As news came of the meteor crashing in Russia, NASA sent out a press release that the meteor had absolutely nothing to do with Asteroid 2012 DA14, which came within 20 minutes of Earth.

Oh, sure, it was a smidge over 17,000 miles from our planet, but it’s more dramatic when measured in freakin’ minutes.

Anyway, everyone was still wigging out, and the one thing that really made me boil was…. the name.

Asteroid 2012 DA14

The hell?? I understand that we are rather limited in our English language and that NASA and the Astronomical Naming Union have certain guidelines for naming celestial bodies. But really, there are about 6,500 spoken languages, of which roughly 4,000 are spoken widely, and there are other alphabets we can use. Tamil has 69 characters in its alphabet! Heh, I typed ’69′. Anyway, with all the brou ha ha over the Mayan calendar, why not name it something way cool to scare the hell out of everyone? They were tracking it since February of 2012. Seems to me they missed the perfect opportunity to name it….

MAYAN DEATHWISH

See? How awesome would that have been??

I swear, if they let me name astral bodies, I would do it for free.