As you walk into the cozy little newsroom at KNCO Radio, there is a rather small standard definition television mounted in the upper left corner. It is usually tuned to CNN with the sound down, and at noontime we check out the local stations to see what stories they lead with in their newscasts. This week, the volume was up on many occasions, and when people in the news business are watching, you know there is something going on.

Tuesday afternoon was the most compelling, when the manhunt for Christopher Dorner was close to reaching its conclusion. The fiery end came after I had left to do a basketball game, but the sound on the television was up, and people kept coming in to check on the latest throughout the day. Many, including myself, feared that the end wasn’t going to be pleasant. Not necessarily for Dorner, but that he might take several people with him. And to think he was hiding just yards away from the police command post the whole time.

Thursday marked the end of the Carnival ‘Cruise from Hell’, and as we were watching the repeated video of passengers in a human formation spelling out the word ‘help’, I couldn’t help but think there was a bigger disaster to come. I was afraid when the ship finally got to Mobile, passengers would trample each other while trying to disembark. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but how unbelievable was it when a bus carrying some of those passengers to New Orleans broke down? The lawsuits have begun, but Carnival representatives should have been waiting to greet the passengers, with everyone getting a check for 100 thousand dollars.

I didn’t believe the story about Oscar Pistorius when I first read it from our news service on Thursday.  Just a week earlier, I had interviewed a local paralympic snowboarder, who will be off to Sochi, Russia for a World Cup event at the end of the month. We didn’t discuss Pistorius, but Evan Strong, who has one prosthetic leg, could easily be compared to the South African in terms of bravery and courage. This still hasn’t been verified, but it is believed that Pistorius is a gun nut, and maybe a bit paranoid, and shot his girlfriend by accident. Truth or not, it’s something to remember if you are going to keep guns in the house.

And Friday was the double-whammy. We find out that the asteroid missed us, but a meteorite crashed down in Russia, injuring over 1000 people, and breaking glass, damaging the town of Chelyabinsk. We were told that the two were unrelated, but I find that hard to believe. I think I have a better chance of winning the lottery every day for a month, than two different cosmic events of that magnitude occurring on the same day.

Add the State of the Union address, Marco Rubio’s drink-of-water response, and the upcoming ‘sequester’, and you have quite a week. And that’s not to mention the local news.