Another asteroid near-miss: Devo sings "Space Junk"

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Today, February 15, another asteroid – 2012 DA14 – such an unattractive name! – will graze the earth. It will come within 17,200 miles of the earth’s surface, in fact – closer than some of our own communications satellites.

 

 

How do we let these things happen?

 

 

Oh, that’s right, we have no say in the matter one way or the other.

 

 

These things have been whizzing past us for eons. Some of them hit the earth, and then it’s an “Oh my goodness!” moment. (Check this link for what happened in Siberia about a hundred years ago.) And, if they’re a bit larger, you get something like an extinction event, as happened 60 million years ago near the Yucatan.

 

 

Today, however, we can give 2012 DA14 a wave and a smile.

 

 

And now, ladies and gentlemen, from almost forty years ago: Devo’s brilliant song “Space Junk.” I posted this song back in 2011, but who cares? It’s still a classic.

 

 

She was walking all alone 
Down the street in the alley 
Her name was Sally 
She never saw it hit
She was hit by space junk 

In New York Miami Beach 
Heavy metal fell in Cuba 
Angola Saudi Arabia 
On Christmas Eve said Norad
A Soviet Sputnik hit Africa 
India Venezuela

Texas Kansas
It's falling fast in Peru too 
It keeps coming 
And now I'm mad about space junk 
I'm all burned up about space junk 
Oh walk and talk about space junk 
It smashed my baby's head 
And now my Sally's dead 

 

 

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It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having; or, Rhapsody on a theme by John Ashbery

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So (I says casually), did you see the photo on the front page of the New York Times on Friday? Snow in Jerusalem. Crazy, right?

 

 

And how about that heatwave in Australia? Pretty awful.

 

 

Not to mention the soaking rains they’ve been having in the UK.

 

 

And did I mention that it’s gonna be close to sixty degrees here in Providence over the next few days? In mid-January. Seriously, it feels like late March / early April outside.

 

 

You know where I’m going with this.

 

 

We’ve done it to ourselves. We didn’t mean to do it, but we did it. We have steadily warmed our climate, and now abnormal weather is the new normal: storms, droughts, temperature extremes. 2012 was the warmest year on record in the United States, by the way.

 

 

So what can we do about it?

 

 

Little enough. The damage is already done. The carbon dioxide is already out there, and the ozone is already torn up.

 

 

Good night and good luck, human race.

 

 

(But let’s end with something nice. I started with a John Ashbery quote, so let’s have the whole poem, and think – or hope – that humanity might not die out completely, or might at least leave behind something beautiful.)

 

 

(Something like this:)

 

 

 

 

It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having:
Falling forward one minute, lying down the next
Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.
People have been making a garment out of it,
Stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning
At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls
To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray
Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.
You are wearing a text. The lines
Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need
Any other literature than this poetry of mud
And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily
Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had
A simple unconscious dignity we can never hope to
Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody
Will inspect where some late sample of the rare,
Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots, for all we know. 

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Asteroids

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Partner and I saw something interesting the other night. A near-earth asteroid, Apophis, was making a near approach to Earth, and we watched it in real time, on a British website called Slooh.com, which operates a powerful telescope in the Canary Islands off Africa.

 

 

The images were peaceful enough: a tiny bright spot moving slowly against a background of stars.

 

 

Apophis will not trouble us this time; it’s too far away.

 

 

But Apophis is coming back. It will make another near-Earth approach in 2029, and again in 2036. There is a vanishingly small chance that, in 2036, Apophis will actually hit the Earth.

 

 

If it does, it would not be quite as bad as the dinosaur-killing asteroid that hit Earth sixty million years ago. It would be very bad, however.

 

 

But, as I said, the chances are very small.

 

 

Makes you feel uncertain, doesn’t it?

 

 

I don’t much care. In 2036, I’ll be 79 years old, if I’m not already dead.

 

 

But it makes me think of all the odd things that can happen, and the random horrible accidents that can really ruin your day.

 

 

And I used to like the asteroids.  I thought of them as a remote peaceful place, a planetary archipelago, kind of like the British West Indies.

 

 

I prefer them that way.

