H.G. Wells and the Pepsi logo
(“… baloney is my business — I know it when I see it.” John Lithgow as Bruce the Army P.R. guy in Memphis Belle, Warner Bros. 1991)
I understand that the world is going to end this Friday. Still, I confess that I really haven’t been following any of these Doomsday reports since none of them are consistent with the Bible’s foretelling of the end of mankind’s rule on Earth. Most noteworthy among these discrepancies is that the Bible clearly states that no one knows the day or the hour but the Creator Himself.
It’s somehow doubtful that a bunch of ancient Mayans got God to slip up and spill the beans. Another popular prediction is that of Earth colliding with a tenth planet no one has actually seen and that has somehow escaped being named after Greek and Roman deities like eight out of the other nine. I’m sure there are plenty of scenarios that I haven’t heard of.
Recently, I heard another Doomsday-after-tomorrow scenario whereupon planetary alignment causes the sudden onset of a second Ice Age. Due to a sudden and dramatic drop in temperature, we would then share the apparent fate of the dinosaurs — instantly deep frozen right in the middle of whatever we were doing. Some caution is therefore advised. This could happen at an inopportune moment leaving us frozen in the act of doing something that we would not want to be declaring to the indifferent night sky for all eternity.
The quick freeze figure mentioned, as I understand, was 80 below zero. Heck, I can handle 80 below. In the Midwest, they still talk about the winter of 1977-78.
We spent that winter in a drafty circa 1880s Iowa farmhouse where the wind howls all winter and it snows sideways. Old Prairie farmhouses tend to be especially drafty because they had to be built between the winters. The scarcity of trees on the rolling, grassy landscape made it difficult to amass enough surplus lumber so as to let it season properly.
Consequently, many older houses were “put up green” and the lumber, already in place, would warp as it dried. This warpage made for stairways that are difficult to navigate in the dark and door frames worthy of Salvador Dali.
The out-of-square door frames and the corners that didn’t quite meet where they should were easily detected by my unpracticed eye. Had a skilled carpenter tried to live there, the place would probably drive him crazy. At night, the house would rock back and forth in the wind causing the iron window sash weights to swing back and forth, thumping eerily on the insides of the uninsulated walls.
That winter, our dog and our cat, normally bitter adversaries, called a temporary truce allowing the cat to sleep perched atop the dog in one of nature’s most unlikely symbiotic relationships. We lived in the large front room of the house, having closed off the rest of the place, including the kitchen. Fortunately, there was no plumbing to freeze.
The big Martin Wood King (basically an Ashley) stove that we had brought from the East kept this big room warm. In the morning, we would open the door to the kitchen and light the wood cook stove. The kitchen wouldn’t really start to warm up until it was about time to close off the kitchen for the night and let the cook stove go out.
All this, of course, required a lot of wood, which is not a problem in West Virginia but, on the Prairie, the supply could get frighteningly low. We sometimes had to cut firewood regardless of the wind or outside temperature. One especially cold and windy day, Stephanie (aka old Hippie) and I headed out to cut wood, sawing up lengths of blighted elm which had previously been hauled up from the creek bottoms. Our chainsaw was on the fritz with a new part ordered so we had to use the two-person crosscut. It was entirely too cold for any flesh to be exposed and even through the scarves and ski masks the wind’s bite was like Robert Service’s driven nail. We soon learned that we could minimize our exposure to the wind by trading ends of the saw frequently.
The following day, we learned that the previous day’s low temperature, including the wind/chill factor was 75 below zero. So what’s another 5 or 10 degrees when you’re dealing with those kind of numbers? We haven’t been cold since.
Anyway, all of these Doomsday scenarios (with the express exception of Bible prophecy) are merely fiction presented as news. How do I know? One consideration is that I’m in the business of story telling and thus can easily recognize the product. However, I can’t say for sure that I wouldn’t have been taken in by the 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds where even the official weather report told of a “high altitude disturbance of unknown nature.” And, more recently, for a few hours I was convinced by an NPR broadcast that a familiar corporate logo (likely Pepsi’s) was to be projected onto the moon that night of April 1.
See you next Wednesday — Canada’s Boxing Day.
