Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, August 24, 2020.
While California burns, a local fire here in the Santa Fe forest burns on. It makes me so sad, for the animals, for the people who escape to it for shade and comfort in this desert landscape. Stay safe out there.
Could have avoided damage to the giant redwoods by doing small scale selective logging and keeping underbrush cleaned out.
Stopping all fires in a forest is not a good thing. Small seasonal fires would remove small trees and brush before they’d get thick enough to be a hazard for a huge fire that would kill all the mature trees.
When the objective of total fire prevention is met, humans must take over the job of what the natural small fired sued to do, clean the forest.
“..natural small fires used to…”
Most selective logging in california ecosystems doesn’t work. Makes things worse. It could probably be done well but in the current political climate it …isn’t. The only functional way to manage the land is with frequent prescribed burns where appropriate. That’s how it was managed for thousands of years pre colonization. However that might not even work now because newly introduced invasive weeds are more flammable than what used to be here. And of course climate change and habitat fragmentation etc.
When someone talks to herself that much in a closed space, it helps to have fresh breath.
For just a moment I thought “Suicide pill?”
I suppose the other option would be a ‘temporary coma pill’ to aid his escape.
Actual answer, Tic Tac.
This IS Chris we’re taking about… (his mind anyway. Lol)
So Minty fresh truth serum pills would be Tik Talk?
i have a whole new anxiety regarding death now.
what flavor should my breath be when i die?
I’m hoping mine will be beer flavoured, after I tell someone “hold my beer and watch this.”
Garlic. Make them regret killing you.
ooh, revenge breath. need to trademark that.
You know, I’m not sure this joke is appropriate.
Chris has already admitted that being isolated is his worst fear of jail, and it seems to be Stangor’s fear likewise. Is she about to off herself for real out of that fear? Uh, no.
The last time I saw this gag done well, it was Richard Hooker’s “M*A*S*H” — not the film, the book he wrote after coming home from Korea. And it was played for a more serious set of laughs, what with Captain “Painless” Waldowski getting served up, in order, Black Capsule (“It worked for Hitler and Eva Braun”) and the clueless, hapless Lt. Dish. And mind, now, this is about a guy who wants to kill himself because his one-time flaccid performance convinced him he’s gone homosexual. He finds out otherwise (off-camera, in book and movie). In 1970 this worked.
Stangor has already been shown about to blow herself up to try and get free, with her belatedly realizing what would happen in the BANG. She’s of limited imagination as well as limited intellect, but geez-o-Pete (sic), going the poison-pill route in such dramatic fashion? I’m too horrified to laugh. Had she pulled out an umbrella or the tattered remains of another symbiont… I would be riveted. A fifty year-old rehash of a suicide gag… not so much. Sorry, Chris.
No worries, @Pete. Can’t please ’em all. I think the “spy with a cyanide pill” is enough of an overused and mundane trope, that I’m comfortable making a joke about it. But I see how it could be taken more serious.
I just hope Emily hasn’t forgotten about her. I mean, she’s in that box, which presumably has some sort of Maxwell’s Demon to ensure a fresh supply of oxygen, but there’s no waste disposal units, nor water for washing after or for drinking.
I’m still not sure if that was a suicide pill. A minty one?
No more than Trapper John’s Black Capsule was lethal. We’re just allowed to think it is until Stangor pops it and comments about breath mints. The possibility of minty death pills is left to the reader; it is not pursued here.