LILAC IN THE COAL MINE

LILAC IN THE COAL MINE

My wife grew up in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal country, not far from Wilkes-Barre. Tall buildings for coal-crushers dotted the landscape the way silos do in Vermont, and always there seemed to be a runaway coal mine fire somewhere, “deviously wasting and inextinguishable,” as poet W. S. Merwin once put it. Coal smoke was everywhere, too.
Maybe for that reason, she is phenomenally sensitive to particulates. Driving down the highway after a truck has stirred up road salt is a torment. So is sitting next to someone at a concert who is wearing cheap, heavy perfume. When someone smokes, her throat clamps shut, and as she has observed, “When you can’t breathe, nothing else matters very much.” She’s gained a measure of local fame for her saying, “Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.”
Her early warning system is so well-attuned to particulates that sometimes I call her “the canary in the coal mine.” Those who went down those shafts sometimes took a canary in a cage, knowing that if there was a problem with the air, the bird, with its higher metabolic rate and oxygen demand, would show the effects first.
When she moved to Vermont, one of her regrets was that the lilacs she loved so much did not bloom on Mother’s Day the way they always did in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Some observant readers will be wondering here, “What do you mean not blooming on Mother’s Day? That was this past weekend, and lilacs were blooming everywhere.”
That’s the point. Within one person’s lifetime, the season for lilacs has advanced by weeks. The lilacs are, among other things, a “canary in the coal mines”--for global warming.

War Loses

Thought I'd share a picture I came across recently. I've titled it "War loses."

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Weapons of Mass Destruction

The current economic crisis was kicked off by the housing bubble bursting, which most literate people understood, then the financial football was run back by real-estate-backed investments that included subprime loans, which many people found to be (to cite an old Vermont saying) like looking in a dark room for a black cat that ain’t there.
But there’s an easy way to grasp what happened, by considering that All-American treat, the hot dog.
The hot dog is basically a sausage, and standard advice for sausage lovers is never to watch it being made. Doubtless that are many companies that produce all-meat hot dogs, but lots of them involve grinding up some meat, too much fat, and perhaps a little gristle; seasoning it and adding too much salt; and counting on the intoxicating (to an evolutionary former hunter-gatherer) smell of hot grease to create a positive experience. “You sell the sizzle, not the steak,” goes an old advertising saying, only here there’s no steak. Or as one children’s song puts it, “Nose lips and ears are us, ears are us, ears are us, noses lips and ears are us, we’re a hot dog.”
So, in the real-estate-backed derivative, they mixed a little hot stuff, a little not stuff, and did a sizzling job of selling it.
Warren Buffet once called derivative investments “weapons of financial mass destruction.” Ralph Nader once called the hot dog “the deadliest missile ever made.” H. L. Mencken once said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the good taste of the American people.”

