pastpersistent

the past in pop culture

Month: January, 2014

January 31, 2014

The Birds Are Angry

The Birds

The Birds (Photo credit: edu_fon)

With the NSA around, who needs fiction any more? Using Angry Birds to spy on people? Priceless! It’s the perfect mash-up of time wasting app with full on 1950s paranoia. Rovio married to Hitchcock. In The Birds, we never do find out why those birds are so angry at Tippie Hedren nor is it clear in the game what the swine have done to merit such hatred. All we know is that the threat is constant.

Some see a neo-Cold War conspiracy in Angry Birds. The game’s designers say they were inspired by the threat of a swine flu epidemic back in ’09. As it turns out, the birds are now the bigger problem. Even just this week avian flu has returned to the headlines with new quarantines of bird markets in China and the first human death from the virus recorded in North America. Are the pigs going to get angry, too? (This is not a facetious question if you live in Texas, by the way. After a dramatic rise in the feral hog population, the ravaging swine have invaded suburban areas causing fears of an aporkalypse.)

Pigs just don’t seem to have the same existential charge as birds though. Pigs, after all, are mammals like ourselves. Birds might be warm blooded but they’re still reptiles descended from the dinosaurs. It’s hard enough to know what your cat thinks of you—good luck with the birds.

We all like watching the sea gulls at the seashore but just try eating a hotdog there. Crows can also be creepy. Why else would a group of them be termed a murder? Just a few days ago a sea gull and a crow got together to attack some peace doves released by the Pope. Birds have a pecking order, too. Just ask Amazon. Its delivery drones are getting taken down by hawks who aren’t accustomed to sharing the skies.

The drones are fighting back though. Or rather, the U.S. Army is. Now it’s making its drones look less like drones and more like birds. Soon it will be equipping its troops with flocks of them. What’s that at your bird feeder, you ask? The beady-eyed character with a sharp beak and no interest in seeds? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s just the latest technology coming soon to a location very near you. Promise.

 

 

 

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January 8, 2014

Some Say in Ice

Endurance final sinking in Antarctica

Endurance final sinking in Antarctica (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fairy tales are timeless, aren’t they? If Disney’s box office busting Frozen seems timely in view of the polar vortex then surely that’s just coincidence. Of course, fairy tales are also cautionary or at least they used to be. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen that inspired Frozen had a queen who meant to kill and the original stories that the Brothers Grimm gathered frequently included mutilation, sex out of wedlock, and murder most foul.

In Frozen, Olaf the snowman sings of summer without realizing that melting means an existential crisis. It’s the joke of the movie and also its hint of menace. What happens to said snowman? Let’s just say here that according to the ever reliable Urban Dictionary “Disneyfication” means “to remove the sharp edges and darkness that is life.”

Not that happy endings never happen. Just yesterday the Russian ship the Akademik Shokalskiy that had spent the holidays mired in Antarctic pack ice and the Chinese icebreaker that tried to go to its rescue made it out to open water. Things didn’t always go so well on polar expeditions. In 1915, when Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance got stuck and then crushed by Antarctic pack ice, he and five of his men trekked 800 miles to get help rescuing the rest of the stranded crew. Before setting off, Shackleton reached in his pocket and threw a handful of gold coins in the snow. They would be of no use.

Now, by contrast, cost is at issue in the rescue of the Akademik Shokalskiy since no fewer than three ships needed to come to its aid and thus couldn’t do their actual work of supporting polar research. Still, for fans of Disneyfication, climate change deniers have made merry with the thought that the scientists aboard the Akademik Shokalskiy found more rather than less ice on their expedition. Perhaps they should read the message in a bottle left by an American geologist in 1954 in the Canadian arctic. Recently rediscovered, it served its intended purpose as a measurement for the near disappearance of a glacier that has dwindled by over a hundred meters.

Robert Frost debated whether the earth ought to end in fire or ice. The journalists based in Australia covering the Antarctic rescue contretemps can get a first row seat at that debate. The island continent faces a devastating heat wave even as the polar vortex crushes the northern climes with punishingly low temperatures. Will Heat Miser and Snow Miser become the new Ali versus Frazier? To paraphrase the ever quotable Mohammed Ali, that showdown will be a killer and a thriller and a chiller. Let’s hope Olaf stays home.

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