Look out above!

Here is why I prefer tea:

A woman in France was drinking coffee with her friend this summer and was struck by a small meteorite. They call it "an extremely rare event."

They were outside (note: meals and hot drinks are supposed to be consumed indoors.  Animals eat and drink outside.) when she took a pebble to the ribs, according to French newspaper Les Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace.

"I heard a big 'Poom' coming from the roof next to us. In the second that followed, I felt a shock on the ribs. I thought it was an animal, a bat!" said the unidentified. "We thought it was a piece of cement, the one we apply to the ridge tiles. But it didn't have the color."

Meteorites are those annoying "space rocks" that fall to earth through the Earth's atmosphere and land on the land. They are known as meteoroids when they're in space, but they go to court to change their name once they get to town.  Meteorites can be the size of tiny dust grains or they can be the size of a Buick or the size of the semi-trailer that delivers Buicks. 

For reasons best known to herself, the French woman, a resident of a commune in NE France, carried the rock to a local roofer for scientific analysis.  The roofer said it was a meteorite, a suspicion borne out by consultation with geologist Thierry Rebmann. It weighed about four ounces.

In the United States, the first confirmation of a person getting whomped by a space rock involved one Ann Hodges of Sylacauga,  Alabama. Ms Hodges had a meteorite crash through her roof in November, 1954, but there is no evidence that she was drinking coffee at the time.