"Absolutely Crowned"

Okay, for me this is amazing. For some reason we don't even think about meteorites (ie those that hit the Earth). Maybe because it doesn't happen often enough. But it does happen. It actually happens every day. At the very least, some vaporised asteroid drifts down and settles on your carpet, or on your curtains in your house.
In the last year or so, a space object fell out of the sky and crashed through the roof of a house.
Here's the story:

16.06.2004
Meteorite crashes through roof of Auckland house

9.30am
A black lump that crashed into an Auckland family's living room yesterday was identified as only the ninth meteorite to be found in this country, television's One News reported.

The 1.3kg, four billion-year-old rock fell through the roof of the house in the suburb of Ellerslie about 9am.

"There was just a huge explosion and we looked around and there was just dust everywhere," householder Brenda Archer told the station.

"I don't know what to make of it, it's unbelievable. I'm just glad no one was sitting on the couch because they just would have got absolutely crowned."

"Falling through a roof is really an exceptional event that rarely happens, and this is a beautiful large specimen," Joel Schiff of Auckland University said.
Verify this story here:
www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?ObjectID=3572212

I'm from South Africa, so I feel the karoo and the highveld are pretty uneventful places. They have a kind of barren, unfolding beauty about them. One thing is certain, the karoo is ancient. Could I be forgiven for thinking nothing exciting, geologically speaking, has happened around Johannesburg, or anywhere else in South Africa, for that matter? No, I could not be. Here's why...

http://www.hartrao.ac.za/other/tswaing/tswaing.html:
Forty kilometers north of Pretoria lies a ring of hills a kilometer in diameter and 100 meters high. These hills are the walls of an impact crater left by an asteroid which hit there some 200 000 years ago. The Tswaing crater is similar in size to the well-known Barringer meteor crater in Arizona. The crater walls at Tswaing were originally about twice as high as they are today.

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/news/features/southafrica/
day02log.html:
Tswaing Crater was created when a chondritic (rocky) meteor impacted the Kapvaal Craton, where we are now camped, 220,000 years ago. It is one and a half kilometers in diameter and was originally 200 meters deep, though more than 200,000 years of sedimentation leaves it only about 90 meters deep. As with many other small craters, a shallow lake lies in the depression. Preserved in the sediments under the lake is a record of the climate and culture in the Tswaing area.

The lake is saline water does not flow out. For prehistoric man this lake served as a valuable source of salt. It remains an important resource for wildlife. More recently (from 1912 to 1956) a mining company extracted crude soda ash and salt, first from the sediments of the lake and later directly from the water.

All this information and more was laid out for us in plaques along the trail. As the trail wound around the crater rim and down to its floor through tall bushes and grasses we beheld spectacular views of the crater and surrounding Karoo plain. Our best view was from Shoemaker point, which was named after the late Eugene Shoemaker. My eyes were drawn first to the deep, startling blue of the lake and then up the steep sides of the crater through twiggy acacia trees and leafy bushes (and the occasional Amarula tree). In this splendidly beautiful spot lies a plaque dedicated to Gene, around which we shared a moment of silence after listening to Joe reminisce about his mentor and friend.

When we reached the bottom, we found the lake waters coffee-colored and smelling strongly of salt. We took another group photo and discovered we could create seismic waves in the water logged, salt-encrusted sediments by jumping (or falling). On the way back out of the crater we examined a road cut that displayed a record of the seconds that followed the impact.

Even more amazing is an impact 100km south of Johannesburg at Vredefort, called the Vredefort Dome. The impact was so cataclysmic that rocks were melted for miles around, and deep below the earth the heat melted everything too. Is it a coincidence that this impact occurred slap bang in the middle of all the gold mines that are there? Satellite images show the massive crater and around it are lots of tiny squares that are today's mine dumps.

It's possible that I hail from South Africa today, because a few billion years ago a big rock fell out of space, bliksimmed the Earth, did its alchemy, and turned the ass end of Africa into a veritible gold mine. The discovery of gold unleashed a chain of events which finally led to the Dutch and British flocking to Africa and setting up camps, then towns and once a few unpolluted newly civilised outposts were up and running, my young Dutch (the de Jongs, van der Leeks and van Niekerks) and British forebears(the Goddards)set sail for South Africa, intent either on convalescence (in the manner of JRR Tolkien's father)or seeking their fortunes.

Okay the diamonds are another story altogether. But I believe it's possible that I owe my nationality to a space rock.