BLEAK SCIENCE BINGO

This week, more news from the world of science. And, given that this is 2020, the Official Year from Hell, get out your Apocalypse Bingo Cards, boys and girls, and prepare to play, because you won’t believe what the universe is throwing at us this time! 

 It’s not enough that we’ve had a worldwide pandemic, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, landslides, melting ice at both poles, an acceleration of species extinction, madmen in charge of governments around the world, wars, riots, locust invasions, Asian giant hornets and fill in the blank with whatever might be affecting your neck of the woods, now come the latest nightmares to disturb your sleep. Just shout Bingo! if you complete your row of unlikely crazy scenarios! 

Oh-so-appropriate meme courtesy Matt Jagger's Music FB Page

Don’t Plant The Seeds!—Folks in 27 states have received warnings from the U.S. Agricultural Service and the U.S. Postal Service about mysterious packages arriving in the mail containing unidentified seeds. The seeds, which appear to come from China, but which may or may not actually come from China, are unsolicited, and no one knows precisely what kind of plants will grow from them. Some people think the seeds are a plot to discredit the Chinese, some that they are simply a marketing tool to generate fake reviews on Amazon, though the senders (and the product) are obscure.  

The warnings, which have been splashed across traditional and social media are clear, though: DO NOT plant the seeds! Remember kudzu, “the vine that ate the South?” Over a hundred years ago, some bright bulb thought it would be a good idea to import it from Japan to stabilize eroded hillsides. Now we can’t get rid of it. The list of invasive plant species causing similar trouble in the U.S. because of someone’s lack of foresight is long and alarming. If you receive the seeds in the mail, contact your local post office and extension service, and mark off “alien seeds” on your Apocalypse Bingo card. 

Jumping Worms—As an organic gardener, I never would have thought an earthworm could have been the villain of the piece. In fact, I wasn’t aware there were parts of the country where earthworms weren’t native at all. But apparently New England, the upper Midwest and Canada, are devoid of native earthworms, due to the structure of the soil left behind by retreating glaciers after the last Ice Age. (Any earthworms to be found are likely imports of European species brought over in ship ballast, etc.) Forest floors don’t rely on earthworms to break down detritus, either. Other creatures—fungi, bacteria, millipedes and so on—do that job. 

Your common night crawler-type earthworm is no real threat to that kind of system. But according to an article in the New York Times, the invasive Asian jumping worm, which has been found in Oregon, the upper Midwest, parts of New England and the mid-Atlantic, and now even the southern Appalachians in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, can be devastating. It eats through masses of leaf litter and the top layer of soil much more quickly than other worms and leaves behind, not a fertile, well-aerated growing medium, but loose, crumbly, sterile soil that looks like coffee grounds and grows nothing. Yikes! They’re called “jumping worms” because of their exaggerated, thrashing movement when disturbed. They also have a distinctive whitish band around the top third of their bodies. If you find them in your yard or garden, call your extension agent right away. And, yes, you get another mark on your Apocalypse Bingo card! 

Finally, some almost good news—If you love horror movies in the apocalyptic or disaster vein, like I do, research shows you may be better equipped to deal with real-life disasters like the pandemic we’re currently enduring. A study from scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark (currently under peer review) monitored the enjoyment levels of people watching movies the scientists identified as “prepper” stories—tales of alien invasions, apocalypses and zombies—versus those of strictly “horror.” They then compared those enjoyment levels to the watchers’ reported positive experiences and “overall comfort level” during the pandemic. 

According to their results, those who most enjoyed watching the prepper stories reported the most positive experiences and higher comfort levels during the pandemic, indicating that their familiarity with the possibilities presented onscreen may have better prepared them for the reality they faced with the pandemic. They felt “better able to cope” compared to those who avoided watching movies like CONTAGION altogether. People who liked straight horror movies proved to be “psychologically resilient,” but not necessarily well prepared to deal with the realities of the moment. 

In an interview about the study with The Guardian ,Coltan Scrivner, a psychologist who specializes in morbid curiosity at the University of Chicago,said, "If it's a good movie, it pulls you in and you take the perspective of the characters, so you are unintentionally rehearsing the scenarios. We think people are learning vicariously. It's like, with the exception of the toilet paper shortage, they pretty much knew what to buy." 

So, keep watching those disaster movies, folks. You might learn something that helps you win Apocalypse Bingo! 

