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This Abstract Idea of Bigness
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1/11/2005
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So...web traffic has incidentally gone up a bit since the tsunami, due to my moniker being what it is and all. Not sure how to feel about that. I'm also seeing a mega-surge of natural disaster/terror related features on the picture tube which strike me as less than sensitive. Sensitive being my middle name and all of that...
I saw the lineup for Saturday night (yes I stayed home Saturday night and watched Discovery and built a model airplane. Wanna' fight about it?), and it was roughly as follows-
Discovery channel presents: Horrible water-related mass casualty night.
7 pm- Killer Waves
8 pm- Salt Water Murder
9 pm- Terror from the Seas of Death
10 pm- An Interview with a Wall of Water (of Death)
11 pm- Water Wave Mega-Killer Death Hour
12 am- Girls Gone Wild- Thailand Exposed
Of all of the facts and figures that were thrown at me, two things kept sticking in my head-
The first was Discovery's constant use of obscure quantifiers for the scale of disaster. They are never satisfied with simply saying "A 30 foot wall of water traveling 200 miles per hour". I can imagine that in my head, and it's really frigging scary. Especially since my mind's wall of water contains sharks, jellyfish, and at least one giant squid. Discovery has to make it weird by saying something like "Imagine forty four Boeing jetliners full of salt water, headed for your face."
Okay. Got it. Now my wall of water has seat cushions that can be used for floatation. Plus, who can imagine the volume of a Boeing jetliner, much less forty four of them? It just becomes this abstract idea of bigness.
Their favorite such comparison is to compare anything violent with the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Everyone knows that if you remember that event, you weren't there. They said that the meteor that killed the dinosaurs released energy equivalent to that of 30 billion Hiroshima bombs. Why not just say that it made a wave twice the size of the universe? Having never been blown to hell by a two megaton atomic device, I really can't imagine what 30 billion of them would do aside from kill everything on the planet, and frankly, that's all I need to know. Hey Discovery, drop the A-bomb references and use something that we can relate to...like monster trucks.
The second thing I couldn't get over was the fact that rescue workers haven't found a single animal carcass in the rubble. The animals can tell when shit's about to go down so they stop throwing their poo long enough to prove that they are smarter than all of the humans combined by hauling ass to higher ground. I wonder what the exodus looked like. Was there a big parade of monkeys and ligers and aardvarks all leaving town at the same time? Because that would freak my ass out, but I don't know what conclusion I would draw. I'd like to think I would follow them just in case. Aardvarks really don't like to be followed, though. Trust me- never follow an aardvark.
The whole idea of animals knowing beforehand is unnerving to me because I have a cat who may or may not choose to warn me when something bad is about to happen, and I'm all hyper alert for any sign that something is wrong. Now every time she meows in the middle of the night I run out into the parking lot and scream to my neighbors to get out of their houses, clutching my confused cat to my naked chest...
Better safe than sorry, right? One day there might be a wall of water the size of six billion dinosaurs from Hiroshima...
 Dusty
RELATED LINK: www.americares.com
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posted by Dusty at 1:15 PM |
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11 Comments:
Love, James
Dont stop rockin Man.
Just a comment........
If that wave hit in Southern California, there'd be a least one guy grabbing his surf board saying,"Dudes, surfs up!!!"
156,000 people dead? Lets see, with the world population increasing by 175 million every year, that means it took all of 8 hours to replace them. Man, that's a big hit,,,
The Crusty Curmudgeon
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