The Winter No One Went Into A Fugue State
The Ozone Hole That Shrank To The Size Of A Pea
The Enchanted Unbreakable Full Spectrum Bulb
The Marine Biologist With Silver Hair Who Married The Seal King And Never Had To Write Another Grant Proposal Ever Again
The Littlest Emperor Penguin Colony That Wasn’t A Pointed Metaphor For Humanity
The Day When All Of The Supplies Arrived Intact And On Time
The Frosty Boy Machine That Gave Five Days Of Desserts On One Day’s Worth Of Supplies
Little Red Tucker Sno-Cat
Gnome’s Own Wine Doesn’t Cause A Fist-Fight Or Hangover
Dr. Goldilocks And The Three Stable And Thriving Seabird Populations
The Fair Folk Who Keep The Pipes From Freezing
The Funding That Never Ran Out
Jack Who Sent Down A Core Sample And Reaped Statistically Significant Findings
The Prince Who Kept A Normal Sleep Schedule Despite Six Months Of Daylight
The Whales (Have Nothing Wrong With Them)
No One Made A “The Thing” Reference, Not Even Once
The Glacier Report That Showed Only Average Rather Than Drastically Increasing Seasonal Melt
The Funding That Never Ran Out
*clutches her grant application to her chest* tell me this magical tale, please
Figure out how your research fights terrorism
Let me tell the thrip story.
At the school where I worked, there was a professor who studied thrips: crop parasites – little insects that drink the sap of plants. She had a weekly grant writing meeting with her students, and eventually she ran out of grants that pertained to thrip science.
She started applying for ridiculous grants, as her heart was pure and I suspect the grant writing meeting had snacks and wine. One day, she applied for DoD grant saying terrorists could weaponize thrips and devastate the nation’s crops, and we would not know the first thing about countering them because we did not understand their biology.
The Department of Defense awarded her a million dollars and she lived happily ever after.
that is a happy happy story and I love it
tell it again
WEAPONIZED THRIPS <3 i love you
Beware the Zombie Apocathrips
This is the best thing I have ever heard. Bless the thrips and her thrip devotion.
I guess I could settle for The Marine Biologist With Silver Hair Who Married The Seal King And Never Had To Write Another Grant Proposal Ever Again
“The Funding That Never Ran Out” is a lost story. Rumor has it that a copy is written in code on the back of the Declaration of Independence.
already a better plot than “National Treasure”
This is triggering my PTSD from last year’s winter in Boston.
The Fair Folk Who Keep The Pipes From Freezing
Starting now I’m leaving out a bowl of milk every night.
I based the illustration on this classic Baga Yaga cover that apparently everyone had growing up ! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Yaga#/media/…
Gorgeous illustration, John!
I didn’t have Baba Yaga, I had East of the Sun and West of the Moon though. They seem similar, but one less-creepy than the other.
I love Baba Yaga! I used to make my sister play Baba Yaga games with me where she would have to be a useless princess I captured and I lived in great delight in my house in the forest on chicken legs. Sometimes I feel like this is why I prefer tall houses surrounded by trees.
Did anyone ever read Jerri Neilsen FitzGerald’s memoir about treating her own breast cancer in Antarctica? Awesome, awesome book. Made me want to go to Antartica for about 0.5 seconds until I carefully considered how whiny even a normal Chicago winter makes me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/us/25nielsen.ht…
The Winter No One Went Into A Fugue State
The Ozone Hole That Shrank To The Size Of A Pea
The Enchanted Unbreakable Full Spectrum Bulb
These are just the right amount of grim that I needed today.
“The Chapstick You Only Needed To Apply Once A Day” (Aarne-Thompson Type 568)
The Day We Played Football with the Adélie Penguins
(those buggers are CUTE!)
I assume they were the opposing team and not the ball, right?
Dude penguins keep stealing the ball and trading it for sexual favors from lady penguins. Penguins.
This made me consult wikipedia on Adélies and I found this quote: “They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the Antarctic world, either like children or like old men, full of their own importance.”
Penguins!
“I went all the way to Antarctica to escape self-important men, but even the penguins dismay me!”
An important distinction. “Among” rather than “with,” I think.
“Against”
knowing several scientists who have done research in Antarctica, I snickered at “The Frosty Boy Machine That Gave Five Days Of Desserts On One Day’s Worth Of Supplies”
someone did their homework 😉
I love this so much! You managed to capture the specificity so perfectly while also the capturing the dream-like qualities of the continent. My favorite is “The Marine Biologist With Silver Hair Who Married The Seal King And Never Had To Write Another Grant Proposal Ever Again” because #lifegoals, but the one about frosty boy is truly the stuff of legends and beyond belief!
“The Winds That Warms From The Inside As It Blows”
“The Big Red Zipper That Works Perfectly Every Time”
“No One Crowned Themselves King Of A Geographically-Name Station, Not Ever”
“Skuas Only Want To See What Pastry You Carefully Saved From Brunch And Have Not Told Their Friends You Are An Easy Mark”
“Congressional Knights Realized The Urgency In Climate Change After Visiting, And Brought An Era Of Science, Scholarship, And Reason To The Kingdom Of DC”
“Congressional Knights Realized The Urgency In Climate Change After Visiting, And Brought An Era Of Science, Scholarship, And Reason To The Kingdom Of DC”
Yes, please!
The Best Journey In the World
Sadly, fairies have been extinct in Antarctica for at least 25 million years, although it is generally accepted that the continent acted as a land bridge linking ancestral populations of fairies in Australia and South America. The Australian Little Blue Fairy (Iridopteryx lethifera), sole extant species of the family Iridopterygidae, is considered a “living fossil” due to its close anatomical similarity to fae microfossils collected by the Pabodie Antarctic expedition.
Can I quote you in my next essay?
By all means, though honestly pretty much any modern reference text on Antarctic fairies is going to give basically the same information.
I wish I wish I wish the Ozone hole would shrink to the size of a pea.
I would like to go outside this summer and not acquire the usual immediate sunburn…
One moment when I felt like my life was full of a bunch of exciting possibilities was when, flying to a friend’s wedding, I sat next to a really lovely, friendly, attractive, chatty guy in a Chicago Firefighter sweatshirt, and he told me he was about to leave for Antarctica to be in charge of their firefighting operations for the summer. And then he bought me a beer while we were waiting to transfer to our next flights (his to Patagonia, mine to Denver…).
I have never wanted to run away with someone quite so badly!