Cheers, Donna 

*Information for this post provided by:

 “Do NOT Plant The Mystery Seeds: People Across The US Receive Unsolicited Seed Packs From China,” by James Felton, IFLScience Newsletter, July 29, 2020. 

 “As Summer Takes Hold, So Do the Jumping Worms,” by Margaret Roach, The New York Times, July 22, 2020. 

 “Fans Of Horror And Disaster Movies May Be Better At Coping With The Covid-19 Pandemic,” by Rachel Funnell, IFLScience Newsletter, July 3, 2020.

THE SLOW APOCALYPSE

Well, here we go again,cleaning up after the second monster hurricane of the season to hit North Carolina. Although Hurricane Michael roared in from the Gulf, rather than the Atlantic, as far as the battered central and eastern counties of the Carolinas are concerned, it didn’t make much difference. They’ll still got hammered by destructive winds, plenty of rain on saturated ground, and the threat of storm-generated tornadoes.

Destruction from Hurricane Michael in the Florida Panhandle (NBC News).

 Michael came ashore on the Florida Panhandle as a Category Four storm—the strongest storm in history to hit there—and pretty much flattened that part of the state. It left behind tens of thousands without power in Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia, and is expected to remain at tropical storm strength until it finally blows out to sea today. Experienced weather-watchers are in awe of not only the storm’s power, but also how quickly it built over the very warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico in a matter of a few days.

Again it appears our little patch of ground in the mountains was spared the worst of the storm’s effects. We had rain, which we needed, but not much wind. No flooding. No washouts. No tornadoes. We were lucky. So why are you reading this weather report, when The Weather Channel is much more grimly interesting?

The short answer is because, as writers and readers of science fiction and SFR, we are all concerned with the future. And what we are seeing right now—on our television screens if not outside our windows—is a sign of what is to come. 

These two megastorms—Florence and Michael—hit North Carolina after the warmest September on record for the state, in the warmest year on record so far. That is not a coincidence. Neither is it a coincidence that the eastern counties of North Carolina have been devastated by flooding numerous times in the past few years, including just two years ago with Hurricane Matthew, which was said to be a “hundred-year” event. And yet North Carolina state government policies, as well as Federal flood insurance policies, encourage routine rebuilding of coastal communities and flood-prone communities along river basins further inland, as if these storms were isolated, once-in-a-lifetime incidents.

I’ve had notes for a post-apocalyptic SFR novel called Higher Ground on my computer for years. The story follows a group of refugees from a catastrophic event that inundates the eastern coast of the U.S. as the survivors struggle to reach safety in the mountains of Appalachia. But I no longer believe we will see that kind of single, horrific event—an earthquake and tsunami, say, or a meteor strike like in DEEP IMPACT (1998). 

 

A disaster of this magnitude is doubtful. We'll likely drown by inches.

I believe now, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, that the world will end not with a bang, but with a whimper. The storms will keep coming, growing worse and worse. More and more people will lose their homes, their businesses, their lives. Due both to budget constraints and lack of political will, our collective ability to help them through state and national programs will diminish, until we can no longer do so at all. 

People displaced by the flooding and the destruction will become refugees within our country, those with resources able to start over, those without left permanently adrift. The coasts will be left to the rich; the inland towns will be abandoned. The “higher ground” will be coveted, driving up land prices and crowding out those who can’t afford them. (In fact this last is already happening: Western North Carolina has experienced a steady influx of mostly wealthy retired Floridians since Hurricane Andrew in 1992.)

The process will be gradual, but it will be relentless. Just as relentless, by the way, as global warming. Which is real and the inevitable result of our love affair with fossil fuels, the combustion engine and unfettered development. This is not politics, it's science. Don’t believe me? Look at your television screen or out your window. The future is now.

Cheers, Donna

BIG ONE A BIG HIT AS THE ROCK SAVES THE DAY

Lord knows there are enough real disasters in this world—earthquakes in Nepal, floods in Texas, droughts in California, wildfires in California, mudslides in California . . . I don’t linger over TV images of the suffering of real people in these rampages of Mother Nature. I feel for the victims of these incidents, I contribute to the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. 

But I just can’t help myself: I love me a good disaster movie! I’ve seen (and I own) ’em all, from THE TOWERING INFERNO to TITANIC, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW  to 2012. Volcanoes! Earthquakes! Rogue waves! Tsunamis! Flash freezes! Superstorms! Tornadoes! Super-tornadoes! (I do hold the line at sharknados. Sorry, not buying that one.) It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine!