 

 

Here’s Diane Ackerman’s poem from the 1970s:

 

 

We imagine them

flitting

cheek to jowl,

these driftrocks

of cosmic ash

thousandfold afloat

between Jupiter and Mars.

Frigga,

Fanny,

Adelheid,

Lacrimosa.

Names to conjure with,

Dakotan black hills,

A light-opera

Staged on a barrier reef.

And swarm they may have,

Crumbly as blue-cheese,

That ur-moment

when the solar system

broke wind.

But now

they lumber

so wide apart

from each

to its neighbor’s

pinprick-glow

slant millions

and millions

of watertight miles.

Only in the longest view

do they graze

like one herd

on a breathless tundra. 

 

---

 

 

New England winter

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Walking through the parking lot of my office a while ago, I noticed that the management company has put up those tall orange sticks again, in the landscaping and along the edges of the sidewalks.

 

 

If you live in a temperate climate, you won’t know what those are for. If you live in a place where snow falls heavily, you’ll know that they’re meant for snowplow season.

 

 

The sticks are about three or four feet high, so that even if we get a whopper of a snowstorm, the sticks will still be visible above the snow, and the plows can avoid the curbs and the shrubs.

 

 

It took me well over twenty years to figure out what the orange sticks were for. The property managers put them in place well before the snow falls, usually, so you don’t really make the connection between stick and snow.

 

 

I grew up in a very temperate place: western Washington state. Winters there are dark and rainy and relatively warm, and snow falls only once in a while. We didn’t need orange sticks in our parking lots.

 

 

Does it bear repeating that the New England winters are getting less and less snowy, and more and more like those Northwest winters? Here we are in mid-December, when the weather in Rhode Island should be freezing every day, and it was – mm – damp and dark and rainy today. Just like those old rain-foresty temperate winters in western Washington.

 

 

Also, there are still those damned cherry trees that bloomed a few weeks ago. It’s been happening with regularity over the past few years: the blooming of those insane (or deluded) trees in mid-winter.

 

 

The world is changing, kids, Mayapocalypse or no Mayapocalypse.

 

 

There are those who assure us that, even if climate change is happening, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s a Northwest Passage! Saskatchewan and the Dakotas will be like Paradise!

 

 

And who needs Florida, or South Carolina, or the Maldive Islands, or cares if they’re swamped completely?

 

 

And who cares if the equatorial regions become uninhabitable? No one important lives there, right?

 

 

As I’ve said before: I have maybe twenty or thirty years left on earth, if I’m very lucky. I never dreamed I’d say something like this, but: I hope I don’t live to see the worst of it.

 

 

I’ve seen cherry trees blooming in New England in December.

 

 

That’s bad enough for me.

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A bumper crop of weeds

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Such a crop of weeds we’ve had this year!

 

 

There’s a yard down on Cooke Street, a few blocks from our house, with weeds like nothing I’ve ever seen. Some of them are eight feet tall. There’s dwarf dandelion (it seems silly to call it “dwarf” when it’s that tall, although “dwarf” refers to the flowers, not the plant), and some pokeweed, and other things I don’t know the names of. I actually own a copy of the “Golden Guide to Weeds,” and I still cannot figure out what some of them are. They are like props in a horror movie, or background scenery in an episode of “Lost in Space.” They tower over me. (Fine. They’ll be dead in a few months, and I’ll (probably) still be here. So let them tower.)

 

 

I love weeds. I love the way they sprawl and occupy the space they’re given. I know they can be parasites, but they’re often lovely. (My father, a farmer at heart, hated weeds, and hated it when he saw me playing with things like quackgrass and cheat. I had no idea that I was doing anything wrong.) I love the resilience of weeds, and their vigor. Many of them are annuals: they grow from seed in a single season, and die. Imagine that! All that growth in a single year!

 

 

And they are common, and friendly, and green. They mean no harm. (Most of them, anyway.)

 

 

And why do you suppose we’re getting such a nice crop of them this year?

 

 

We’re getting warmer hereabouts; we’re getting a climate that’s more like the mid-Atlantic states. Climate change, you know. And the landscape, and the greenery, are responding with gladness

 

 

Lovely weather, if you’re a weed.

