The Revenge of the Mighty Five Ninety

Our parents had a summer house at Harvey's Lake, Pennsylvania. Technically, they had a year-round house that we resided in only during the summer. Despite my oft-voiced lament at how hard my growing up years were, I cannot remember one kid from the neighborhood, actually, any of the neighborhoods we ever lived whose family blew out of town right after the school year ended and who didn't return until after Labor Day.

I didn't mean to rub my childhood in your face, or in mine (actually) but I was thinking about one of the most annoying thing of all those summers (the Summer of Love happened ohne mich and anybody else I knew) with the fitful musical companionship of The Might Five Ninety (AM), from Wilkes-Barre/Scranton (but it was really Scranton), W-A-R-M.

"Is it hot enough (or cold enough in the winter on the ski trips) for you? Well, it's only WARM for me!" Every stop set ended with that voice over and the TM jingle package singers would croon and somebody somewhere, maybe the guy with the business at the Avoca Airport, would sell us something and then it was back to the (Top 40) music.

Was thinking about warm, not the radio kind, more like the radiating kind while reading this news item. Suspect some of us, no names please (the junior Senator from Texas) are hoping tee-shirts will be given out. Though I suspect two agencies, NOAA, and NASA, might see budget reductions as punishment for telling their committee chairman he doesn't need new clothes because it is truly so (globally) warm.

And that's not the only bad news in our war on nature if that's what we're waging. I’ve shared in this space that I’m not a fast friend of fish on my menu. I eat fish sticks, drenched in tartar sauce and swordfish with lemon and that’s it.

I recognize I’m depriving myself of a vital part of everyone’s nutritional pyramids but unless or until Pepperidge Farms comes out with Flounder, Perch, and Bass in the way they did with Goldfish, I’ll stay on the shore and cast not my bread upon the waters.

That said, as a traveler on The Big Blue Marble, I found this story about our oceans becoming floating garbage dumps more than a little frightening.  And being one of the people who helps put the sap in homo sapiens, I know how competitive we are as a species so I can easily see us beating that 2050 date. 

I don’t know much about a lot of things (and it’s too late in the day for me to start now). About the only thing, I comprehend about the map below is that it’s definitely not to scale (that was a fish pun; the Gordon’s fisherman would be proud). On a more serious note, it looks like we can drop a Texas, or maybe two of them, into that space.   

We have a recycling program where we live and we make good use of it. Could we do be better? Yeah, I’m sure we could and after looking at what purports to be one of about two hundred gazillion pictures of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I hope we succeed. 

This is all the planet we have, so far, and once we’ve finished spoiling our oceans with indestructible pollution, don’t expect the lights to come up and an usher to escort you from your easy chair to the nearest exit.  

We are slowly committing suicide, even those who are afraid of commitment, and will take the rest of the orb with us. It’s not just diamonds that are forever and at the rate we’re going, it won’t be us either. 

-bill kenny