I will tolerate any kind of disaster movie, but a well-made, well-acted one is right up there with a day in the mountains and fluffy kittens on my list of favorite things. So you know I was in hog heaven sitting in the theater to see Dwayne Johnson (formerly “The Rock”) save the day as a “swarm” of earthquakes of over 9.0 on the Richter scale take out cities all along California’s San Andreas fault in SAN ANDREAS. Yes, it is finally the day of reckoning for the Golden State, the one we’ve all known is coming, the Big One! And we are all safe in our seats watching it happen.

As is the tried-and-true formula of disaster movies, we meet the cast of characters in the first half-hour of the film: Johnson’s Ray, a Los Angeles Fire Department rescue helicopter pilot (and veteran) with a big heart to go along with his big muscles; his college-age daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario, an up-and-comer), as resourceful and brave as he is; his soon-to-be ex-wife Emma (Carla Guggino, LOVE her!), smart and sweet; the requisite bad guy (Ioan Gruffudd), an architect whose building amazingly does NOT fall down right away!; the scientist who warns everyone of the coming disaster (Paul Giamatti, terrific as always); and other supporting players.

We get the warnings—a little landslide here, a tremor there. A quake where there is no fault line, which destroys the Hoover Dam. The scientist begins to see the scope of things. Then all hell breaks loose as the entire San Andreas fault, which runs from L.A. to San Franciso, begins to crack wide open. Whee!

The quality of special effects makes or breaks a movie like this, and the effects are first class in SAN ANDREAS. The entire L.A. basin ripples and waves like a sheet in the wind. Buildings topple into each other and disintegrate into rubble. A tsunami carries a massive container ship into the Golden Gate bridge, tearing a huge gap in that span. Oh, and did I mention the Hoover Dam?

But none of these things would have meaning if they put no one at peril. We have to care about the people in the film for all this destruction to have any emotional impact. Carlton Cuse wrote the screenplay for SAN ANDREAS. Cuse’s screen credits include TV’s LOST, BATES MOTEL, THE RETURNED, THE STRAIN, and some of my personal favorite oldies, NASH BRIDGES, BLACK SASH, THE ADVENTURES OF BRISCO COUNTY, JR. Cuse has a special talent for combining action plots with character development, giving his characters emotional depth and “history.”

 Cuse has done that with Ray and Emma and Blake in SAN ANDREAS, too. Blake had a sister, who drowned on a family outing. Ray blames himself for not being able to save her. At the beginning of the film, the incident and its consequences have nearly destroyed the family—divorce is imminent, Emma is ready to move in with her architect boyfriend, Blake’s headed off to school. But events intervene and reconciliation becomes possible as Ray shows his stuff, Emma sees her boyfriend’s true colors and Blake is forced to grow up fast. Nice character development in the midst of all that mayhem, I say!

I’ve thought a lot about why I like disaster movies so much. I think it’s because I have a secret fear of the Apocalypse. I’m studying up on survival techniques, reviewing those Too Stupid to Live actions-to-avoid. My favorite book as a kid was Swiss Family Robinson, and my favorite part of that book was the ingenious way they salvaged and made use of what was left from the shipwreck. I joined the Peace Corps later in life and lived without the luxuries of modern life for a time in Africa. I learned some things about boiling water, let me tell you!

But, as my karate teacher always said, the First Rule of Self-Defense is Avoid the Situation. I won’t be living in California—ever. I won’t be building a home too close to water or on a steep mountainside. As long as a sharknado doesn’t come along, I should be okay.

Cheers,

Donna

SO MANY SONGS, SO LITTLE TIME

Granma got run over by the Mayan apocalypse,

Coming home from our house Christmas Eve . . .

Well, we’re halfway through December 21, 2012 and the world is still intact.  Yay, Earth!  Looks like we may have dodged another wonky doomsday prediction.  The Mayans have just gone the way of Jim Jones—turns out that old prophecy just meant today was the day to carve another calendar and make a new blood sacrifice after all!

I must admit to a quiet fascination with the End of the World.  Some tiny little part of me secretly wants to wipe it all out and start all over again (a fraction the sane, rational ruler of my brain keeps firmly under control, don’t worry!).  I’m not sure where that destructive impulse comes from.  It might be the question of whether I’d be able to survive the challenges of a disaster or a post-apocalyptic world.  (One of my favorite books as a child was Swiss Family Robinson.  I read the lists of things they took off the ship over and over and imagined what I might need to survive on a desert island.)  Or it might be a messianic zeal to heal the earth or build a new utopian society on the ashes of our current greedy, self-centered culture when I’m stuck in traffic.