Electoral Hinge

ELECTORAL HINGE

Hearing Barack Obama speaking on the radio, I had decided he would be the right person to engineer a transformation of American society back toward its democratic ideals. Seeing his recent actions on the campaign circuit, I no longer believe he is more likely to be elected than Hillary Clinton, though I think that if he were Commander in Chief and the one proposing a national agenda he would surprise many of those variously described as working class, middle class, middle-of-the-road, regular, ordinary, and lunchbucket.
First, his comments about the way people redirect their lack of power into various kinds of compensatory pride was sociologically spot on, but his statement of that concept was politically inept, both in the way he put it and even more in the fact that he said it at all. He should have been enough of a student of this country’s history to know that suggesting in any way that AMERICA is not The Greatest In the World is the proverbial third rail of political life, to use an urban metaphor in a heavily rural context. By the way, I fully realize that in putting it this way, I am betraying myself as an intellectual. No apologies. I worked very hard to become one. This country will never be truly first-rate until it takes as much pride in its intellectuals as in its athletes. Electing Obama would be most revolutionary in crossing that divide, in my opinion.
Then, even more importantly, he blew his chance to get truly, furiously angry at Rev. Wrongwright. Mark my words: this election will hinge on anger more than any declared issue. Obama was cool and calm, but because of that he won’t collect.
This is such an important matter than I need to say more. Ever since the Sixties, I’ve been dreading the consequences of two major forces in American life: the international wealth differential and the 80-20 divide. The former is easier to describe because we’re all seeing the consequences: we’re well-off, they’re poor, they think they’re just as good as we are, and they’re going to get their fair share. Nature abhors a differential (and currency traders or offshore outsourcers love one). Our blithe assumption that we continue to deserve a better life just because a series of historical accidents make it possible has about as much chance as rock salt in fresh water. We’re well into the siege mentality phase: everyone fighting everyone else for what’s left, blame flying right and left, and no one able to do anything about the stark reality that without substantial shared sacrifice then restoration of our work ethic, the American Way of Life will continue to be dismantled.
The 80-20 divide shows up most notably in two ways. That’s the split between those who finish college and those who don’t or don’t go at all. Likewise, and not purely coincidentally, it’s for many years been the split between those who raise their children democratically—treating them as equal beings although not equally responsible people, using discussion and reason first to change behavior rather than immediately applying disciplinary punishment—and those who favor the authoritarian model. It’s easy to spot the democratic ones: they talk to their babies in a normal, conversational tone of voice rather than cooing and blabbing at them.
The authoritarian model is what Americans prefer when the country is attacked. They want a leader who is a father figure, capable of the kind of towering, righteous anger that is the foundation of punitive discipline. They want the perpetrators of 9-11 punished, even if the effort has given al-Qa’ida an ascendancy in the Islamic world the tiny band would never have otherwise achieved. They see no merit in saying that before we can convince potential lslamists not to choose that form of righteous anger, we must reform American life and make it truly pro-family. And they ignore all the military history that suggests intelligence, in all senses, again and again tips the balance in warfare; and that sources of intelligence from within an enemy’s ranks have again and again been inspired to collaborate with us because they felt we could help change their country’s way of life for the better. As a country, we now seek to shock and awe more than to inspire, unless it’s commercially through advertising campaigns.
So anyone seeking to be President must display the ability to get royally angry. Hillary, anyone can imagine working up a towering rage, especially women who know what she had to go through with Bill. Obama I believe is capable of something far more targeted and deadly—along the lines of the old saying “Beware the wrath of a quiet man”—but I don’t think enough of my fellow Murkans feel that way.
The flip side of authoritarian anger is baby talk. Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes learned how to talk to the American electorate in a patient, sweettalking sort of way, as if explaining something obvious to a child. You might think people would resent being talked down to like that, but oh no, that’s the confirmation that the strong parent is in a good mood. Hillary can turn it on or turn it off, she’s a master politician. Obama sounds too much like a keynote lecturer, though in doing so he is giving people a look at his true personality. If people thought there was something wrong that we needed to think our way out of, perhaps they would like his way of thinking, but under stress, it’s more important that the average person feels good. Did you hear the sound clip of the crowd at the bar roaring in approval when Hillary knocked back a shot of whiskey? A shot of, in plain truth, of a toxin that depresses the operations of the central nervous system. I hope I’m wrong, but so far, it seems as if the American Presidential electorate’s top question has been, “Would I feel comfortable having a drink with this guy?”
One last thought: if you don’t know the word, look up the German translation for “leader.”

