early dismissal parolees, which means that only three hours after making the long drive into town to drop him off for some public education, I must turn around and pick him back up. As a lazy, work-from-home writer, this interferes with my daily routine (which involves a second breakfast and a short nap before lunch) and highly perturbs me.

Call me jaded or desensitized, but it’s kind of hard for me to get excited about a three-minute event in the sky. Perhaps it’s the poor branding and marketing – Total Solar Eclipse sounds more like a garage punk rock band than something I want to get my kid out of school early for.

What we need are the creative folks who brought us the “Murder Hornets.” Remember those? They were just really mean and aggressive invasive hornets, harmless enough if you left them alone, but somehow scientists and sensationalistic journalists convinced you they might dabble in a little homicide when they arrived in your neighborhood…

What we really need here are a few zombies. That’s right, you can make everything sound more interesting – and more serious and frightening – just by putting the word “zombie” in front of it.

Cases in point – consider these two recent headlines:

“Canada Braces for Wildfire Season as ‘Zombie Fires’ Blaze,” courtesy of The New York Times.

“Zombie Wildfires,” aptly named after their unsettling propensity to appear extinguished while still smoldering underground and even under the snow, reignite once weather conditions permit.

That’s right, while you are sleeping, there are as many as 100 Zombie Wildfires lurking under the surface, waiting to flare up just north of the U.S. border. Where’s the watch party for that?

Not too long ago, National Geographic and Scientific American warned us about a “Zombie Fungus” that infected ants and other insects, injecting them with amphetamines and taking over their frantic, but dead, bodies and infecting others, but nothing beats this headline from CBS News:

“Hyper-sexual ‘Zombie Cicadas’ that are infected with sexually transmitted fungus expected to emerge this year.”

Here’s a quote:

“Once the cicadas emerge from the ground, they molt into adults, and within a week to 10 days, the fungus causes the backside of their abdomens open up. A chalky, white plug erupts out, taking over their bodies and making their genitals fall off”…but….”There's this hyper-sexualized behavior. So, males for example, they'll continue to try and mate with females — unsuccessfully, because again, their back end is a fungus. But they'll also pretend to be females to get males to come to them. And that doubles the number of cicadas that an infected individual comes in contact with."

If that doesn’t frighten you, nothing will. Hopefully, the Zombie Wildfires will kill them all while they are still underground.

At any rate, I’d be willing to willing to bet if the headlines warned us about a “Hyper-sexual, Zombie Solar Eclipse,” or, heaven forbid, a “Murder Eclipse,” your local school district wouldn’t turn the kids out so quickly, now would they? And I could get my Monday morning nap in.

But who knows what Monday’s eclipse will bring. So just in case, drive safely parents, watch out for those gawkers at the watch parties, hug your kids tight, and make sure they wear their cheap solar sunglasses tomorrow.