The Day After

There have been countless stories, books and movies written about the day and days after events that wiped out the world, leaving behind only a few hardy survivors. or perhaps none at all.

"Aftermath" tales are popular and filled with fantasy of how the human race rebuilds itself after unspeakable disaster.

For all we know, our world has already had such disasters. Ice ages, meteor strikes come to mind., but the human race, if present during those times, had much less to lose and certainly much less of a hurdle to climb to return to its previous state.

It's one thing to survive Armegeddon without having access to your vital cave drawing tools, but it's a whole different situation if you don't have access to your 4G and no place to plug your iPad recharger.

Much less is written about the aftermath of wonderful things happening.

Once you get to paradise can you really get to a better place than that? No one fantasizes about how much better things would be if only there was a 73rd virgin.

It would probably be fairly depressing to write about how banal existence becomes when there's no likelihood of improvement.

We were all pretty ecstatic when news of Osama bin Laden's death was reported, but how long did that last?

And sure, it was like a little bit of heaven on earth when the polling indicated that Tim Tebow was a better choice than Tom Brady for the new Jockey underwear ad campaign, but the joy was fleeting.

I'm not one much to dwell on "half lives," but there's probably a strong correlation between the half life of an event's aftermath and the need to portray it to others.

The half life of a nuclear glow off the horizon is probably longer than the giddiness over the announcement of a dividend.

So today, in the immediate aftermath of Apple's dividend announcement it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that it's completely forgottten news.

Time to move on.

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