Cue the Stunt Turtle!

I was getting ready for bed when the first car hit my roof.

I'll have to admit - that, I didn't expect. True, it had been an odd week in the news, even by contemporary odd standards. But "a slight chance of cars" in the weather forecast? That's a bit much.

Maybe it happens to you, too. You see something really strange on the news. You count to ten, you blink a few times, you look around, even though you're single and live alone, to confirm. To see if anybody else saw it, too. (Actually, single guys do this more often than you might think.)

So you think, "Okay, give it a minute." And you keep watching, thinking the world can't possibly be this nuts. At least, not consistently.

And then cars start falling on your roof.

The worst part, though, was trying to figure out who was responsible. After a week like this last one, it was difficult to point a finger. There are no "usual suspects," because everything is unusual.

For starters, there's Iran. Earlier in the week, Iran scoffed off the latest stern threats from the United Nations, including their most harshly-worded warning yet: "HEY! Ix-nay on the ombs-bay, or such a look we'll give you!" No matter. As usual, Iran's President, McMood Blagojevich, stood on a box and yelled for a while, threatening to vaporize Israel and snuff out capitalism, just as soon as his beard fills in.

Iran then claimed to have test-launched an end-of-life-as-we-know-it missile, bragging that the missile's deadly payload was - and I'm not good enough to make this stuff up - a rat, two turtles and an earthworm.

Great. Now, we're timid in front of a guy that threatens to attack us with three Chinese New Years.

So maybe it was Iran that did the deed to my dormers. Maybe Iran had an out-of-date GPS and attacked my neighborhood, thinking it was the Holy Land, though I don't think we're zoned for that. Maybe they weren't cars at all, but some sort of weird, 4-door Persian turtles.

But many experts doubt Iran's ability to mount such an attack, so some pundits accused Iran of simply filming an entirely made-up event, using computer-generated digital turtles. But that didn't stop the news channels from racing to find the scientist with the most rumpled, slept-in tweed suit, eager to discuss the tactical nuclear yield of your average sand tortoise. The resulting scientific analysis was inconclusive, with expert comments ranging from "total annihilation" to "is this a cash bar?" One wise guy made a bad pun about "shell shock," and was immediately beaten senseless by an exhausted, humorless reporter.

Fox News interviewed one Elgore Snecklin, associate assistant advisor to the assistant associate for the Science Department at the Feast-of-Some-Saints Community College For The Particularly Ungifted, who comfortingly pointed out that the average kill radius of an exploding terrapin is really quite negligible, unless detonated in the upper atmosphere. Snecklin warned that any such high-altitude amphibian ordnance detonation could effectively shut down communication as we know it, which, if Facebook is any indicator, would be no great loss. Fox News promised to blog about it, and suggested that if things go badly, fans could follow the end of the world via one of their Twitter accounts, @Last or #Sand.

So I wasn't at all convinced that Iran was the dastard. Remember: not long ago, an airline passenger from the East, flying to the West, tried to blow up his personal South in the U.S. North. I don't recall if he had a box turtle in his boxers, and I promise to step away from where that joke's going, right now.

Also recall that, last week ... and again, I'm not good enough to make this stuff up ... a 17-foot section of airplane fuselage fell out of the sky into a mall parking lot in Florida, barely missing 26 sexual predators and nearly destroying two bales of cocaine. So maybe somebody's rental car fell out of a plane, ultimately leaving six vinyl siding salesmen from Cleveland stranded on the tarmac in Vegas.

Then, to further complicate my suspect search, we discovered last week that budget cuts had forced NASA to restrict their meteor monitoring to a slice of the heavens approximately the size of Iran's President. So maybe an Acura-shaped asteroid had slipped through the sky-net and scuttled my gutters.

Of course, it's possible that Santa had simply misread my last letter, and mistakenly thought I wanted some "cars." Could be worse. He could have misread it as "scars."

And I'm fairly positive that no American politician was at fault, because I can't think of an American politician clever enough to pull it off. If cars were raining on my roof, and politicians did it, then they were likely aiming at something else. On the other hand, fixing my roof will save or create millions of jobs.

And at the end of the culpability parade, there's Toyota, who just recalled about 80 million cars after discovering that turning on the car radio may cause some models to erupt into boils, spit acid at Sigourney Weaver, and morph into Godzilla. Other customers have complained that they can't deploy the parking brake without the car breaking down, sobbing uncontrollably and ultimately costing the car's owner a fortune in group therapy. Toyota's marketing department quickly responded by unveiling a new Class-Action-Class sedan, the Toyota "Precedent," which will spontaneously explode in the presence of certain combustibles, like gravel, or air.

So who am I supposed to call? President Obama's not an option - lately, he's gotten so flustered that he recently referred to one branch of the U.S. military as the "Marine Corpse."

And Congress is no help, because it's an election year, rocketing that crowd to a whole new level of Useless. The 2010 Congressional election season (which kicked in about 15 seconds after the 2008 election results were in) is now in high gear, and some members of the club are in deep trouble. For example, one Florida Congressman is being challenged by a dead manatee. And this marine corpse is ahead by 8 points.

So. I was on my own. So be it. And I did, finally, manage to get the cars off my house.

But then, just as I was getting ready for bed, Iran exploded a tactical thermo-ninja-turtle device over Detroit.