Do droughts cause desertification?
The most common consequences [of drought]: wildfires, desertification, loss of agricultural production…
Or not?
It is a common misconception that droughts cause desertification.
We love Wikipedia, but this sort of thing sure happens often. Bit like the old joke about looking up “circular reference” in the dictionary…
I love it that there are people out there who keep a WAAALT! count, though they’re lagging behind. Number of people so far who now refer to Michael as the “Judas Beast” = 4. Please, join the club. Man, I hate that guy. “My booooy! My boooooy!” Aw, go build a raft.
Lost-related coincidences in real life are a little freaky. Roommate bought a copy of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men the day before we watched Every Man For Himself.
I found the Sri Lanka Video a little -annoying, actually, because it seems clumsy and lazy. Not the video itself (that too, perhaps), but the fact that it’s the “Sri Lanka” video. It sounds like they just picked this place because it’s convenient shorthand for “far away”, a nonplace, a placeholder -something which is both exotic and generic. Also, “far away” doesn’t work for us what live out here. It’s not far away, it’s right here -and I can’t picture Rachel Blake running away from the Hansos and Mittelwerks on the streets of my own home town. It’s ludicrous. Too close to the real world and the fragile suspension of disbelief shatters.
I’m not too hot on the whole let’s-pretend of The Lost Experience with all its games on the intarwebs and half-a-billion fake websites for everything from fake corporations to Enzo Valenzetti’s grandmother. This is Franken-fiction, struck alive by a post-modern lightning bolt and staggering off the table. But when it shambles down the street -your street- you can see the scars of clumsy surgery, and you know it’s just a monster.
It looks so much better on TV.
On this supremely pulped Earth (published by grace of GRACE: the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), why is Sri Lanka at the bottom of an ugly purple bruise? Are we the planet’s gravitational black eye? I watched the little movie clip that comes with it -’tis after all worth forty seconds of your life to find out if you and yours are the only human beings who live in a big purple bruise. The short answer is, yes -we are, in fact, the only visible big purple bruise. The long answer begins with “Of course, we have no idea what the hell that means….” and goes on to elucidate just how clueless we are about what we just said.
Also, Edgy Eft is out today. W00t.
See, apparently Marissa Mayer is a hologram. Or an android. (Technically, she can’t be an android -andros means male. A female-shaped robot would have to be a… gynoid? Unfortunately, anthropoid is taken. By monkeys.) Do you realize what this means? All these years, we’ve bought the “we have a secret algorithm” line that Google’s been handing out, when in truth it’s much simpler. Marissa Mayer is a super-intelligent AI who personally indexes the entire web and answers all Google search queries. You heard it here first.
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