New Year's Eve will be ushered in by rare blue moon; will party heads be too drunk to notice?

All right New Year's Eve party heads, gird your loins, put on your tinfoil hats and brush off your favorite nutty end of the world conspiracy theory because not only will there be a full moon on New Year's Eve -- but 2010 will be ushered in with a rare blue moon!

That's right! A blue moon! Does this mean the moon will look blue? Ha, ha! No you crazy nimrods, who probably didn't pay attention in your high school science class because you were too brain dead from playing Warcraft for six hours straight the previous evening.

No, a blue moon, genius astronomical minds and calendar geeks tell us, is a second full moon within a given month. There was a full moon on Dec. 3, and there will be another one Dec. 31, the last night of the year when responsible people everywhere go out to get drunk, party down, where stupid paper hats and wake up in the freshly minted New Year by vomiting into the toilet, or in their own beds, or wherever.

So a blue moon is a rare second full moon within a month. But, why then, is it called a "blue moon?" It's okay to ask, since we are often told there are no "dumb question," only dumb people who ask stupid questions, and then forget the answer as soon as the information leaks out of their porous brains.

Well, believe it or not, the first recorded usage of the term blue moon can be traced to 1528 using a device called the Internet, even though the Internet was still years away from being invented by the backward primates of the year 1528.

But the term blue moon was used in a pamphlet, which is a crude kind of web page, in which can be found the phrase: "Yf they say the mone is belewe / We must believe that it is true" Translating this phrase into modern English, we get: "If they say the moon is blue, we must believe that it is true."

What are we to make of this? For one thing, we can say that people did not know how to write very well in 1528. For example, instead of simply using the word "If" they would use "Yf" which makes almost no sense, but in those days it didn't matter, as long as everyone had enough mastodon meat stored up in their dirt cellars, along with roots and various fungi, which they could eat, and thus sustain themselves.

Interestingly the 1528 phrase has nothing to do with the phenomenon of two full moons occurring within the same month, yet scholars plunge ahead and make the linkage, knowing that most people don't read anymore anyway, and if a set of facts is not in Wikipedia, then it probably is not real information.

It is significant to note that there is considerable controversy about a blue moon being a second full moon within a month. In fact, it was an error in the much vaunted Sky and Telescope Magazine in 1946 which led to the popular belief today that a blue moon is a second full moon within a month.

But the question we all must ask ourselves today is, do we really care, and does the fact that there will be a blue moon on New Year's mean the world is coming to an end?

Well, of course, any idiot knows that the world is actually coming to an end in 2012, and the reason we know this is because Hollywood made an extremely bad movie about it, the movie earned over $700 million, which in turn proves that rich Hollywood producers know that no matter what kind of trash they spew out on film, millions of losers will line up to hand over their cash for the privilege of being bored to death for two hours.

Thus, we can conclude that the world will not end in 2010, even though the New Year is being ushered in by a blue moon, which is a scientific phenomenon that has been well understood since 1528, the year Larry King established his first radio broadcast in Europe, using a coconut for a battery and an elk bone for a microphone.

THE MAGIC MINNESOTA MUSHROOM