h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As the awaited filmic presentation of the Art Bell book of climate crises is set to debut in the United States,(referrencing "The Day after tomorrow."), one must note the odd Aprilian weather activities of this week just passed. Monday was a shivering 40ish day, Tuesday a fright of hail, oddly un-gentle rain, and funnel cloud, mid week saw the temps climb to the 80 mark (but still chilling in the shadows of trees). Marching on into Friday and Saturday, more heat wave! Odd weather for Seattle, all together!

Running almost like sterophonic background theme music, self-concious climate pundits of myriad media, espouse a future of the UK under 80 feet of ice. This tact for weather prediction never fails to engender an image of the folks in 'Train Spotting' being fast-frozen, breakfast knippers still in their mouths, to be discovered a millinium later at the next defrost cycle.

Locally, stirring the disquiet, a mini-series on American television is being pandered to the public via frequent broadcasts of alarming footage of [models] the Seattle Space Needle and the San Francisco Golden Gate bridge dancing themselves down to doom and destruction, with a generic earth ripping train swallowing scene or two thrown in. The highly suggestive hook line on the voice over is "Buildings will fall, heros will rise." (I think it is titled "10.5" but I am not certain because I am always focusing on the made up buildings that the toppling Space Needle is smashing, hoping to identify their full scale counter parts.)

American males from a tender age exhibit a prediliction for playing out the substance of all this model smashing, trashing matchbox cars on shakey ice cream stick bridges with outsized scale boulders in an otherwise placid sand box. Come to think on that, my suspician is that males world-wide (and in the words of H.G. Wells, the better sort of girls) share this taste for tiny disaster making. There are those children who express a less destructive natue, of course. You can tell the future engineers in the bunch as they create futile mini-landslide barriers above the doomed roadway.

The resurgence of the disaster-tainment industry evokes an awareness of my country's healing. Returning to the escape of sand box calamity while exiting the eyes and ears glued to the world news is a sure indication that as a nation Americans are getting on with things, even as they wrap up, with the able assist of stalwart allies, the deeds that will be writ large in the annals of human memory.

And beyond the sand box crises? The 'Illiad' in the filmic guise of "Troy," a favorite mental venue for imagined heroics of my youth, will envelope and ensnare our minds, as spear-weilding Brad Pitt leaps blondely across the kinetic sky, striking the latest incarnation of the doomed Hector down to the shadows of death. (Interestingly, the Illiad is also the first 'show' in history that produced spin-offs, not just the post-Illium-sacking 'Odessey' (the original version of the joke, 'why men wont ask for directions') but the 'Aeniad,' which could star Joey Trebbiany, if it were ever submitted to a film treatment.

Call it a quiet return to confidence for civilization. Call it a renewed heathful experiancing of being alive. Or simply name it, 'entertainment.' It should be a very interesting summer.

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