Imagine sailing across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. You are hundreds of miles from the rest of humanity, cruising the North Pacific Gyre, the converging vortex of oceanic currents that covers ten million square miles between East Asia and North America. You might just be the farthest possible distance from any other human on earth. The. Middle. Of. Nowhere.

And you are sailing a sea of trash.

It has come to be known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. At the center of the gyre collects the trash that both Asia and America spill into the sea. The majority is our fantastic plastic, wonderfully photodegradable into tiny particles that, on a molecular level, never stop being plastic. An area the size of Texas (the conservative estimate), or twice that of the continental United States (a more expansive one), in the middle of the fucking ocean, is full of our polymers.

Ocean researcher Charles Moore has been studying the patch for years, estimating that in the center of it is something like one million miniscule pieces of plastic per square mile. (Remember, of course, that this is not just a few square miles but around a million.) Recently, the good folks at VBS.tv, the televisionary subsidiary of Vice Magazine, went on board with Moore to go document "Garbage Island" themselves. Thomas Morton of Vice describes the samples he pulled up with the crew (a merry band that keeps it interesting over the week-long haul to the center of the gyre) as, like, "snow globes made of garbage" -- garbage that is eaten by little things that get eaten by bigger things that get eaten by us. The documentary is absolutely shocking and incredible and disgusting, and I can't recommend that you watch it enough.

However, I will warn you in advance that you will get really fucking mad.
Ever since I first heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I have been hyper-aware of how ridiculously and precariously we deal with the world. Humanity, the pack of glorified monkeys that we are, has decided to see no evil. Places that might have never been seen by human eyes are already full of our refuse.

Efforts to clean up the large pieces have been haphazard at best. But the majority of the plastic littering the ocean are the tiny bits so poetically known as "mermaid tears." I can't say I blame the mermaids for crying. Or the albatross for hanging 'round our collective neck. Because by and large, we can't fix this mess.

80% of the plastic in the gyre comes from land; it's not the cruising bourgeoisie. It's everybody in California and Japan who has ever thrown out a plastic bottle or a spork. We are colonizing the sea with our garbage. It is beautiful and terrible irony that this garbage climbs up the food chain so that we end up ingesting it (and all those lovely flavors it has). We are saturating the world and ourselves with our wickedness and then feasting upon it.

While trying to figure out the angle I wanted to take with this article (besides, you know, complete unabashed horror and disgust), the good old Anglo myth of the Sin-Eater came to mind. Instead of absolution through handing sin-tainted bread to the beggar or village fool (or maybe we're all the fools now; I don't know), we are caught in a complex cycle of consuming our own transgressions. We are eating our own sins; they saturate the earth.

Like I've said before; we've got to learn how to sacrifice. As I write this, my adopted home of North Carolina is taking in ballots for the Democratic primary. I console myself in thinking that, hey, at least if Obama doesn't win we'll be one step closer to apocalypse. I don't want to give up on humanity just yet, but if massive catastrophe goes down, at least Mama Earth will get a little break.

And then I realize: God damn, I'm a cynic.

Ever upward, I guess.


Flux is wishing that she had come up with this angle sooner. "A vote against Obama is a vote for Ragnarok" is so catchy!

Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching too much VH1, but when during the course of my scanning the Internet for the latest news I come across a paragraph like:

I immediately think to myself “What, did Paris Hilton name a drunken elephant ‘Mohammed’ or something?”

But no, the death threats in question are being made against an actual bitch, an 8-year-old Maltese dog named “Trouble”. While the urge to kill a small yappy dog with a penchant for biting people may be understandable, Trouble is not your average canine. Up until recently, Trouble was the pet of Leona Helmsley, the controversial New York City hotel mogul and philanthropist. While Leona earned the nickname “The Queen of Mean” for how poorly she treated her employees, and claimed that “only the little people pay taxes” before serving 18 months in prison for tax evasion, she spent the last decade attempting to rehabilitate her public persona by donating large amounts of her fortune to charity. She also spent a lot of time pampering her faithful canine companion Trouble.

After Leona died in August, all three of those aspects of her personality were on display when her will was made public. While she donated the bulk of her $4 billion fortune to a charitable trust, she left $12 million to Trouble to pay for her upkeep while leaving two of her grandchildren nothing.