But if you, like me, are feeling a little, well, let down by today’s humdrum lack of apocalyptic excitement, you can always turn to Hollywood for a vision of doomsday.  From the ridiculous to the sublime, these films will take you all the way to The End.

2012.  (2009)  Directed by Roland Emmerich and starring John Cusack, Thandi Newton, Amanda Peet  and a host of others, this blockbuster from a few years ago has the best special effects and the worst science of any of the doomsday films reviewed here.  Something about the Earth’s core, blah, blah, blah, I can’t remember.  But who cares when stuff gets destroyed with amazing abandon?  The best part of this movie was the tagline, used in theater previews:  “How would the governments of our planet prepare 6 billion people for the end of the world?  They wouldn’t.”  That’s been worrying me a lot as the “official denials” of the apocalypse have gone out this week.

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. (2004) Roland Emmerich directs (again!) Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal in this epic of global warming/superstorm disaster movies.  In this case the science is better than 2012 and the effects are just as good, making for pleasure without the guilt.  The acting is even decent, with a young Jake Gyllenhaal getting the false bravery thing just right.  Dennis Quaid as his prickly scientist dad provides a cheer-able combination of maverick intelligence and gritty physical courage. Love this movie!

KNOWING. (2009)  Well, these are movies about the end of the world, aren’t they.  So—SPOILER ALERT!!—they can’t all end well.  This outing, directed by Alex Proyas and starring Nicholas Cage and Rose Byrne (of TV’s DAMAGES) is in a different category from our two previous films in that it’s all about figuring out the mystery hinted at in a series of numbers left in a time capsule buried in a schoolyard in 1959.  Nick Cage is a mathematician, and what he finds in this “code”, written by a little girl so long ago and unearthed at his son’s school, sends him on a quest for survival.  Dark and suspenseful, but ultimately futile.

THE ROAD. (2009)  What was it about 2009?  As a movie-going public we were obsessed with the End of the World, though the ticket sales on this particular film probably didn’t show it.  Like the novel by Cormac McCarthy on which it is based, this film, directed by John Hillcoat and starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron and Kodi Smit-McPhee, is relentlessly grim and dark.  It is set in a post-apocalyptic world, but I include it in this list because the world is actually in a process of slow death throughout the film.  We don’t know why, and we don’t know if the world, and the people in it, will ultimately survive or not.  Fun times!  Not even an extended shot of Viggo’s naked backside can save this film.  Watch it when you think life couldn’t possibly get worse for you.  You’ll change that outlook in a hurry!

THE LAST WAVE. (1977) Peter Weir (MASTER AND COMMANDER; THE TRUMAN SHOW) directed this little gem of a film starring Richard Chamberlain early on in his career. I think I might have seen it on television years ago and I’ve never forgotten it.  Like KNOWING,      the focus in this film is on a central mystery, gradually revealed as Chamberlain’s character, a lawyer in Sydney, Australia, prepares to defend a group of Aborigine men on a murder charge.  Meanwhile the rain is falling and a prophecy foretold in the dreamtime is about to be fulfilled . . .   I have recurring dreams of tidal waves; the final scene still plays in my head.

 Jingle bells,

What the hell,

No killer asteroid today?

No zombie fun?

Don't have to run

From the undead, I'm not prey!

Hey!

On the other hand, it is the holiday season.  If the rest of today goes well, you could fall back on tried and true favorites like IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE or MIRACLE ON 34^TH STREET.  Or maybe a little disaster mixed with Christmas like CHRISTMAS VACATION or HOME ALONE.  Hollywood always has something for everyone!

I’ll be with family next Friday, so I won’t be blogging.  Here’s wishing everyone a Happy Holiday season and a Joyous New Year!  See you in 2013.

Cheers, Donna

A MORE SERIOUS NOTE

This irreverent look at the possibility of “apocalypse” is by no means meant to diminish the suffering of the victims of the very real disasters of Hurricane Sandy and the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  For those families and individuals, to an extent those of us on the outside cannot fathom, the world as they know it truly has ended.  We can only pray that they find the strength to rebuild and regain a sense of peace, security and love in a new world of their own making as the New Year dawns.