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Monthly Archives: January 2013
A Whelk’s Chance in a Supernova…
Adelaide, Australia reached 113 degrees F. in the first week of this year, with higher temperatures expected elsewhere. The Australian interior anticipates temperatures widely topping 120 F. this summer. Forecasters and climatologists have added two new colors to the temperature mapping system in Australia.
It bears consideration that our planet is not a static system. The Sahara wasn’t always a desert. West Texas was once an inland sea. And climatic change doesn’t necessarily take thousands of years to progress.
Inconvenient truth. Al Gore couldn’t have chosen a better title, unless, perhaps, he’d borrowed a phrase from Douglas Adam’s ‘Life, the Universe, and Everything’. A snatch of dialoge :
“True? Of course it’s true.”
“… then we don’t stand a whelk’s chance in a supernova.”
“A what?” said Arthur sharply again. He had been following the conversation doggedly up to this point, and was keen not to lose the thread now.
“A whelk’s chance in a supernova,” repeated Ford without losing momentum. “The …”
“What’s a whelk got to do with a supernova?” said Arthur.
“It doesn’t,” said Ford levelly, “stand a chance in one.”
This passage and the chapter it’s from didn’t specifically refer to climate change, but rather concerned a galactic disaster born of tribal differences and impending war, but Adams, as so often in his quirky fiction, made the brilliant leap in linking the most extreme of environmental disasters, “a whelk’s chance in a supernova”, to the pernicious, wasteful distraction of tribal warfare.
My birth tribe has been American West-European Judeo-Christian Transplants with a big dose of New York regionalism.
My chosen tribe has become the tribe of listening, thinking, analytical, scientific, mystic/mythic-skeptic, who would prefer to not hurt a spider, because they are much harder to put back together than they are to take apart. This tribe transcends race and region, because listening and thinking, although not universal, is widespread. Pursued in a healthy manner, and to a logical outcome, listening and thinking will generally result in kindness, tolerance, and empathy.
If you aren’t spending all your time fretting about who’s god is the real god, and imagining that your birth-tribe is the best and only GOOD tribe, there actually IS time enough in the day to step back, and connect the dots on climate change, and maybe take a step or two back from ending up as a sizzling amuse bouche of escargot in clarified butter.
I’ll save you looking it up, as I had to do. A whelk is a snail…
The Dead-Blog Blog
So, from time to time the Postmaster at the Swiftpassage webs will get a robotic email from the WordPress system cheerfully informing me that qrrkcft@numnutz.lv, or some equally prosaic entity, has applied for citizenship as a “member” of this blog. More excitingly, they might have placed (or attempted to place) 173 or so new spamments, offering up their insights on what’s here to read, along with enticing offers for services, or goods. Most often the latter are pharmaceuticals with charmingly mispelled names, such as Ciagra or Vialis.
( Incidentally, and appropos of nothing at all, my father’s preferred hair grooming tonic, back in the “Mad Men” sixties was a fragrant liquid called “Vitalis”, which was fortified with a magic ingredient called V-7, which made his hair kind of stiff. Google tells me this hair-groom is , through the good graces of the Clairol company, still available at Wal*Mart and through Amazon. Wikipedia, however, seems not to have heard of it. Indeed, the disambiguation choices at Wikipedia for Vitalis are intent on sorting out a platoon of Middle Age monks and saints, most of whom lived in hermetic seclusion, probably because of poor hair grooming, due, perhaps, to a lack of stiffness?)
Because I cannot vouch for the safety of Ciagra should it be a pharmaceutical, although, I suppose it MIGHT be a simple transposition error for the plural of cigars in Latvian, (Well, noo, Google-translate tells me that “cigara” in Latvian means “weed”. Oh, wait, I wonder! Now, that’s a pharmaceutical I’d not have suspected…), nor can I report on the efficacy of Vialis, it seems prudent to remove these offers and links to commercial websites! However, I could imagine making an exception for “Vialis, With V-7”. Yes, I’d let that one pass.
Long story short, this is the kind of problem a web blog develops when IT SITS TOO LONG!
I have been remiss! Bless me WordPress, for I have sinned! It have been almost SIX MONTHS since my last confessions here, and we have both suffered for it. In this, the new year, the first since the expiration of the Mayan calendar, I shall make amends. I am determined to post something, A N Y T H I N G, at least monthly, to extirpate my past sins of omission, and to expiate the Mayan gods, who have so graciously allowed us this new year, at least until the next asteroid lines up on us.
I feel better already! Now, I’ve got to go run an errand; it seems I’m running low on hair gel…