Third World Athletes

Third World Athletes

As the world follows the peregrinations, permutations and politicizations of the Olympic torch, and while this country follows and bets on the National Basketball Association championship, I’m collecting pictures of third world athletes.
Sometimes we get a glimpse of them, like the Maasai who ran the Boston marathon with spears and shields, chanting, the way they do chasing lions from their herds. East Africa’s runners—is it just a coincidence that the bones of the earliest humans were found in Olduvai Gorge, whose name comes from the Maasai word Oldupaai, for the wild sisal plant?--are so famous they’ve even been in a TV ad. It was one of the most subtle I’ve seen, deserving to be put in the commercials Hall of Fame, if there is one: a herder out in the arid Kenyan bush asks another herder, “How do you stop a rhino from charging?” Then he gives the answer: “You take away his American Express card.” “That’s good!,” says his interlocutor, “They’ll love that in Nairobi”—and he turns and starts running. The camera turns and shows a dusty road going up and down, up and down, into the invisible distance. Thirty miles to Nairobi? Sure, why not?
But back beyond this, I mean athletes like the workers in the sulfur volcano in Indonesia, who go down into the fumes and come back carrying 70 pound chunks of sulfur as if they were schoolkids carrying backpacks. Like the Laotian boatmen who have long, skinny, shallow craft that can speed when needed and navigate shallows when essential, which they pilot with poles, while standing upright in the stern. The peasant haymakers bringing back a wagonload of their harvest, pulled by a donkey, with the workers balancing on top of a load piled so high that it scarcely seems possible to have arranged it. The shipbreakers on the tidal mud flats of Chittagong, Bangladesh, about whose working conditions one observer said, “just a brief look around is enough for one to know that the working conditions found there would give an OSHA inspector instant cardiac arrest.”
To me, the glory of the Olympics and the championships is that they expand our ideas of what humans can do. We all gain respect for each other through such events: maybe we can’t do those things now, but in time, as our children’s children’s children to the seventh generation meet and marry, who knows?
The Third World athletes expand our ideas of what humans can endure.
So, as I weed old National Geographics that are threatening our foundations (Remember how Omya marble is used in the papermaking industry? This must be how) I look for pictures of these unregarded heroes and heroines—unregarded except for the photographers trying to pay attention to their settings and timing and not be overwhelmed by the inhumanity of it all.
Today, in one issue, I found three such athletes. Arguably four, since one picture shows candymakers in Kabul, Afghanistan, each wrestling with a huge rope of hardening sugar paste. The two turn out a thousand pounds of sherni a day.
Another picture shows the rice field worker in Japan, headed back home the same way he came: via a long path made of what look like two-by-eight boards, set in a staggered line about eight feet above a shallow river on top of poles and crosspieces. It’s not short walk: the end of the plank road is invisible in mist rising from the cooling water. One hopes the photographer had a telephoto lens.
When the work day is done, they relax: like the Zambian swimmer a foot away from the 365 foot drop of Victoria Falls, standing on the edge of an eight-foot-deep pool that somehow they discovered carved into the rock next to the waterfall. Deep enough for good underwater swimming, and probably no crocodiles, either. Just don’t dive in and come up forgetting which way you’re going.
There are towns in Vermont where the high schools have great athletic traditions that were raised into place by grandparents and great-grandparents who worked in mines and factories. There are factories in Vermont where the leaders will tell you the operation would have left the state long ago were it not for an incomparable work ethic, which in some cases they think may be founded on the work ethic of farming. Elsewhere in the world, the connection may not be so clear, but here at least we can appreciate that hard work can be athletic and heroic—and I hope in time we will honor all the other workers around the world for what they have suffered and survived, and what they have put into place.

ICE STORM ZONE

ICE STORM ZONE

Now that it seems as if there’s a reasonable chance that we might be past having ice storms, I’d like to share a few thoughts about them. But to make sense of the first part, I have to digress into family history.
“Barna” means “brown” in Hungarian. If you know immigration history, you know that means the American branch of the family is only about a century old, having come over in the big wave of Eastern Europeans before and after the turn of the last century. Like many such groups, the “Bohunks” (it was hard for Real Americans to tell the Bohemians from the Hungarians from the Czechs from the Slovaks, so that was a handy label for all the solid, stolid Slavs). Did you know the Hungarians won the war with Japan? There was a moment during the atomic bomb project when Enrico Fermi left the room, and one of the other nuclear physicists remarked, “Now we can speak Hungarian.” Stolid indeed—look up the Polgar sisters’ record in the chess world. Don’t mistake the Asiatic eyefolds for sleepiness; behind that cover, he’s probably thinking several moves ahead.
But to return to the digression: like many such groups, the first immigrants clustered, close to Ellis Island more often than not. My parents were pioneers in leaving the New Jersey nest to come to Vermont, first for my father to use his G.I. Bill benefits studying languages at Middlebury College, then to teach in Brandon at the behest of the high school principal, another Midd grad.
Our cars were what grandparents gave us when they bought something newer, so for most of my childhood, we toodled about in a 1940 wood-bodied Chevy station wagon. It was a good car, so reliable that one time I dreamed World War Three had happened, and almost nothing would run because the bomb blasts had ruined the electronics—but the old Chevy went on as before.
So it was that we made trip after trip back and forth between Vermont and New Jersey. Enough of these took place in winter for us to hit ice storms—or rather, an icy zone through which we had to pass to get to the safer roads in Vermont (which was not that hard on the New York Thruway but a bit dicier on Route 9 before the Northway opened). I came to the conclusion that the Albany-Troy area was the ice zone.
You may have leaped to the conclusion here: global warming has shifted the ice zone northward, and now I think we have met the enemy and not only is he ours, he is us (the Pogo quotation gets shortened by most users; look it up, and wonder how many other great statements now differ from the originals).
Of course if conditions are right, you can have an ice storm just about anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line. (The Mason-Dixon line: Mason says to Dixon, “Why the hell are we out in this wilderness surveying a straight line to nowhere? Nobody will ever remember or care about it.” Moral of that story: do your work and do it well, you never know what it will become when joined with the work of others.)
Which brings me to ice storms and work. Ever look at a stone wall and wonder how the farmer ever got those multi-hundred-pound boulders into place? Part of the answer can be seen at the Rutland Fair if you get to the oxen pulls. Ice storms are the other part of the answer. With such a glaze on the ground, a stone boat could haul quite a load. Even an icy crust could carry smaller loads—read Robert Frost’s poem “Brown’s Ride” (that’s from memory, but I’m pretty sure it’s right).
One fascinating illustration of the same principle at work can be viewed, oddly enough, in Death Valley National Park. There is a flat stretch of dry lakebed that acquired the name “The Devil’s Racetrack” because again and again visitors found big stones with long tracks showing they had been moved, but never any human footprints. I’ll put a picture of this phenomenon at the end so you can see for yourself.
Though no one ever saw any stones moved, someone finally figured it out. Seasonal rains were soaking into the clay of the former LAKEBED and making the surface very slippery (something that can be observed right now in Addison County, much of which was once UNDERSEA). The prevailing winds were sometimes strong enough, coming off the area’s slopes (like the big windstorm did in Rutland) to send sizable rocks skidding along—no demons or UFOs necessary.
If you Google all this, use advanced search and put in Death Valley NATIONAL PARK, because there is a high-banked one-third-mile clay oval near the California-Nevada line whose enterprising proprietors have named it Death Valley Raceway. Bob Dylan comes onto the subconscious soundtrack here: “It’s easier to see without lookin’ too hard there’s not very much that’s really SACRED.”
Just remember, when it rains on a highway and the water pools up, the same skidding effect can make it harder to brake your car. And if it rains on a frozen road, turn around and go back home, if you aren’t turned around already.