 

 

(Not sure if it’s so good for us people, though.)

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Skunk cabbage

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I wrote a blog not long ago about how warm the winter and early spring have been here in southern New England, and how all the plants are confused and blooming out of season. 

 

 

It was an apocalyptic screed, and I wanted to write something more mellow to counter it.

 

 

Early flowers are not entirely a bad thing.  They are lovely. Right now, in early spring, the magnolias are blooming on the Brown campus.  The azaleas are blooming near my office building!  I’ve seen dandelions in bloom!  And there’s something in the grass outside our apartment that looks almost like carpet bugle, with tiny purple blossoms, but much smaller.

 

 

All this in early spring.

 

 

(Ahem.  Global warming / climate change / apocalypse. Ahem.)

 

 

The other day we were driving through rural Connecticut (to go to Foxwoods – why else would we be driving through rural Connecticut?), and I was watching the drab early-spring scenery rush by.  And I saw, in a low unruly-looking place among trees, skunk cabbage coming up!

 

 

It took me back.  I don’t know if East Coast skunk cabbage is the same as the West Coast variety I used to see in Washington state, but it looks exactly the same.  Those big shiny green leaves!  Those big juicy yellow flowers that smell like rotting meat!

 

 

That, my friends, is the nasty sulfurous aroma of rebirth.

 

 

Welcome, Connecticut skunk cabbage.  We’re very glad to see you. 

 

 

You're the real herald of spring.

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The United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change, Durban, South Africa, 2011

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The Durban climate conference began yesterday.  According to the Financial Times, the conference is given “low expectations of success.”

 

 

No surprise here.

 

 

(Cherry trees are blooming again, down by Fox Point here in Providence (latitude forty-one degrees).   They were blooming downtown two months ago, if you recall.)

 

 

(So climate change has at least driven the trees crazy.)

 

 

(That’s something, at least.)

 

 

The President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, wrote an editorial in the FT last weekend to say that his country (a small group of very low-lying islands, none of them more than a few meters above sea level) was striving to become carbon-neutral and environmentally responsible, and asking other countries to do the same.

 

 

Then again: George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the United Kingdom, was recently quoted as saying that he would not “kill Britain to save the planet,” or words to that effect.

 

Hm.

 

 

Does he realize that, if the planet dies, Britain goes with it?

 

 

Last, and most somber of all: another FT article seriously discussed the possibility that the human race is endangered.  One scientist, quoted in the article, thinks that we will hang on – but marginally, the way that Native American languages have survived in Mexico and South America.

 

 

Doesn’t that make you feel hopeful?

 

 

Me neither.

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Cherry blossoms in September

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It’s happening again this year.

 

 

Walking to work yesterday morning, I could see a filmy white cloud around some of the trees on the far side of the Providence River, as if they were in bloom.

 

 

In late September!

 

 

Ridiculous, right?

 

 

I saw them close up later yesterday morning.  Yup.  In bloom, and lovely as an April day.

 

 

In late September!

 

 

Waiting for the shuttle yesterday evening, I was examining the shrubbery nearby: some low-growing azalea-like thing.  And oh my dears it was plumb full of flower buds.

 

 

I know I wrote about this last November.  And I am a broken record on this subject anyway.

 

 

But the bloody climate is changing.  Isn’t it obvious? The plants are confused. They’re blooming at inappropriate times.

 

 

Back in the Northwest where I grew up, flowers bloomed deep into November and December; it was a gentler climate.  Those of you who are familiar with New England know that, while September and October can be (and usually are) glorious, they also (usually) grow gradually colder day by day.  I even remember seeing snow on the grass in October once or twice.

 

 

But that was quite a while back.

 

 

What can we do about this? Nothing, probably.  This is one of my “hopeless glance into a dark unfriendly future” blogs, in case you can’t tell.

 

 

The change will continue.  Maybe in a hundred years the Yukon and Nunavut will be garden spots.  (And maybe Copenhagen and New Orleans and poor low-lying Providence will be under water.)  Maybe Canada and Siberia will become the breadbaskets of the world.  (And maybe Cape Cod and the Elizabeth Islands will be washed away.)

