Supervolcanoes

For the first time in my life I'm actually paying for cable TV. I've had it before but it was always there in that new apartment we moved into already hooked up and ... well... Who wouldn't take free cable? Right? Now you know how soft my moral underbelly really is, neh?

The last time this was the case was 2001 when we watched the trade towers come down live from NYC and in October of that year the Yanks lost the World Series to the D-Backs... Then the juice was shut off...darkness all around...the flicker of the set silenced... that's ok.... I don't need TV... it's all shit anyway... there's nothing on day to day I absolutely must see...

You end up taking pride in the fact that you don't watch TV. Like this somehow makes one appear smarter and more in touch with the more scholarly pursuits of reading and playing computer baseball... You say to your students, "Sorry, I don't watch TV. Just DVDs... No, I don't know that funny commercial you're talking about. Yeah, no, I missed the brawl in Legislative Yuan..." And I didn't miss it. Really. At all.

Enter the Sandstress. Earlier this year she suggested we get it for 3 reasons. A) It's good to hear Mandarin and it's even better for Ivo (20 months) to hear it. B) They show a lot of baseball games (though they are mostly Yankee games) and C) Don't you miss zoning out? And it's not like we're suddenly gonna stop reading...

Good points all. So I agreed to get it installed.... which brings me to the point of the post...finally...

I was watching one of the nature channels the other night and they had some vulcanologists not just investigating volcanoes but SUPERVOLCANOES. Lake Toba in Indonesia is one. So is Yellowstone in the States. As well as others scattered across the planet...When these things blow again - and we just don't know really when that'll be - the ash cloud and pyroclastic floes?/flows? should do a pretty good job of blotting out the sun for a couple of years, long enough to kill all plant life... Ambulatory corporeals like ourselves inside the blast zone would obviously be toast...those outside would become victims of a kind of ash inhalation that could only lead to death... there's a word for that... very bad news...The magic number they reckoned on was 75,000 years ago Toba went up and it's possible though not certain that it may have triggered the last ice age...

anyway here's a very comprehensive link on SUPERVOLCANOES...