Frazz by Jef Mallett for January 28, 2021

And people forget how to drive. . .

Human memory is peculiar. We remember that time the nasty kid told a tale on us FOREVER, but when a politician lies, it seems to evaporate in a couple of weeks. We remember falling in love, a great meal, and that time we came that close to dying, but we don’t remember what we had for dinner yesterday (well, at my age) or even why I walked into this room. Peculiar.

Also, while Frazz was thinking globally, Caulfield was thinking just about his world – home, school, and the neighborhood.

Come July, most people will be cranking up the air conditioning and reminiscing about playing in the snow

(which coincidentally will hasten the future Frazz is talking about)

You just can’t narrow the definition of “Future”.

Half a year is pretty much like ten minutes these days.

When you are one day old a day is 100% of your experience. Three months or so later a day is just 1% of your experience. By the time you hit 70 a day is just .004% of your experience!

When that time comes, we’ll be too busy rebuilding many of the coastal cities on higher ground.

Eventually, 2-story buildings on the shoreline could become reefs for future exploration by aquanauts.

The transition to adult can be marked by going from “How long till Christmas?” to “Christmas again? Already?”

Hate to break this to you but Snow ain’t NEVER going away. If anything the odds are better on another ice age then global warming. I’ve seen years when we had almost no snow, and years when they had to bring in plows from the Rockies to clear the roads. The banks on the sides of the road were an easy 12 to 15 feet high. It was like driving though a canyon.

Many years ago, when I was planning to spend a couple of weeks in the British Isles, I picked up a book called Britspeak, Amerispeak, about “two countries divided by a single language”. The introduction contained a pearl of wisdom that I’ve had multiple occasions to quote since: “The two countries would get along better if Americans realized that, to a Brit, a hundred miles is a great distance and the Brits realized that, to an American, a hundred years is a long time.”

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Frazz17 hrs. · This doesn’t seem like such a stretch, really. After all, here in Michigan — and I assume it’s the same elsewhere — if we go two weeks without a blizzard people forget how to drive in the snow. So forgetting how to shovel it over the course of a few months seems believable enough.

Also, some of us seem to forget the planet is burning up if we go any amount of time between monster hurricanes or catastrophic wildfires. But that’s not as funny as fender benders. Which are often far more than fender benders and far, far from funny.

Sigh. Sometimes it’s all too tempting to forget as much as possible by July.

Frazz first thought Caufield is talking about AGW.

14 years ago, Al Gore said we had 10 years to fix the environment…