 

 

Not to mention that I don’t do so well in warm weather.

 

 

Probably it’s a good thing that I won’t be around for much longer.  I’d be complaining incessantly.

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Rhode Island global warming apocalypse

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We have entered my least favorite time of year: the hot stifling humid Middle of Summertime. New England is unpredictable in this regard, but this year is a lollapalooza. We're dancing in the 80s and 90s every day, with humidity approximating that of the Amazon River delta. I arrive at work every morning looking like someone threw a bucket of water at me. (Actually, that's a nice cooling thought.)

 

Thankfully, we have a nice air-conditioned office, and Casa Futureworld has built-in AC also, so we can survive, so long as we can pay the electric bill. It's the inbetween part – the frantic dashes outside – that kill me. (Fran Lebowitz defined “the outdoors” as “what you pass through after you get out of the cab and before you go into the restaurant.”)

 

I was not born for this. I grew up in the cool forgiving Pacific Northwest, where anything in the 80s is considered a scorcher. But I chose Rhode Island a long time ago, imperfections and all, and this humid breathless summer weather is one of its imperfections. (To be fair, no one told me that it's basically a tepid swamp that freezes over in the wintertime.)

 

It's also ironic that my Peace Corps service was in North Africa, which is not known for its chilly weather. But I was lucky there, really: in Morocco I lived on the temperate northern Atlantic coast, with a Northern California-type climate, and in Tunisia I lived in Tunis, with its Mediterranean breezes. (Well, I should mention that it doesn't rain in either place for five or six months in the summer. Things get very dusty and sticky sometimes, especially around the end of August.)

 

But have you noticed that the weather hereabouts is getting worse?

 

Yeah, I know, another rant, global warming, the end of the world, yada yada yada. But it's true, girls and boys. Storms. Heat. Yeah, I know that one hot summer day doesn't make the case for global warming, any more than one wintertime ice storm disproves it. But the world is so full of bad weather these days! Remember that early-June tornado in Massachusetts? The flooding in the Midwest? That nasty heatwave in most of the center of the country, that I think is still going on? The drought in east Africa? Go look at maps of the Aral Sea sometime. Or, I should say, go look at a map of what's left of the Aral Sea. Very disheartening.

 

Cheerful thoughts for a stuffy hot summer evening, even with the air conditioner churning in the background. (I have the Beethoven E-flat quartet on in the background, but there are some strange squawks and beeps coming out of the AC that keep harmonizing with the music in a creepy way.)

 

Okay. You know where I stand on the subject. I don't know what to do about it. I already use energy-saver bulbs, and I turn off unused electrical equipment like a fiend. I don't smoke. I'm cutting down on meat.

 

It feels like a generally feeble way to prepare for the Apocalypse.

 

But it's all I've got.

 

See you in the afterlife!

 

Or not.

 

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The world is coming to an end, you stupidheads!

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A report was recently released on the health of the seas.

 

 

Here's a quick summary: it ain't good.

 

 

Marine species are dying. The chemical composition of the sea is itself changing. There is reason to believe that we are in the first phases of the sixth great extinction in the Earth's history, and that we – human beings – are responsible for it.

 

 

There are so many man-made disasters, big and small. A recent episode of Halogen's “Angry Planet” gave us the death of the Aral Sea and Chernobyl, in one brief half-hour program. Oh, and just for laughs, there's a lab on an island in the Aral Sea where the Soviet government stockpiled – and weaponized! - things like bubonic plague and anthrax. Except that it's not an island anymore; the drying of the Aral Sea (see above photo) has connected the island to the mainland. Rats and mice and vermin in general are probably carrying bits and pieces of all those deadly things to land.

 

 

Charming.

 

 

I'm always pleased to bring you news of the apocalypse. One of these times, it's bound to be true.

 

 

And it's always best to be prepared.

 

 

So put your crash helmet on, buckle your seat belt, and start screaming now.

 

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Birthday blog: Life goes on within you and without you

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Happy birthday to me, kids!

 

 

My birthdays make me very thoughtful.  (Some say my birthdays make me moody and bitchy, but that's all in the eye of the beholder.)

