Even if you are not superstitious, you avoid giving names that portend calamity. You won’t, for example, call your cat Road Kill, nor would many people think it wise to name a jet Crater.

Although named after a native tribe of the Wichita people, one can’t help but wonder if ‘nomen est omen’ adheres to the town of Waco, Texas. In 1993 it was home to a group of world-class religious wackos who called themselves Branch Davidians and managed to not only get themselves killed, but also took a number of innocent law officers with them.

Recently, “The Science Guy” Bill Nye got a taste of some more Waco wackiness: as one of the speakers in McLennan Community College’s Distinguished Lecture Series, he incurred the wrath of religious nut-cases who took offense at him pointing out that the moon does not glow by itself, but merely reflect sunlight. The problem? In Genesis 1:16 it’s written that God put up a Light to rule over the night, not a mirror. And everyone knows that the Bible is always right. The nuts left the lecture in protest over Nye’s irreverence.

Luckily this kind of crazy does not extend to nearby Huston – else we’d really have had to fake that landing.