Day 934 – Happy Birthday to Me.

Thursday, August 10, 1050

Yeah, it’s early morning and time to contemplate because I’m now a year older. Well, not til 10:30 tonight, but close enough for me to ponder what I’ve done in the last year, and with my life so far, and what I intend to do in the future.

I’m giving a talk on Angkor Wat soon and I was trying to think of a way to wrap it up. I thought about Ayn Rand and the phrase she used over and over again in “The Fountainhead, “Check your assumptions, one of them is wrong.” And that sums up the problem ancient Angkor ran into.

I was also thinking about Florida and the elephant they are not dealing with, which will make Ron DeSantis’ mean spirited dumb actions irrelevant. (His latest one was to dismiss a prosecutor he didn’t like. Somehow he thinks this endears him to people? I don’t know. You’d think he’d want to get a handle on leprosy and malaria in the state he’s supposed to be governor of.)

And this led me to thinking about Tom Van Sant. Back in the 70s when I was very active in kiting, Tom was an artist on the west coast. He had some materials left over from a job and he used them to make a centipede kite, also called a dragon kite. The typical Asian dragon kite is a series of round cells with bamboo arms sticking out to either side. These cells are joined together with lines and equally spaced. The kite can be very long, a hundred cells or more. The arms have feathers on them and they droop down a bit from the center. This actually helps stabilize the kite. Much like a high wire performer on a tight rope with a long pole hanging to either side helps stabilize them. Tom made a huge cell and it was an oval. I think it was three feet across. He stabilized each cell with a drogue hanging from a vertical stick off the bottom. It was very unique and spectacular. There’s a black and white movie on YouTube showing it flying.

Here’s an updated color movie of Tom’s kite. I stand corrected on the drogue. Either my memory is faulty or he changed some of the design. (Couldn’t be me? Naw.)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6RiTIEgLDIc

When I went to see Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” he had maps showing what would flood if the sea levels rose. He mentioned they were done by his old pal, Tom Van Sant. I wondered if it was the same guy. I didn’t really know Tom; I knew of him. I noodled around, got an email address and asked. Yup. Same guy.

One of his map models shows Florida when the sea levels rise. Most of the state is gone. It’s underwater. We are already seeing evidence of that when downtown Miami gets flooded on a regular basis. What is the answer of the political right? Last I heard it was to point out that someone who is famous and known to be progressive bought a house on the Florida shore. This as if to say, “See! If they are doing that they don’t believe it.”

Soon it won’t be a matter of belief.

Like the people of Atlantis (e.g. Santorini) and it’s neighbor Crete, when the volcano collapsed Santorini was mostly gone and what wasn’t was buried under a wave of water. Crete suffered from a set of tidal waves, at least seven. What do you do when a wall of water nearly 300 feet high is approaching? There’s nowhere to run. Like the folks in Galveston who went out to see the dry ocean bed, not realizing this meant a huge wave  had sucked out all the water and was coming. They should run like hell the other way. When it came; it was too late.

But Florida will suffer a similar if slower fate. Enough time for the right wing and QAnon folks to develop elaborate theories and conjecture as to why it’s not their fault. When the wave comes, when the water rises, it doesn’t care.

Angkor? They planned their whole city around the water staying at a certain level. When the water level dropped, the whole plan was moot. People moved away. 

The Mayans cut down their forests to grow crops and make stucco. They saw the rain levels drop, but they kept cutting. Soon their cities could no longer sustain their populations.

We know what happens. Some are in denial. Some don’t believe it. Some make excuses. The ocean doesn’t care.

Hum. This isn’t where I thought I’d end up. Hum. 

Here’s hoping that people will start standing up and like the little kid say, “The emperor has no clothes.”

Speaking of which, a politician I heard speaking yesterday said that if Trump is convicted of all the charges he’s accused of he could be spending over 600 years in jail.

There. That’s a better place to leave it.