Idiot Dad Wastes Our Time

I have been watching the drama of the boy who wasn’t in the helium balloon and I’m very disappointed by the outcome. Not only did they called out the Colorado National Guard, but the 24 hour news channels have devoted a lot of helicopter time to following what is an essentially empty weather balloon. It was launched from the backyard of a goofy family. The family was on ABC’s ‘Wife Swap’ and the dad is a weather chasing nerd who launches rockets and apparently leaves the balloon launching to his six year old. So, as usual, this is a spectacular non-story. It seems that it might be prudent to get a few of the pertinent facts before you devote your entire network’s resources to something.

CNN has been going ape over this, talking to every “balloon expert” that they could get to call in. None of them knew anything. Rick Sanchez, who is the new Geraldo Rivera keeps telling me to pray and that the kid not being in the balloon is the best outcome. I say the best outcome is the kid being in the balloon and then being found intact while the dad is carted off to jail. Now they are searching for the boy near his home in Fort Collins. He probably unhooked daddy’s balloon for a little attention, and now he’s hiding from the consequences. I bet that they find him under his bed. One thing for sure: I’m never going to be able to look at Jiffy Pop the same way again.

The dad is a former TV weatherman who chases storms and runs “experiment” about weather on his own from his home. We have The National Weather Service and NASA for that. Why not take your kid to the mall or maybe to a movie when he has a day off of school? Who launches their own weather balloons? The dad has a theory about magnetic fields and gravity. Hey, who doesn’t? Apparently the kids are taken out of school a lot to chase storms too. These people are lunatics, and I want them to compensate the taxpayers. Turns out the balloon didn’t have enough helium in it to even lift a six year old. Somebody should have done the math before they became enamored with the images.

Here's the idiot dad proving that there's life on Mars: