The Amethyst

My new favorite pastime when there’s nothing to do at work is to head to Google Maps, pick an ocean, find an island whose name I don’t know by sight/shape/placement, zoom way in, and check out either the Google-paths or just the user-submitted photos. This is heartbreaking work because let’s face it, I KNOW A LOT ABOUT GEOGRAPHY ::blowing on knuckles::, so if I don’t know about an island by sight, it’s probably pretty fricking remote. So I’ve been zeroing in on random photos to find a lot of desolation. Old shipwrecks and untouched basalt column forests and “whale pots.”

(What are whale pots? Super don’t know. Well, I mean, they’re these things:

but beyond that, I can’t tell you. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know—sounds torturey. All I know is that those are them and that Campbell Island off the coast of New Zealand has some. [It also has some sweet basalt columns, I've found. See if you can find Perseverance Harbour.])

Anyway, I’ve spent most of my life knowing the word Socotra, or maybe just knowing that Socotra is a word but not what it means, but, um, I found Socotra today. It’s a four-island archipelago off the Horn of Africa in the Indian Ocean, it belongs to Yemen, it’s one of the world’s most isolated island systems, and zooming in on photos of it is giving me a full-on fear heart attack. Bug-out conniption fit. Attack. Postscript: attack.

The island is basically uncontaminated from the time it separated from the mainland six million years ago. Ergo, a third of its native flora and fauna is found nowhere else on Earth, which is good, because I would spend all day crying if I didn’t know that that I can safely keep tabs on all of the world’s flesh-toned human-lady’s-leg-lookin’ trees with pink flowers growing out of the top.

[whoopee cushion noise]

Dude, I was Wiki-cruising the other night and found this map of North-central-ish Seattle from 1893, focusing especially on my very own University District. Check out all the wacky street names! I knew, like everyone else, that Ballard’s east/west streets all used to be named other things, just because those little street name mosaics are still embedded in some of the sidewalks along 24th NW, but I never considered that my own neighborhood’s streets had maiden names too.

(Click to enlarge! It’s huuuuuge.)

Per Wikipedia:

So I guess I live at Pasadena and Clemson? At the ghost of Pasadena and Clemson, I mean? This is kind of tripping me right on out.

I also love that there’s more or less nothing at all north of 45th, fka “Frankin/Wyandotte,” even in 1893. “We built a university right next to the wild, untouched forest, yeah, what of it? It’ll get taken care of, don’t worry. Fine, look, here. We built you the Knarr. Happy?”

Ever since the 8th grade, when Mr. Becker totally shanghaied our Washington State history class to force us to learn about the Canadian parliament instead, I’ve had a begrudging, secretly intense interest in the murky story of Canada. Don’t tell anyone I like Canada, OK? I dunno, Canadian history is sort of a mix of adorable, pathetic, hilarious, and kind of, like . . . hardbitten-badass. It’s like a really polite Wild West. They COULD fuck you up if they FELT like it, but they’re too busy being industrious and conscientious. Like, they probably won’t. Like, you can probably get away with whatever you were gonna do.

Anyway, if you weren’t previously clear on the fact that Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, was originally called Pile-of-Bones [sic, hyphens and all], well, uh . . . now see here. Seems that when the whiteys showed up to take over the native settlement and declare it part of Canada—now we know where Mr. Becker learned it—they arrived to find a gigantic fucking HILL of buffalo and bison bones there, so the natives called it [whatever "pile of bones" is in Assiniboine or whatever they spoke]. So the English-French were like, okay, we can dig it. We got shit to do. Pile-of-Bones it is.

Makes sense. Looks like this is just the skull pile. Of bones.

Oh, here are the rest of the buffalo bones, whew, thank god

Looks like it’s more of a pile of skulls and then a separate, disparate wall of bones. Get it right, native Assiniboines, Jesus.

From the wiki on Regina: “There was an ‘obvious conflict of interest’ in Dewdney’s choosing the site of Pile-of-Bones as the territorial seat of government and it was a national scandal at the time.”

And then someone was like, uh, this is Canada, you have to name everything after the queen. So there went Pile-o-Bones, Saskatchewan. The name, however, lives on in Regina’s local roller derby league.

Ugh, god, so perfect. I super love this entire thing. (Please don’t tell anyone.)

