Blinded by blogging?

CW FISHER Japanese scientists have discovered an alarming connection between the act of staring into a computer all day and the incidence of myopia and other visual field abnormalities that often predict glaucoma or blindness. Researchers at Toho University School of Medicine in Tokyo expect an enormous rise in serious glaucoma among heavy computer users over the next ten years. This future Blind Blogger says they're bluffing! for three reasons: Blindness is "too pat." The irony of a society obsessed with appearances finding itself blinded is too perfect to ever actually happen, but there is a certain romance to the idea of a third of us going blind. It would drastically change what it means to hide out for both the blind and sighted, which would give rise to scenarios in business and romance, robbery and rape, drama and comedy. But fit for no stage or screen because--we're blind! Rewrite. Blindness is intolerable. They'll come up with a surgery for it and the problem will be solved. Last year a different medical research team found a connection between glaucoma and the wearing ofneckties tied too tightly. Long ago they said blindness was caused by masturbation. Now it's blogging, which is a form of masturbation. Nobody reads your blog? Maybe it's your typing. Science will find a way, even if it has to scoop out the sockets of the money-hungry poor. There will always be those who'll do anything to put a scrap of food on the table. Blindness is too slow. Despite repeated emergency warnings from hundreds of top scientists around the world (including the World Health Organization), Earth is in big trouble and the time to panic long past. Ask them about terrorism, they're utterly unconcerned. The mural they paint makes blindness in ten years look like a blessing. Survivers would have made it through the h5 flu pandemic, the great floods, droughts and desertifications, catastrophic temperature changes, disappearance of vegetation, rapid extinctions, new rivalries between species, and always, everywhere, the smell of methane, which technically has no smell, but we associate it with garbage, feces and death, which is everywhere. But most of the methane, which creates a feeling of fullness in the chest, deep, dissatisfying shortness of breath, is coming from deep beneath the ocean floors. The water heats, the pressure eases, the cap blows, and a bubble the size of Chicago explodes out of the sea and into the atmosphere. It's a planetary chain reaction, oh, come look. This is all the stuff the scientists didn't tell us. Or maybe they did but we were watching Extreme Makeover. The earth wipes a hemisphere at a time of half its species, leaving them half baked or frozen, the rest are all dead except the inevitable few -- just enough for an ensemble Fox thriller, if only... If all this is too dark, cynical, maybe pointless, I'm with you. These aren't my predictions. They come from scientists.