 

 

I get thoughtful because I start thinking about my own ending, which is barreling down the track straight at me. And sometimes I think about the ending of the human race, and the world as a whole.

 

 

Isn't that lovely?

 

 

I was just reading a review of a new Brian Eno recording. It was described as “hopeful,” and ends with the words “Everything will be all right.”

 

 

You know, strangely enough, in the cosmic sense, I think that may well be absolutely true.

 

 

Just maybe not with human beings in the picture.

 

 

We are absolutely not necessary in the Universe. The Universe got by just fine before we human beings evolved into our current hip/square dichotomy.

 

 

I have read lots of science-fiction books in which human beings grow giant heads and colonize every planet in the galaxy; also I have read lots of religious texts in which we sprout wings and fly into a celestial DisneyWorld.

 

 

I think either of those conclusions would be groovy. But I'm not betting on either.

 

 

Human beings are just another weed in the weed patch. We bloom from time to time, and brighten the summer day once in a while.

 

 

But, as the late George Harrison said, a long long time ago, when we were all very young:

 

 

. . . You're really only very small

And life goes on within you, and without you . . .

 

 

08_Within_You_Without_You.wma Listen on Posterous

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Tornado warning: southern New England

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Partner and I were on Cape Cod last Wednesday when the tornadoes marched through Massachusetts. Cape Cod is normally pretty placid weather-wise, but the water was very choppy that morning, and there were some big ominous-looking clouds up in the north. We knew there were some storm warnings, and even hail -

 

 

And then we heard the tornado warnings on the radio.

 

 

We knew we were out of harm's way. But northern Rhode Island was on tornado warning for the entire afternoon. Central Massachusetts got hit, especially Springfield, where there were several deaths, many injuries, and extensive damage. We spent the evening watching weathermen breathlessly Telestrating the map, talking about debris clouds and rotation and the Fujita scale.

 

 

Do you understand that this doesn't happen here?

 

 

New England is not Tornado Alley, by any means. New England is famous for the changeable nature of its weather; didn't Mark Twain himself say, “If you're not happy with the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes”? And God knows we get storms, sometimes pretty ferocious ones. But tornadoes we do not get.

 

 

One more sign that the weather is changing, and the world is changing.

 

 

It kills me that people do not get this. But here's the thing: it's not that they don't get it. They just pretend to believe either that it's God's great plan, or that it's just the way weather works.

 

 

Oh, no. Not in this particular epoch, dear hearts. We have turned the page, mostly through the stuff we've plentifully sprayed – mostly carbon dioxide and CFCs, but lots of other interesting stuff – into the atmosphere. Also overfarming and overdevelopment. Also miscellaneous pollutants. Also -

 

 

Anyway. The world is changing. And we helped.

 

 

We've passed the point of no return. Even if Sarah Palin herself (who, in a motorcycle rally a while back, said something stupid like “I love the smell of those emissions!”) were to begin recycling today! - it wouldn't make a bloody bit of difference.

 

 

I don't think we're doomed.

 

 

But I think there are going to be a lot less of us in a hundred years.

 

 

And, in a very little while, I won't be around to snark at everything.

 

 

Won't that be lovely?

 

 

Ah me. How very old the world has become.

 

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Rapturous

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In case you haven't heard, today is the end of the world. Or at least the beginning of the end of the world.

 

 

You see, people love playing with Biblical prophecy and calendars and such, to predict the End of Days.  (Back when I was in high school, a Jehovah's Witness friend very solemnly informed me that “something big” would happen in 1978. I guess, in hindsight, he must have meant my college graduation.)

 

 

So this guy, Harold Egbert Camping, has determined that today - Saturday, May 21, 2011 - is The Day. The faithful – the truly faithful, not me and not you, obviously – will be caught up into heaven today.

 

 

I've scheduled this blog to post at 6:00 am Eastern Daylight Time, so it may already have happened.

 

 

I know three things that are probably true:

 

• If it does happen, it probably won't happen to me. I don't think Jesus likes me very much.

• It probably won't happen, because people can't predict it, according to the Bible!: “No man knows that hour, not even the angels in heaven – not even the Son! - but only the Father.” (And a big nyeah-nyeah! to H. E. Camping on this one.)