If $12 million seems like an excessive amount of cash to set aside for the upkeep of a dog, remember when I said she was not your average canine? Providing Trouble with the medical care, grooming, security and chef-prepared meals she’s accustomed to costs $300,000 a year. Of course, with this inheritance came death and kidnapping threats, so recently Trouble was flown via private jet down to Florida under an assumed name, because of course nobody would want to kill that other small yappy dog who enjoys gourmet meals, private jets and biting people.

One reason that Trouble may be inspiring death threats is that once she dies, all of the cash that remains in her name gets donated to the Helmsley charitable trust. So if the concept of snuffing out a small, mean, pampered yappy dog wasn’t appealing enough, now you can do it for charity!

While the “kill one small yappy dog, send seven human kids to Columbia University for a year” equation may appeal to class warriors, a recent scientific study shows that it might be a better investment to send seven chimpanzees to college instead.

Researchers at Japan’s Kyoto University conducted a memory test that pitted five-year-old chimps against university students. Both the monkeys and the undergrads were presented with a touch screen, on which a random sequence of numbers one through nine were briefly displayed in random locations and then replaced with blank white squares. The subjects then had to touch the squares in ascending numerical order. All of the young chimps turned out to be both faster and more accurate at recalling the number patterns than the humans, even when the numbers were displayed on screen for as little as 210 milliseconds, a speed too fast for the human or chimp eye to scan across the entire screen.

The researchers think this indicates that young chimps have a photographic memory, and theorize that once early humans developed language they lost the need for such sharp short-term memory skills, causing those skills to decline below chimp level.

Or as lead researcher Dr. Tetsuro Matsuzawa phrased it:

Spoken like someone who hasn’t seen a Planet Of The Apes movie, or read the pilot script for the gripping legal drama I’m currently pitching to various TV executives, "Mr. Bubbles: Chimpanzee At Law".

While human beings may have lost the short-term memory race to chimpanzees, we still have at least one thing that sets us apart as a species from other primates: a seemingly unquenchable desire to get high. Although if young chimpanzees were exposed to a lack of parental supervision, cheap drugs and an Intro To Philosophy class that they might catch up to college students in that department as well.

While personally I’m a bit of a fuddy duddy when it comes to drug use, I’m fascinated by the lengths that people can and will go to in order to get a buzz. I’m sure that one of the reasons that privatized space exploration hasn’t been much of a success is that space dust doesn’t get you high. If Neil Armstrong’s first words from the Moon had been “That’s one small step for man…wow, I’m seeing such fucked up colors, dude!”, by now a small army of tech-savvy stoners would have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and colonized the fuck out of our solar system.

Alas, the urge to self-medicate remains terrestrial, and while that avoids things like belts of deadly radiation and the icy, airless void of space, the quest for new and novel methods of altering one’s state of consciousness is not without peril.

For example, the Kansas City Police Department recently announced that they’d arrested a local man on, among other things, one count of possessing drug paraphernalia.

That “drug paraphernalia” was a live poisonous toad.

According to police, the man allegedly planned to frighten or anger the toad, harvest the poison the toad would then secrete, then smoke the poison in order to get high on the supposedly psychotropic chemicals the poison contains. Kansas City police and health officials expressed concern that this was part of a new epidemic of “toad smoking”, a new variation on “toad licking” that was corrupting our nation’s youth, or at least freaking out our nation’s toads:

Of course, being the semi-responsible quasi-journalist that I am, I had to at least pretend to do some research into this new “toad smoking” craze, especially since the same article contained a similar warning about the hoax drug “Jenkem”. I was worried that typing “toad licking” into a search engine would dredge up the type of brain-scarring, savage internet weirdness that normally only results from searching for “anime porn” or “pandas are dicks”, but apparently there’s actually been a decent amount of actual scientific research into psychedelic toads. While there’s apparently a consensus that “toad licking” is an urban myth (since by the time you licked enough toads to get you high, the poison would have already sickened or killed you), the mind-altering aspects of certain toad poisons are unclear, as is the safety and effectiveness of smoking the poison as opposed to licking it.

Of course, even if toad secretions didn’t get you high and would probably kill you if you tried to smoke it, thanks to the magic of the internet, there’d still be a bunch of morons who’d try. Or as one Kansas City health official phrases it:

Wow, the Internet can provide me with porn and kill off gullible kids? Is there no end to the awesomeness that is the misinformation superhighway?