Insurance for dummies

If yesterday's blog on bizarre disasters made some of you nervous, we've got just the thing to put your anxious minds at ease: bizarre insurance. Like what, you ask?

"¢ Alien abduction insurance. To protect in case little green men should come to collect you, London Brokerage Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams Pearson will happily collect your little green bills. At least, they did until the famously dead Heaven's Gate cult bought thirty-nine of their policies, and were promptly "abducted" one month later. (Why didn't they just buy life insurance policies?) On the status of those million-dollar-per-member claims, GRIP adjuster Simon Burgess explains, "They would have to prove they were abducted." Blasted details!

"¢"Virgin Birth by Act of God" insurance -- especially popular with girls named Mary (about 4,000 of them to date). Also known as Immaculate Conception policies, claims are notoriously difficult to verify, as you might imagine.

"¢Ransom insurance. Yes, that's my name. No, I've never been kidnapped. (Thanks for asking, everybody I met in third grade.) But if I were, a policy like this would come in handy: Lloyd's of London will pay $1 million in reimbursement to ransom-payers, and charges between $1000 - 5,000 to insure the average globetrotting CEO.

"¢ If you're worried about your tropical vacation being ruined by rain, invest in a rain-out policy from Worldwide Weather. For $404, for example, they will pay $3,000 if there is more than 0.01 inch of rainfall between 10 A.M. and 4 P.M. on five or more days between September 1 and September 9 to cover a vacation on the island of St. Maarten/Juliana in the Caribbean.

"¢If you're worried about being struck by an asteroid, you can cover that too. Whether or not there will be insurance companies around to pay out such claims after the catastrophic event is another question entirely.