(“… baloney is my business — I know it when I see it.” John Lithgow as Bruce the Army P.R. guy in Memphis Belle, Warner Bros. 1991)
I understand that the world is going to end this Friday. Still, I confess that I really haven’t been following any of these Doomsday reports since none of them are consistent with the Bible’s foretelling of the end of mankind’s rule on Earth. Most noteworthy among these discrepancies is that the Bible clearly states that no one knows the day or the hour but the Creator Himself.
It’s somehow doubtful that a bunch of ancient Mayans got God to slip up and spill the beans. Another popular prediction is that of Earth colliding with a tenth planet no one has actually seen and that has somehow escaped being named after Greek and Roman deities like eight out of the other nine. I’m sure there are plenty of scenarios that I haven’t heard of.
Recently, I heard another Doomsday-after-tomorrow scenario whereupon planetary alignment causes the sudden onset of a second Ice Age. Due to a sudden and dramatic drop in temperature, we would then share the apparent fate of the dinosaurs — instantly deep frozen right in the middle of whatever we were doing. Some caution is therefore advised. This could happen at an inopportune moment leaving us frozen in the act of doing something that we would not want to be declaring to the indifferent night sky for all eternity.
The quick freeze figure mentioned, as I understand, was 80 below zero. Heck, I can handle 80 below. In the Midwest, they still talk about the winter of 1977-78.
We spent that winter in a drafty circa 1880s Iowa farmhouse where the wind howls all winter and it snows sideways. Old Prairie farmhouses tend to be especially drafty because they had to be built between the winters. The scarcity of trees on the rolling, grassy landscape made it difficult to amass enough surplus lumber so as to let it season properly.
Consequently, many older houses were “put up green” and the lumber, already in place, would warp as it dried. This warpage made for stairways that are difficult to navigate in the dark and door frames worthy of Salvador Dali.
The out-of-square door frames and the corners that didn’t quite meet where they should were easily detected by my unpracticed eye. Had a skilled carpenter tried to live there, the place would probably drive him crazy. At night, the house would rock back and forth in the wind causing the iron window sash weights to swing back and forth, thumping eerily on the insides of the uninsulated walls.
That winter, our dog and our cat, normally bitter adversaries, called a temporary truce allowing the cat to sleep perched atop the dog in one of nature’s most unlikely symbiotic relationships. We lived in the large front room of the house, having closed off the rest of the place, including the kitchen. Fortunately, there was no plumbing to freeze.
The big Martin Wood King (basically an Ashley) stove that we had brought from the East kept this big room warm. In the morning, we would open the door to the kitchen and light the wood cook stove. The kitchen wouldn’t really start to warm up until it was about time to close off the kitchen for the night and let the cook stove go out.
All this, of course, required a lot of wood, which is not a problem in West Virginia but, on the Prairie, the supply could get frighteningly low. We sometimes had to cut firewood regardless of the wind or outside temperature. One especially cold and windy day, Stephanie (aka old Hippie) and I headed out to cut wood, sawing up lengths of blighted elm which had previously been hauled up from the creek bottoms. Our chainsaw was on the fritz with a new part ordered so we had to use the two-person crosscut. It was entirely too cold for any flesh to be exposed and even through the scarves and ski masks the wind’s bite was like Robert Service’s driven nail. We soon learned that we could minimize our exposure to the wind by trading ends of the saw frequently.
The following day, we learned that the previous day’s low temperature, including the wind/chill factor was 75 below zero. So what’s another 5 or 10 degrees when you’re dealing with those kind of numbers? We haven’t been cold since.
Anyway, all of these Doomsday scenarios (with the express exception of Bible prophecy) are merely fiction presented as news. How do I know? One consideration is that I’m in the business of story telling and thus can easily recognize the product. However, I can’t say for sure that I wouldn’t have been taken in by the 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds where even the official weather report told of a “high altitude disturbance of unknown nature.” And, more recently, for a few hours I was convinced by an NPR broadcast that a familiar corporate logo (likely Pepsi’s) was to be projected onto the moon that night of April 1.
See you next Wednesday — Canada’s Boxing Day.
