And since we’ve no place to go, let it snow let it snow let it snow

Locally we have a jeweler that hopes you are the type of costumer who likes to gamble. You see, if you buy jewelry as a holiday gift, and it snows on Christmas, your jewelry is free. So why not buy some jewelry, it might snow. Yeah, why not?

Clearly, this local retailer was great at manufacturing demand for his jewels. A novel concept, a gimmick, to get you into the store, spending your money on ice, hoping ice falls from the sky.

Maybe you like snow so much, you buy the jewelry in hopes it does snow. You got to be in it to win it.

Or, you turn your jammies inside out as a kid, hoping this would create a snow day, and you sleep in them all night, only to awake to find disappointment. You’ve spent your night dreaming of something special only to awake to discover your clothes are inside out and you still have to go through things you were hoping to avoid…sounds like a misspent night sleeping over at a college frat house party.

Snow is a fickle mistress, perhaps.

Case in point: the Beijing Weather Modification Office. Yes. The Chinese government is engaged in the immense task of weather modification. And by weather modification, I don’t mean turning your jammies inside out (well not literally, maybe figuratively). I mean shooting rockets into the skies, releasing chemicals that in turn get clouds to release their precipitate upon the earth below. Rain. And, yes, even snow.

You’re like, “yeah right. Good luck with that, Beijing Weather Modification Office. Pshaww…getting it to snow whenever you want…*eye roll*”

Apparently, they are getting a little too good at this. According to this article (ahttp://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-11/11/content_8946435.htm), the director of the municipal weather modification office says an Oct. 31 Beijing snowstorm was artificially induced, and dropped 16 million tons of snow on the city. Snow fell again Nov. 9, also believed to be a result of smart guys shooting rockets into the air.

And although snow can often be quite fun, it often can not. Shoveling, hazardous roads, Ugg boots. And, in the case of Beijing today, a complete meltdown of air and city traffic. As this article from China Daily put it: “Municipal transport authorities used more than 6,000 tons of thawing agent to clear the roads to ease congestion. The snow also caused a four-hour shutdown of the Beijing Capital International Airport, with nearly 200 flights cancelled.”
In my neck of the woods we are content to blame bad weather on our local meteorologist or Mother Nature. But in China, locals are getting used to blaming their weather modification office, aka the government. Sounds like great fodder for your university debate team’s big discussion about big government, huh.

Me personally, I’ve watched enough sci-fi movies to know you don’t fuck with Mother Nature. In fact you don’t even have to venture into the sci-fi genre, you just have to pick up some Jack London to know that.

But whatever. After I read this article (http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-06-29-china-rain_x.htm), I’m convinced the Beijing Weather Modification Office is too busy to spend their time watching sci-fi movies or reading Jack London. They are very busy indeed, as evidenced by previous projects of the office to make sure it didn’t rain during the Beijing Summer Olympics. Hey, why not. No one likes rain on race day.

When Mother Nature becomes the government’s bitch, it sounds like the apocalypse to me.

Might as well just eat plastic

When I was a young girl learning my penmanship (do they even have those lessons anymore?) I had my pencil in hand, and, in my boredom, I would chew the eraser right off my pencil (do they still use pencils in school these days?). Eventually, in middle school, we were given the privilege of using pens -- I still can't figure out why teachers withhold our pen-bearing rights until to a certain level of maturity/school age (fears of ink stains? of massive amounts of cross-outs? institutionalization?) But what I'm getting at is that when I was old enough to be allowed to wield a pen, I took to chewing on the end of pens just as I had in my younger years bit off the ends of pencils. Chomp chomp chomp, another pen cap mauled by my fangs.

At this point you're wondering what this has to do with the apocalypse. And I will tell you (finally).

According to this NYT article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10patch.html?_r=3&src=twt&twt=nytimes), it turns out there are giant islands of plastic trash swirling about the ocean. The islands are more like whirlpools, the author says -- whirlpools of bits of plastic the size of rice. And, small fish eat the plastic, big fish eat the small fish, and we of course eat big fish. (It stops there because no one eats us, except maybe earthworms and vultures and cannibals.)

The cause for concern is that, as the adage goes, you are what you eat. And it would then follow that small fish eating lots of plastic are what they eat...and so on and so forth right up the food chain (even up to the earthworms and vultures and cannibals!)

My mom always yelled at me for chewing on my pens. She was quite concerned I would destroy my teeth ("stop that! your beautiful teeth!" she would holler) but little did she know that one day she too might be chomping on plastic via her favorite marine life aka dinner.

I mean hey, it's logical; according to the article, "One rainbow runner from a previous voyage had 84 pieces of plastic in its stomach."

Speaking of which, has anyone ever eaten a rainbow runner? Never seen that for sale in the Pathmark fish department. Who knows.

Anyway, when your ocean's full of trash and your fish are full of plastic, it sounds like the apocalypse to me.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10patch.html?_r=3&src=twt&twt=nytimes

Welcome to your daily apocalypse

On my lunch break today I decided to register this blog after reading an article about trash in the ocean. The facts in the article seemed to be further proof of what in my mind is an obvious fact: we're up shit's creek without a paddle.

Me, the fan of speeding up the entropy, finds these examples darkly comic.

And so I decided (on my lunch break) that I would love a place to post these examples. So I created one (how omnipotent of me). It's Your Daily Apocalypse. Sit back and enjoy the ride to impeding doom. Hey, we all gotta go sometime. Enjoy.