Now Hear (But Don't Eat) This

LIST OF THE MONTH: NOW HEAR (BUT DON’T EAT) THIS

On February 12, Onion Crock of Michigan recalled Old Fashion Potato Soup and Minestrone Soup due to undeclared wheat and soy allergens.
On February 14, Summit Import Corp. recalled Oriental Mascot Sweetened Sliced Coconut because of undeclared sulfites.
On February 15, Nutri-Foods recalled unhulled organic sesame seeds in half pound containers because of a “possible health risk.”
On February 18, Pierre’s Ice Cream issued an allergy alert on Homestyle Brand Dutch Chocolate for undeclared peanut butter candies.
On February 22, Lion Pavilion issued an alert on undeclared sulfites in Grassplot Dried Pachyrhizus.
On February 26, Summit Import Corp. issued an alert that fish in its packages of Sum Cheong Lung dried fish hadn’t had their intestines removed, creating a danger of botulism.
On February 28, Walker Food Products Co. recalled its Four Bean Salad because of “possible health risk.”
On February 29, Palo Alto Labs recalled its Aspire 36 and Aspire Lite dietary supplements because of contamination by a male erectile dysfunction drug,
On March 3, Gorton’s Seafood recalled Crispy Battered Fish Fillets (package of six) due to “possible adulteration.”
On March 4, Quaker Oats Co. recalled a “limited number” of Aunt Jemima Pancake and Waffle Mix products because of possible salmonella contamination.
On March 5, New BCN Trading, Inc. issued an allergy alert on undeclared sulfites in Asian Boy Sweet Ginger.
On March 8, the Texas Dept. of State Health Services closed Aransas, Corpus Christi and Copano Bays to shellfish harvesting due to a toxic algae bloom, and warned that “cooking does not destroy the toxin.”
On March 10, Hartz Mountain Corp. recalled Vitamin Care for Cats because of a “possible health risk.”
On March 14, Slade Gordon and Co. recalled Icybay Cooked Langostinos because of a “possible health risk.”
On March 16, Publix issued a recall for assorted flavors of Empanadas due to undeclared milk.
On March 19, the Food for Life Baking Co. recalled 2,241 cases of Spelt Bread because it contained spelt, a known hybrid of wheat.
On March 20, Williams Food, Inc. issued an allergy alert on undeclared milk in Bass Pro Shops Uncle Buck’s Light ‘N Krispy Fish Batter Mixes.
On March 22, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an import allergy regarding entry of cantaloupes from Agropecuaria Montelibano, a Honduran grower and packer, because they appeared to be associated with an outbreak of Salmonella Litchfield.

