Some truly bad news appeared on the event horizon in this past week — that would be the news event horizon, not a "real" event horizon.

Physicists know about the "real" event horizons, just as they know about dark matter, dark energy, the Higgs boson, and the correct pronunciation of "gyros." All those things might be "real." Then again … (You ever notice in this life that there always seems to be a "then again …"? Me, too.)

(The good folks at the American Heritage Dictionary cheerily tell us that "event horizon" is "The region, usually described as spherical, marking the outer boundary of a black hole, inside which the gravitational force is strong enough to prevent matter or radiation from escaping." But you knew that.)

Frankly, that definition sounds to me like a description of the inside of a conservative’s brain, but then, I’m one of those delusional Red Sox fans who still believes the Sox can come back. (Yeah, I know; that’s hilarious. It’s a thigh-slapper, as my grandmother would say. Then again — not to revisit that phrase or anything — my grandmother drank coffee all day and all evening, too. All by herself, I think, she made Folgers profitable.)

Oh, there was some good news on the news event horizon, too. For instance, the city finally managed to bury that pesky Landfill fire. ("Pesky" is probably the polite word, but then again, my grandmother taught me to be polite.)

Why didn’t the city do this at the beginning? you ask. Good question. You guys are asking good questions today. The answer is, Beats me. Lord knows, the city has enough sand on hand, given the mild winter and that the city didn’t have to sand the streets very much. But, you know, Sand in the City is coming up, so …

Then again, there’s plenty of dirt and clay in this section of the universe — I mean, it’s not as if you have to search very hard. Or very long.

And, then again, there’s the bad news: The Nobel Prize people have announced that, because of economic hard times, they’re going to cut down the monetary size of the prize from $1.4 million to around $1 million.

The Nobel Prize. Cutting back. Sheds some light on the European and U.S. economies, doesn’t it?

But it hardly makes the prize worth winning anymore.

Then again, as my old pal Higgs, who was once a Navy bosun, points out, I wasn’t in the running for a Nobel anyway, so what do I care?

However, my old pal Higgs, who keeps disappearing on me, had never heard the now-famous story of Mitt Romney, the happy family vacation to Canada, and the dog. The dog was strapped to the top of the family car. (Well, OK, the dog was in a kennel strapped to the top of said car.

Really? Higgs said. You’re making this up.

Nope. Neither is Gail Collins of the New York Times. It’s no shaggy-dog story, though the dog may have been shaggy.

In Romney’s defense, it was an airtight dog kennel, as the Mitt himself has described it. Though, apparently, the scientists at NASA, who, you have to admit, have a very large stake in airtightness (if there is such a noun), had never heard of an airtight dog kennel.

The Rom (How many gigabytes is that, you wonder — um, given recent history, I think that might be better thought of in terms of megabytes or, when it comes to air-tight dog kennels, maybe just bytes. Reality bytes, Guv.) wishes the dog story would just go away, because, you know, it’s ancient history.

Then again, you just have to wonder, What kind of event horizon creates an airtight dog kennel?

Maybe that was an example of Mitt Romney’s brain on rugs.