Click on the smiling, benighted visage of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to view a pretty fascinating interactive infographic (aka infoactive intergraphic) on the education level of world leaders:

The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates have a secondary school-level education. That’s middle school, you guys. Just suck on that numbing little lozenge for a minute.

Via reddit/r/historyporn:

The proposed State of Jefferson, consisting of So. Oregon and No. California counties, prepares for vote on statehood. One day later, Pearl Harbor is attacked; the vote never occurs. Dec. 6, 1941.

This strikes me as so sweet and sad. Good game, you guys. You tried hard. It was a good idea oh wait no it wasn’t at all

A long hiatus, I know. This article, though, seemed positively Amethystian:

Entire nation of Kiribati to be relocated to Fiji, due to rising ocean levels

How do you even rig that? I’m wincing at the idea of Kiribati trying to relocate to the U.S. and all the xenophobic redneck outcries we’d have about it here. Imagine Fiji, which is so much more, uh, how do we say . . . provincial. I mean, I guess the people of Kiribati also have a lot more in common with Fijians, ethnically and culturally, so maybe it’s OK? The article mentions that kids from Kiribati regularly study at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji.

Still, over 100,000 people. That’s a serious population boost for a nation of only 849k.

Sez my friend Laura, who works on a cruise ship:

This has been going on for a while. I was able to go here this year when my ship strangely had a port of call there. Nothing there… no running water, no electric… no sewage… it’s crazy. But the people love it there and don’t want to leave. We (and many other cruise companies) have since been forced to stop supporting them with donations because it’s making them want to stay there to receive their hand-outs. It sucks to move them… but otherwise they’re goners for sure. Over time, of course.

Anyway, I do think about this a lot, and have ever since the tsunamiquake in 2004. The photos of Maldives, man. They were just . . . done. Like, you’d think that this would be the case for pretty much all of the low-lying, nonvolcanic archipelagos of the South Pacific. Yeah? And what about all the little villages on the unfrozen edges of Greenland, once it melts? Is Kiribati just the only one of them with its act together?

This funny little article, It’s Not About You, is so perfectly phrased, I just gotta share. Nos. 2 and 3 particularly resonate with me. The importance of minding one’s own business and not attempting to control other people’s lives, because that is appalling and how dare one, is a lesson I didn’t learn as young as I’d have liked. And also what a real apology is, and how an apology actually isn’t “I’m sorry . . . YOU FEEL THAT WAY, THAT IS, and P.S., I’m still awesome and didn’t do anything wrong.” Because that is how a child apologizes. I’m still surprised every time I see a grown-assed grown-up apologize like that for all intents and purposes, which is basically all of the time. Eyes all cast to the ground. Yeah, you definitely saved face by doing that.

Anyway, Ijeoma Oluo says it better than me in her blog, so read it. Very tidy, very nice.

Because complaining is fun and makes us feel better about ourselves. At least I’m not as bad as the thing I’m complaining about.

So, I walked out in the middle of Prometheus last night, nauseated. That movie is completely disgusting. What on earth is wrong with you, movie people.

(Here’s what happened before that happened:

Boyfriend: Back from Vegas! Wanna go to Prometheus and then get some dinner?
Me: What’s Prometheus?
Boyfriend: Oh, my God, are you serious? It’s, um, science fiction. It’s the movie I’ve been talking about seeing for weeks and weeks? I’ll just go by myself.
Me: No, I like science fiction! And Greek mythology! Sounds like a fine time!
BF: Have you not even heard of this movie?
Me: Well, you. And people on Facebook are, like, talking about it. I don’t remember what they said. Let’s just go! [thinking about restaurant dinner])

I tell you this because I want you to know that I walked in with no expectations and a cheerful and open mind, not knowing it was a prequel and not remembering any positive or negative criticism from my peer group. Other than that my boyfriend was excited to see it, and that I respect his intelligence. It had already been ham-fisted, nonsensical, lazy, phoned-in, and godawfully acted from the start, and I whispered as I cowered into my BF’s shoulder, “I hate this movie! This movie is a dick!” when the dude had the space cobra emerge from a river of cave oil, break his arm, and dive down his esophagus. But when it got to the surgery robot thing, I literally became light-headed and was like, “All right. I’m not gonna let this movie abuse me anymore. I have to leave this relationship, movie.” And I told my boyfriend I had to go pass out now, and I left.

