Well why didnt it warn us?

That again doesn't pack a similar punch, as Covid still feels like being only two years or so ago...

Comment was about the term being used, not about the timeframe.
The previous administration only being about two years ago and it nonetheless feeling like a long gone by era from a different century actually further stresses my point...

What do you mean barely? It is brighter than the Orion nebula and that one is pretty easy to see.

Council of Mages - Official Report on the Wish Catastrophe

(the document is scrawled in a childlike hand, or one that is unused to writing manually. The document is badly smeared with ink and is illegible in many places)

This will likely be the last report of the Council. Many of the members are dead or dying. Suspect anti-magick agents have conducted the Wish To End Wishing. Range of effect unknown but believed general at least to this dimension. Extra-dimensional scrying now impossible (illegible section) impossible to determine. Our palaces will crumble soon to dust, our people soon reduced to scrounging and hunting in the dirt like the mundane creatures of the wood. Most will starve or succumb to disease. Our libraries will decay, all our knowledge will pass into myth, and we will fall into ignorance. There is no repair. My family (This section is smeared and illegible. the smears look intentional)

(illegible) and I will continue our research, if food and shelter can be found, though with no magic whatsoever (illegible section) on survival. Recommend all do similar.

I would wish good luck, but the gesture is now empty. Farewell if you may.

End of Report

We're still going through the Perseids right now, you should see a few if you are patient enough and the night skies are clear.

If meteors combusting in a planet's atmosphere had the ability to grant requests to those who view them, I am sure a great many evils on a great many planets would have been solved a long time ago. In my experience, the only thing that can assist in solving a problem is a thorough understanding of its causes and the ingenuity sufficient to devise a solution.

In other words, you will get no assistance from a rock, unless of course that rock happens to be a scientist.

True! But the "brief flash of light" ones are objects burning up in our atmosphere. They can be comets or even artificial objects, but usually they are meteors.

Also comets are just asteroids with sufficiently eccentric orbits and a particularly impressive chemical makeup. (I.e. enough ice to make a pretty tail.) So I think if they enter earth's atmosphere they're still meteors?

Its a reference to the American version of The Office