• It probably won't happen at all, because it's highly unlikely to begin with.

 

 

And if you're reading this, one of two things is true:

 

 

• It happened, and you weren't taken up into heaven;

• It didn't happen.

 

 

Last week, walking back to the office from lunch, I saw some big trucks parked in front of a big Providence nightclub, all covered with illustrations of the Earth exploding, etc., and legends like: THE RAPTURE IS COMING! MAY 21 2011! ARE YOU READY?

 

 

Hm.

 

 

Hm, hm, hm.

 

 

See you tomorrow.

 

 

(Although: wouldn't it be a hoot if this were all true? . . . )

 

 

(Nah.)

 

---

 

 

Sheen and Deen

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Revolution and upheaval in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Oman, Iraq.  Labor protests in Wisconsin. Budget battles in Washington.

And who gets all the attention on all the TV news shows?

You know who I'm talking about.

Well, it's hard to ignore someone who says things like “I have Adonis DNA and tiger blood.” Also that he has an “army of assassins.” Also that he has “the brain of a 10,000-year-old and the boogers of a seven-year-old.” It's like trying to ignore a naked man riding a unicycle. It's just impossible.

But it palls after a while, and becomes sad and sickening. Yesterday I was reading yet another Charlie interview, in which he was asked to react to his father's very measured appeal for reason. Charlie called it “bollocks.” He's tired of being labeled an addict, he says. Also, he was angry that his father called addiction a disease. Charlie challenged his father to (I paraphrase) “walk through a cancer ward and find anybody who looks as good as me.”

Well, that's that.

I'm as morbidly curious as anyone else. But I keep thinking of the Hogarth print of sophisticated Londoners giggling at the lunatics in Bedlam Hospital.

I'd like to think that I'm a better person than they were.

Let us move on to something more pleasant.

Paula Deen, about whom I have written before, made a stage appearance recently, during which she went on and on about her “britches fallin' down.” (It's much cuter with a Georgia accent.)

Then a big guy came up on stage, pulled up his shirt, and smeared butter on his abs.

And Paula knelt down and licked the butter off.  (Watch the clip if you don't believe me.)

And then the guy got down on all fours, and Paula rode him around the stage, while Paula's big bearded husband watched with a big goofy smile on his face.

Okay. Fine. These are the end days. I admit it now. I surrender. I will worship any deity who will rescue me from this insanity.

(Oh, Paula, Paula, Paula.)

(Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.)

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Things do not get better, but worse

 

 

Partner and I saw the movie “2012” last year, with the neutrinos and the earthquakes and the continents slipping around like fried eggs in a buttered skillet.  Some nice special effects, but – meh.

 

 

But people do love to talk about the end of the world.

 

 

When I was a kid, the whole fundamentalist Christian end-of-the-world thing was going gangbusters. Hal Lindsay was explaining how Russia was Gog and Magog, and it all proved that the rapture was going to happen any day now!

 

 

And I had a Jehovah's Witness friend who told me, with perfect assurance, that the Apocalypse would begin in 1975.

 

 

You may recall, if you are old enough, that the Apocalypse did not begin in 1975.

 

 

This does not deter the end-of-the-world theorists.  It did happen, you see, but we didn't notice.  Something happened – something epochal, something horrible, something hidden – but we weren't aware of it.  How about the birth of the Antichrist?  That sounds suitably ominous . . .

 

 

Well, if he was born in 1975, the Antichrist should be 36 by now. Old enough to be out Antichristing, anyway. 

 

 

But he ain't.   All I see on the evening news is the usual weary human nastiness.  It's not good, but it's nothing new. 

 

 

You never know.  Maybe the world will get squashed by an asteroid this evening.  Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster will arrive and we'll all be saved.

 

 

But I don’t think the world will end with a bang.  I think it will slump and whimper its way downward toward the end, just the way it’s always done.

 

 

Cheerful, eh?

 

 

My title’s from a limerick by Edward Gorey, which I think would be very appropriate for my (or anyone's) tombstone:

 

 

A lady born under a curse

 used to drive forth each day in a hearse;

 From the back she would wail

 through a thickness of veil:

“Things do not get better, but worse.”