A lack of adhesive ducks

There is this truly wonderful scene in The Big Bang Theory in which Penny slips in the bathtub and dislocates her shoulder. In Sheldon’s universe, the reason for this is perfectly clear: he cannot slip in the tub in his own apartment just across the hall, since that tub features a handful of cheap sticky plastic widgets that eliminate the risk. And so, when, at the hospital to which he has driven Penny (quite rightly under protest, since were this ‘real life’ and not a sitcom he would not be allowed behind the wheel of any motorised vehicle), the form he is given asks Sheldon (though of course it doesn’t, not really) “how did the accident occur?” he quite naturally answers, “lack of adhesive ducks”.

Here, let me show you:

… oh, that’s right, I can’t: not in the way I’ve become accustomed to doing. It would seem that I’m currently only able to offer you a simple hyperlink.

An artist would be probably be unconsolably heartsick upon returning from a vacation to discover that, during his absence, every one of his canvasses had been attacked by voracious moths leaving his work riddled with holes the size of despair.

I can’t say that I’m feeling quite that bad about the fact that I return from some time away to discover that, for some reason which I have yet to fathom, none of the YouTube links in my blog are currently working. Not for me, at least: I fully appreciate that they may be perfectly fine, for you — WYSINWOG: what you see is not what others get (on the innerwebz). My preliminary digging has suggested that the problem may be just at my end (if you’ll pardon the expression). If you are being affected in the same way as me, I would apologise (if I believed that the fault were mine), and would assure you that normal service will resume as soon as possible.

Nevertheless, I view this as another in a long line of tedious system failures. When an increasingly complex system (upon which we’ve come to rely and believe to be ‘normal’) fails in one or more of its increasingly fragile linkages, things simply fall apart. From where I sit, at least, it’s illustrative of the kind of thing we can look forward to more of in the future as the triple whammy of climate change, overpopulation and peak fossoil wends its weary way out of the future towards us.

Oh, by the way: happy Earth Overshoot Day.

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