To be fair, I think I was already full-blown pissed within the first five or ten minutes at Chopin’s “Raindrop Prelude” playing on an endless loop while people did random shit on the ship. That’s my audition piano piece, and it’s a beautiful piece that I love, but it was just the first passage ON A LOOP. “Hey, it’s in the public domain! Free music! We’ll just massacre it to suit our purposes.” I mean, I guess it’s Ridley Scott–he pulled that same trick in Hannibal with Bach’s Goldberg Variations. (I guess the Goldberg Variations were in the book, though.) So there was probably no turning back for me at that point. But then there was so much dumbness to follow. What was up with the cyborg guy bleaching his roots? Why would a cyborg have hair that grows at all, and why would he then choose to BLEACH it? Is he a child’s doll? Why did they choose the cartographer, the least likely person out of all of the people, to get lost in the caves? You know, the guy who can be like, “There’s an unknown life form on the map somewhere west of us, so let’s just go east, because I intrinsically know which way east is here on this foreign planet in outer space.” Why, most of all, whenever they discovered some new alien life form, were these supposed Ph.D.s standing around with no masks on and their fingers in their mouths and their goddamn eyeballs resting on the specimen? Not dangerous at all, right? It’s not like this head of a person who died two thousand years ago is moving right now. How did the cyborg just somehow know that when he poisoned the boyfriend doctor, he would definitely go sleep the girlfriend doctor that very night? To implant the alien spawn in her body? And that he’d do it in the narrow window before he died? “Oh, well, he’s a cyborg, so whatever he does, it’s because he’s a cyborg. He’s all-knowing or whatever. Doesn’t need to be explained.” Lazy, lazy, lazy.

Then I wanted to fricking cry when the dude quotes (what I later found out was) Lawrence of Arabia and you just knew it was some high-minded piece of litera-chah and you’re being gigantically winked at and/or tested. Ugh. Punishing. I was much happier to find that I didn’t know what it was from.

Re. acting, it was all unpleasant, but Charlize Theron was unforgivable. I used to like her, too. Not that she had much of a chance with that stupid metallic dialogue, but she did about as badly as possible with it. Pretty sad when your best performance was as a mentally retarded person on a sitcom.

And then, you know, they had to make sure to kill people in the most revolting, horrifying ways possible. Plenty of heads exploding. This, of course, partially ties into my hate for horror movies in general and how I think it requires a depraved mind to enjoy depicting people’s heads exploding and them dying in maximum agony. (And another depraved mind to enjoy it.) Prometheus was just glorying in it, though. “Look how unhappy this character is right now! Let’s drag it out as much as possible. Yeah. Feels good to watch ‘em suffer.” You have to really hate human beings to call that art, whether you’re the artist or the spectator.

That said, I can appreciate a well crafted, well written horror movie with new ideas in it. This one was just, like, written by Beavis. “AND THEN ALL THEIR FACES EXPLODED. No, I don’t see any reason why it needs to make sense.”

You know, can I talk about the abortion machine again? Because in her negotiations with it, Girlfriend Doctor actually calls her desired procedure a “Caesarean!” Which pertains to a live birth, not an abortion, FYI. At no point does she or the cyborg dude ever say the word “abortion.” We’ll show people’s faces exploding, but talking about abortion would be crossing the line of good taste. Even if it’s in reference to an alien squid baby. Simply not done.

Also, do these people actually know what a Caesarean section is? And how it works? I’m not a doctor of medicine or anything, but I’m pretty sure you don’t just make a shallow slice in the woman’s epidermis and then the fetus is hanging out right underneath her skin and you can reach in with the robot arm from the stuffed animal claw game at Denny’s and pluck it right out, without accuracy or precision. There’s this whole thing called a uterus. I also feel like this is really accessible, easily had knowledge. I, for example, learned about how babies grow inside women’s bodies in, oh, the 6th grade. I suppose “completion of the 6th grade” isn’t a requirement for writing a screenplay, but imagining you didn’t have the same getting-to-go-to-public-junior-high-school privileges I did, I’m still willing to bet there’s a wiki on Caesarean sections. Caesar’s mom had one. They’re famous.

Just a fantastic failure of a movie. I’m a huge cheapskate too, so if I walk out of a movie, you know it was bad. Because I, apparently, have to be physically nauseated before I’ll cut my losses. I think the last movie I walked out of was Bulworth.

I have more to say on this topic, I’m sure, but for now: Prometheus is obscene, gross, and insultingly stupid. Fuck everything about it. Don’t see.