Point Nemo

No, it’s not my hidden undersea lair from which my minions plot my megalomaniacal machinations. Nor is it some Vernesian secret society aiming to restore Victorian triumphalism throughout the globe. And it’s not even the hottest surfer spot in Australia, or Hawaii, or Southern California, where dudes mix it up with multi-metered monster waves, nor the stoner bar where they relax and tell tall toked-up tales of the pipelines that got away.

Point Nemo happens to be the furthest point in the ocean from land.

It lies in the central Pacific Ocean, nearly 1,500 miles or so from Pitcairn Island in the north, Easter Island in the northeast, and Maher island in the south, which lies just off the coast of Antarctica. Eggheads refer to it as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility.

Should you wish to plug the coordinates into your motorboat’s GPS (not recommended), you’d use 48 degrees 52.6 minutes south by 123 degrees 23.6 minutes west. From what I understand, H.P. Lovecraft used the coordinates in his infamous story The Call of Cthulhu, it being the location of the Old One’s ancient and terrible eldritch city. But I’d have to look that up; haven’t read it in four or five years.

My interest in Point Nemo was piqued upon reading a short article on the Tiangong-1. What? You don’t remember the Tiangong-1? That was the school-bus sized Chinese space station that plummeted to earth this past Easter. If you remember, “experts” were predicting it could come crashing down anywhere between latitude 43 degrees north (Hopper’s current hidden lair is at 41.01 degrees north) and 43 degrees south. That’s a wide swath of real estate. But, strangely enough considering there was no way to control the station’s crash, it landed very very close to Nemo. I say strange because, due to its isolation from shipping lanes and population centers, Point Nemo is chosen fairly regularly as a crash landing zone for artificial space debris, so much so that’s it’s informally known as the “satellite graveyard.”

Now, apparently there are these things called Gyres out on the seven seas – well, actually five of them. Gyres, not seas. One each in the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Indian, North Pacific, and South Pacific oceans. Major currents, “mega” or even “meta” currents we can call them, to be overly hip, form a swirling Coriolis Effect due to the spin of the planet, and each, logically, has a center. Point Nemo forms the center of the South Pacific Gyre. And these things are big, thousands of miles along the furthest outer regions.

Unfortunately, gyres have two downsides. One is the swirling tides tend to keep nutrients from the center regions. So these centers tend to be lifeless. But worse, they also tend to accumulate all the ocean junk that’s out there: plastic bottles, other floating man-made debris, sludge and oil from spills, the occasional Chinese space station, and whatnot. So much so that Point Nemo also has the informal label of the South Pacific Garbage Patch. Yuck.

So now you have three new terms to dazzle your friends and acquaintances: Point Nemo, the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, and the South Pacific Ocean Gyre. Go forth and dazzle! And I shall abscond to my hidden undersea lair to plot how to use them all against mankind!

Spamtastic II

Hey Hops, surely not everything is grim and work-work-work. See or hear anything funny lately?

Why, yes. Yes I did see and hear something funny lately. This past weekend, to be precise. It literally – and I mean literally and not figuratively, made me laugh out loud.

Lay it on us, man!

Okay. Ever get one of those grammatically-spastic borderline pathetic appeals in your email to help some overseas prince out handling a couple million dollars? Sure. Who hasn’t? One time I even blogged about one I received, here. So imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this youtube video.

Let’s see it!

Tchk – not done with the set up yet.

Sorry, dude. Go on.

I don’t remember how I got to the video or why I clicked on it. It’s a TED talk, and I classify TED talks among Farmer’s Markets and hybrid vehicles. (That’s pretentious to the foo-foo-ey-eth degree, for those unaccustomed to Hopper.) But I gave it a chance, and wound up laughing so hard I had to play this guy’s other videos. They’re all good, and I still don’t know a single thing about him!

Play it! Play it!

Well, you can. Just click on the video below. Enjoy!

Memorial Day 2018

Well, a lot got done over here in Hopperville. Frankly, I’m exhausted. But satisfied.

I spent four hours over two days in manual labor fighting a tactical retreat against nature here at the Homestead. This involved mowing the crabgrass, clipping the hedges, sawing off splintered tree limbs, cleaning that gross yellow tree pollen off everything, and a whole host of other activities. I managed to fill four trash cans and eight leaf bags with vegetation debris to be carted off. Stuffed the entire back of our Honda Pilot with branches and dropped them off at the local recycling center. Assembled a deck table (a gift to my family from my tax earnings) where we ate dinner one night after bug bombing the yard. And this all had to be done strategically, as storm clouds intermittently messed with my agenda.

Saturday morning the wife took the little ones down the shore to visit with their grandpa. Me, I stayed local, ran some errands, entertained the dog. Studied some tax stuff. Watched the ball game. Ate some Chinese (the only time I eat Chinese is when the family’s away). They got back around 8, beat, sweaty, and sunburnt, and took showers, one after the other, and then – left me to go to bed! So I watched some random TV, surfed the web a bit, read some of my books, and finally hit the hay around midnight.

The little ones served at Mass Sunday morning, then spent the afternoon cleaning their rooms. My wife, for reasons I’ll explain shortly, went to the basement office and worked until dinner at her job. I have a 50-page booklet on depreciation I’m working my way through and will be tested on for my work, so I did that for an hour or two. Then Little One and I watched a bad 70s SF movie, Futureworld starring Peter Fonda. A semi-sequel to the infinitely better Westworld, it held her attention and she was fooled by the couple of twists at the end. But we both agreed it was a tad too long and meandering. We group-graded it a C. Patch was fighting a cold, but, being Patch and unable to sit still, was up and down the stairs a dozen times, practiced her saxophone, cleaned out some sea shells, and read her Rick Riordan books.

Yesterday we drove in to the Bronx and watched the Yanks ineffectively lose to the Astros, 5-1. Though the game overall wasn’t exciting, there were a couple of exciting moments (Torres’s two leaping line-drive catches and Greg Bird’s homer). We had decent seats if a bit too high, and I got one heckuva sunburn from the overcast, 60-degree windy day. Had a highly satisfying Stella Artois at the top of the seventh – of which a third ended up on Little One after some mindless lady swung her purse right into my hand. Oh well.

The wife will be flying down to Hilton Head tomorrow morning, staying down there for five days to help her mom in the aftermath of her stepfather’s passing. Dale didn’t want a funeral, so they’re not sure what they’re going to do, with either the ashes or some sort of memorial service. My mother-in-law is doing well from what I hear; her siblings have reached out to her and she has friends down in South Carolina who have been supportive. During the week Patch has a couple of soccer practices and a game on the weekend, Little One has a field trip with the French club and a bridging ceremony, and I got to give the dog some heartworm medication. Domestic bliss.

To honor those who gave their lives so we can have ours, I did DVR 1965’s Battle of the Bulge to watch and discuss with the Mrs., but life interfered. I may watch it piecemeal during the week. I heard that it contains many historical inaccuracies, of which I’m interested to see if I can detect, and that it does not focus on historical leaders, instead choosing to tell the story through fictional men. I may do a post on it in the near future.

Back to regularly-scheduled programming tomorrow …