There were headlines in Vermont about that last one, but anyone who subscribed to the FDA’s email alert list (free) could see that a whole lot goes on behind the scenes that we never hear much about. Personally, from looking at a couple of months of these electronic missives, I’ve tentatively concluded the following:
--Our food is more likely to go kahooey than our pharmaceuticals. There were a few recalls of heparin products during the same time as the above food alerts—it’s a drug that helps keep blood flowing in intravenous hookups—but nothing much.
--Food is more likely to have problems because the food system is so complex. I’d never heard of pachyrhizus (“Pachyrha: a small genus of five or six species of tropical and subtropical plants growing from large, often edible taproots”) or empanadas (“These Latin American pastries, filled with seafood, meat, cheese, vegetables or fruit are wildly popular”) before they appeared in the emails. The FDA folks not only have to know what these comestibles are, they have to know how and where such goods are imported.
--American cuisine is being enriched by immigration, especially from Latin and South America.
--At the same time, it’s perfectly logical and appropriate that there be a localvore counterreaction. The words “possible health risk” make me think “this is worse than it’s been made out to be.”
--The human body, also very complex, is subject to a great diversity of ailments, including some caused by the intestinal immigration of inappropriate foods. Appearances truly deceive: the person to whom you are speaking, while seemingly quite “normal,” may be coping with any number of biochemical aberrations. At least the FDA recognizes that adjustments must be made for these people, too, to have good lives. I’ll say it here and I’ll say it again elsewhere: God have mercy on the chemical cripple, because nobody else will. I remember in my college biochem course, the Nobel prizewinneing professor said that each of us is carrying about eight lethal genes, which helps to account for the high level—perhaps as high as 50 percent, including first-month events—of miscarriages. As I said to my first wife, “I hope the bullets don’t fit the gun.” That was before our miscarriage. I would guess we have another thousand years of debating the nature of personhood before all this gets fully integrated into our lives.
--It just isn’t true that all, or even most, federal employees are “bureaucrats” who sit at desks soaking up tax money to no purpose. If the FDA has problems with politics at the uppermost levels, I don’t think those are coming down to the investigators, who ought to be counted among our best counterterrorism operatives.

