To view something awesomely strange...
The last quarter of 1996 offered a glint of hope to those whose avocation of drooling foam from their gesticulating scowls had come up depressingly desiccated - Enviro-whiners. Sworn to oppose progress in its every form, the self-appointed high clergyhominids of swamp (wetlands), jungle (rain forests), mud puddles (vernal pools), and garbage (landfills) suffered a glut of ecological farce in the sacrosanct Third World and wimpering stock markets in the damned First World. AIDS had not depopulated Africa, the Ozone Hole required billion dollar NASA telemetries to detect, automotive airbags were killing children, and the Greenhouse Effect was tardy in incinerating Gaia. When mutant Minnesota frogs materialized it was Luddite ecorgasm. Civilization did it!
Capitalism brutally expunged 6000 varieties of apples (page 12, January/February 1996 Sierra magazine, "The supermarket is an ideal venue for eater activism"). The Furbish Lousewort is yet endangered. San Berdoo taxpayers stomp every Delhi Sands Flower-Loving Fly they can find. 15,000 acres of fragile and endangered Malibu habitat burned October 18-23 1996, utterly ignored by air pollution indices. Lo! A bright beam blasted down from heaven. Magnus Poswilly of Leech Lake, Minnesota noticed the fruits of his nocturnal frog giggings weren't quite right.
Every anuran hors d'oeuvre from Rana pipens to the Giant Flying Vampire Toad was in Official worldwide short supply as tens of thousands of ecologists fanned out across the globe to trap, count, and then pickle specimens. Nobody cared. (South African clawed frogs, Xenopus, were eleven pounds each of angry abundance, as were highly toxic and hallucinogenic cane toads in Australia. They didn't count - not cute enough.) It was only after Magnus Poswilly came up with bucket after bucket of legless one-eyed double-bodied carnie sideshow mutant frogs that Enviro-whiners made the 11 o'clock news. "Ewwwww! Gross! Show us some more!"
In point of fact the same 43 seconds of video tape was shown on all the news programs, leading one to suspect an ecological travesty of vanishing proportions. One can also view genuine unicorns at the Orange County Fair. Take a baby male goat, excise the horn buds from either side of its head, split them in half sagittally, mix halves, then implant in the kid's forehead. There obtains a splendidly mythical single horn with its natural helicity damped by opposing growth venues of the bud halves.
As with crop circles and child molestations, freak frog fantasies exploded across anoxic mud flats throughout this great nation. The Official dearth of amphibians caused by ozone depletion, pollution, habitat destruction, rising temperatures, and unknown diseases begging for expensive and expansive studies... became an overnight inconceivable abundance of deformed publicity-seeking froggy victims. It was like Notre Dame advertising for a bell ringer a day before the International Brotherhood of Hunchbacks held their Paris convention.
Biologists and limnologists but mostly undergraduates admitted via Affirmative Action diversity guidelines trudged through fen, bog, and mire seeking qualitative and quantitative assessments of anomalous phenotypic manifestations of something publishable in a technical journal. Hot to trot weeklies like Science and Nature, darlings of Martian meteorite right-to-lifers, were strangely silent about the plague. Refereed journals are like that; TV programs like Hard Copy is not.
The Internet seethed with indifference as Web spiders, smart agents, and search engines gorged upon the more palpable likes of http://www.pythonline.com/ and http://www.hillaryshair.com/. Is that a deformed frog in your URL, or are you just glad to see me? Usenet disclosed a four star "huh?". The continental and perhaps global affliction threatening all terrestrial life - frogs being this week's trendy bellwether of Gaian health - promenaded the sustained impact of a sparrow fart in a hurricane.
Deformed birds in California's Central Valley hinted at what were discovered to be toxic levels of selenium accumulating from irrigation seepage leaching desert soil. Biologically refractory, lipophilic, xenocryptoestrogenic polychlorinated hydrocarbons used as insecticides also made their deleterious presence felt. It is one thing to bring the full force and grandeur of modern science to bear upon a rampant biological mystery. It is another to start a Chinese fire drill because a profile of Elvis appears burned upon a taco in Tijuana.
The Minnesota mutant frog plague, originally reported to have spread across the whole of the northern US, vanished without so much as a methane-rich swamp bubble. One is reminded of the National Health Care Crisis after Hitlery Ramrod Clinton put in her thumb and pulled out an interim multi-thousand page turd. Quantum mechanics asserts that only observables exist as reality. Fair enough.
To return to Uncle Al Outrage Central, click here
To view something awesomely strange...