Well, well, it’s Saturday morning and I thought the kiddos had soccer at 9:30 this morning. Turns out it 1:30 this afternoon. Maybe my morning coffee will straighten me out.

Marcia said that after my eyes were dilated during yesterday’s eye appointment that I haven’t been acting right – starting by going from the optometrist’s straight to Target; there to blindly bounce around the aisles wearing sunglasses.

“I walk around like everything is fine, but deep down, inside my shoe, my sock is sliding off” ~ Jessica Terese

Wienermobile – Paul sometimes wonders where I get the ideas on finding things to do. This week it could be that I’ll head to a nearby supermarket for a free Wienerwhistle. See, this coming week the famed Oscar Meyer Wienermobile is touring the Cincinnati area.

Had it come here a couple of days earlier it could have created national attention by chasing the 36,000+ folk running our streets on Cincinnati’s Flying Pig Marathon (it’s tomorrow morning): “27’ of wiener seen chasing flying pigs”, as the headline.

The corner of Chaos and Mayhem – mid-week, 3:30 AM and I awoke to blue flashing lights through our shuttered windows; a Blue Light Special? (remember those from K-Mart days?) Awake, I went to the sun room to see two cops from our neighboring town and a pulled over car go through the normal checks before everyone left. They really were quiet, except that I did hear the cop thank the driver for pulling over and ask if he could make it home.

Nnedi Okorafor – came to town and I invited Jason to join me for an evening with her. A Cincinnati-native born to Nigerian parents Okorafor earned a PhD in literature and taught at the University level: all prior to ‘jumping out’ into the world of writing. And it didn’t take long before a whole new world of African-based science-fiction, fantasy and magical realism was opened up to us.

Then, going against the grain she began branching out, heaven forbid, into visual stories; ‘graphic novels’ –  those dreaded papers which we as kids begged our parents to buy for us – COMICS.

The Marvel story line of Black Panther as part of the X-Men and Avengers comics and subsequent movies has at their root the ideas of Nnedi Okorafor.

End of the world – As a youngster I remember occasionally seeing a picture cartoon of an old, scraggily bearded guy in open sandals and a moth-eaten robe carrying a sign proclaiming; “End of the World”.

Those people really do exist, only now they fly private jets and live in multi-million dollar summer houses. It’s a wonderful business; ask half of the UN, ask British Parliamentarians, Al Gore, or just ask Bernie or AOC or Beto.

All of them are masters of ‘Doom and Gloom’ when it comes to today’s bugaboo: Climate Change. Through them many of us have been dubbed; “deniers’. Especially since, “the science is settled”.

The reality being that there is a whole scientific world which realizes that real science is never settled. And, that from the get-go the climate has always been changing.

So, with Earth Day having come and gone this past week I thought I’d hand you some recent spectacularly wrong predictions (all since the first earth Day):

• Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
• In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half…
• Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
• Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000.

Want me to go on? Bless the Doomsday business.

Finis – By now I’ve seen our spare bedroom turned into a haven for pack-rats. Marcia assures me that this year we’ll head north with “much less” than other years.

Donn, Marlene, and Bulent are all at the lake for season start-up purposes. Photos and writings proclaim that all is well at Northern Comfort. Yea!

And, best of all, after record cold and 13-feet of snow in the north woods, it’s all melted slowly and on the lake the ice is quickly exiting.

Do well and make it a safe week.
Ciao
Dirk