Sudoku Sources

VIRTUOUS VIRTUAL: SUDOKU SOURCES

Finally I decided to try completing one of those little nine-by-nine-spaces number squares where every row, column, and three-by-three square must at the end have one of every number from one through nine. In a word, Sudoku.
Others would say, in word, addiction. Already I have been cautioned by my wife not to get lost in this pastime. I tell her it’s a medical insurance policy: if someone ever runs into my 1994 Geo Metro, whose only airbags are under my ribcage, I’m going to do a lot of down time in some hospital, and not caring much for TV I’m going to get terminally bored without something to exercise my brain.
Sudoku does that. It’s been recommended as one of those mental calisthenics that older people should do to keep their neurons nimble and their synapses synoptic. There are some elementary techniques that anyone could independently reinvent, but there are others that, on first presentation by some tutor, can make you feel like you’re back in Algebra II.
Which brings me to the point of this blog: pointing out some of the better sources for those who want to fill in that thing the Herald runs every day on one of the back pages (which at times is ridiculously easy and at other times is seriously challenging).
The Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that some academic scholars think is an asylum run by its inmates, does pretty well at introducing Sudoku. Among the other things you’ll learn is that a Japanese outfit called Nikoli introduced it.
Guess what: www.nikoli.com is still around. At that site, you can find samples of Sudoku which take various levels of skill to solve. Also, if you REALLY want to waste time, they also have stuff on Slitherlink, Nurikabe, Heyawake, Akari, Hitori, Masyu, Shikaku, and Kakuro. Also, assuming you have Adobe Flash Player, you can enjoy animated jigsaw puzzles and a game in which you need to paint a given map with four colors in a way that keeps each color separate. This being an Olympic Games year, it would be well for us to remind ourselves that our nation, wonderful as it is, has no monopoly on ingenuity.
Back to Sudoku. Serious players know that certain newspapers carry really, really tough puzzles, with the Daily Telegraph over in London being something of a rallying point. There is a website that carries both the Back Page and Announcements Page Sudoku from the Daily Telegraph (the guy who devises them runs the website), the Announcements Page generally having the gnarliest, especially toward the end of the week. There’s an archive, too, at least for much of the past year. That’s at www.sudoku.org.uk.
Most Sudoku sites have links to other sites, so once you get started you may not even need Google to find as much as you need. Were it not for that cross-linkage, I’d put more site reviews in here.
If the tutorials at the Wikipedia seem to complicated, there’s a quick but clear summary of all but the most arcane strategies at www.brainbashers.com. That and other Internet Sudoku lessons come with graphic illustrations, thanks to this new technology of ours. Brainbashers also has a multiyear archive of Sudokus, arranged in six categories: Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard, Very Hard, and Super Hard. If you’re thinking this might be a good parent-child activity, the Very Easy collection could be a blessing. This is an activity where success at the start can be inspiring, and being hit at the start with a Diabolical from the Daily Telegraph (that’s the actual term) could be so daunting as to produce a mental block.
One more thing about the Brainbashers tutorials: if you play online, you can pick a game at random (but at your chosen level) and get help if you’re stuck from “the assistant.” Ask it to apply on one of the solving techniques and it will demonstrate its usefulness—or if that doesn’t do the trick, choose some other strategem.
While we’re on the subject of learning and how-to, here’s something from yours truly that he has heard from more experienced players as well: there is no substitute for doing a bunch of Sudoku. After a while you get used to the grid, and better at spotting particular numbers, to the point where you can see at a glance the first spaces waiting to be filled. In time, various patterns become familiar. Farther along, you get a sense of where best to allocate your attention (if the great World War II general George S. Patton was right about reincarnation, he’s probably a Sudoku player now).
Also, with time, you learn your own characteristic mistakes, and learn to crosscheck yourself with extra vigor to keep them from recurring. This is the sort of thing people with specific learning disabilities like dyslexia learn to do to compensate, SLD having nothing to do with mental retardation. (Come to think of it, Patton was severely dyslexic, and had to memorize his way through West Point with the help of a tutor his wealthy family provided. His spatial sense, though, was right off the charts.)
Finding your own erroneous tendencies is crucial. If you keep failing to complete the puzzles, try to look back and see why, or copy the numbers into another grid and redo it. Recognizing your own weaknesses and learning how to cope with them isn’t just important in Sudoku. But if you can do that in miniature in a numbers game, it may give you insights into other obstacles to other endeavors.
One more site: once you’re hitting on all cylinders with Sudoku, you may want the wit-sharpening and adrenaline rush that comes with competition. Before going to some major city that has a Sudoku tournament, try www.sudokufun.com, where there’s always a timed puzzle, and where you can check how you did compared with other players (I see that SW, judy serve, pixw1, neja, Funkman, Synthest, 77523, moc, Mat2, hockeyman76ns and C Frank are logged in right now).
No, I’m not going to join them, Doing the March 26 Herald Sudoku was exercise enough. Besides, I want to go see how my wife is doing with her beading.

Nadir

NADIR

Thoughtless, selfserving, presumptuous, wasteful, oblivious, divisive, counterproductive, disdainful, arrogant, wearisome, simplistic, spoiled, querulous, wrongheaded, unpatriotic, pointless, irrelevant.

Nader.

Global Warming's Worst Nightmare

GLOBAL WARMING’S WORST NIGHTMARE

Perhaps you read about the “Doomsday Vault” for the world’s most vital seeds. Bombproof chambers, set into permafrost on a mountain on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, contain samples of about 250,000 seeds, which could be used to renew the planet after a global catastrophe—kind of a Noah’s Ark for plants, already landed on its Arctic Ararat.
It’s a good example of how interconnected the globe has become, that such a remote region could be tapped for such a vital role. But let’s not forget there’s another locale far in the Far North that contains a much less life-giving entity.
So far no one seems to have mentioned it, but if the Arctic gets too warm, the Blob could reappear. If you remember, this voracious hunk of extraterrestrial ectoplasm was never killed. By accident, someone who tried in desperation to fend the thing off with a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher discovered that the Blob couldn’t take cold. So it was chilled into hibernation, airlifted to Northern Canada, and dropped into presumed oblivion.
So there’s the conclusive danger of global warming. If the threat of the Blob getting loose doesn’t motivate the nations of the world to address climate change, what will?