Heretical astrophysicists are postulating that the Big Bang has spiraled into a terminal stage of net energy deficiency and that the universe, therefore, is actually collapsing in on itself.  Observable redshifts, they would aver, do not signal increasing spatial expansion but rather temporal acceleration.  Putting the cosmological chalkboard aside, two considerable pieces of anecdotal evidence obstinately support this theory.  First, nearly every baby boomer I query perceives time to be speeding up – “Little Bobby Cochoran arrested for sodomy?  Seems like only yesterday he was scooting across the mats at JW Tumbles; his pants little more than a crap hammock!”  Second, and perhaps more subtly, there is an intensification of the convergence of “like objects” that may well mark our inexorable return to singularity.

These scientists point to October 2, 1976 as some kind of nebular inflection point; measurements recorded that day were the first to show x-ray emissions from disparate Seyfert galaxies moving toward harmonic resonance.  Moreover, it was also the day that John Belushi, on Saturday Night Live, did a better Joe Cocker than Joe Cocker.  And while it would be all too easy to dismiss each and every episode of Hollywood mimicry as either pure thievery (Antz and A Bug’s Life, CSI and NCIS,Capote and Infamous), a desperate grab for publicity (see: Brook Mueller’s Aspen arrest), or simply a dearth of originality (“there hasn’t been a new plot since Shakespeare”), one cannot so blithely explain away the alarming increase in duplicity.

Whereas the hackneyed long-lost-twin character is an admittedly pedestrian construct, the death of Jeff Hall unmistakably evinces the hand of God.  To wit:  Earlier this year, a German court convicted Ivan the Terrible (nee John Demjanuk) of killing 27,900 Jews in Nazi death camps then shockingly set him free.  Days later, Mr. Hall, a neo-Nazi organizer in Riverside, California, was gunned down by his ten-year-old son after giving the boy a leather belt emblazoned with a silver SS insignia.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, too, had his doppelganger.  While DSK was awaiting trial for raping a chambermaid in Manhattan’s Sofitel hotel, prominent Egyptian salt merchant Mahmoud Abdel Salam Omar was arrested for sexually abusing a housekeeper over at the Pierre.  MASO admitted to kissing the woman and touching her breasts, but denied rubbing his groin against her legs and groping her buttocks. After fallible evidence stymied prosecutors, each man shamelessly returned overseas to his wife.  (Imagine Peter Pan and his shadow impishly gliding to Neverland while the Darlings remain bemused by Nana’s tortured yelps and Wendy’s feculent bedclothes.)  In the fallout, habituées of Nancy Grace must now content themselves with cosmic twins Jerry Sandusky and Bernie Fine.

Look close enough and you’ll recognize two sets of alter egos stuffed into the Republican clown car careening towards Washington.  While some may argue that George W. Bush and Rick Perry are more mentor and protégé, I sense Dubya’s anima trying to skirt the Twenty-second Amendment of the Constitution.  Absent divine intervention, what are the odds that within a decade two Bible-thumping, cowboy boot-wearing unabashed morons ascend from Texas governor to President of the United States?  Thankfully, zero, but the hairs on the back of my neck nonetheless stood up during the CNBC debate when Perry couldn’t recall all three federal agencies he would shut down: “ Commerce, Education, and the — What’s the third one there? Let’s see… The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”   Yet during the weeklong maelstrom that followed Perry’s gaffe, not a single member of the media brought up Bush’s extended and awkward silence witnessed during a 2004 debate against Sen. John Kerry (D-MA).

But why?  Were they so taken with Michelle Bachmann channeling Sarah Palin?  True, both women were obscure and unimportant politicians before latching onto the Tea Party and gunning for the White House.  And both had an insatiable desire to bear children.  Palin, who remained in a near constant state of parturition until finally producing a retard, eerily duplicated Bachmann, whose serial accouchements could only be stanched, in the end, by her closeted husband.  At final tally, each spawned five offspring before turning to a career in hypocrisy.

Both women are mouthpieces for the lower-taxes-and-cut-government-welfare crowd.  Yet Palin’s only achievement as governor of Alaska was to raise taxes on oil companies by $1.5 billion a year.  Bachmann, for her part, took a quarter million dollars in farm subsidies and tens of thousand more in state and federal grants related to her husband’s Christian counseling clinic.  How the latter fails to violate separation of church and state is beyond me, but the point remains: they are both sanctimonious, two-faced (four all together?) frauds.

All this leaves me to wonder if somewhere out there in outer space there exists a mirror image of me, his parallel universe hurtling toward ours at a million times the speed of light.  Will we be fused together like charged particles in the Large Hadron Collider?  If so, I really hope he doesn’t have herpes.