apocalypse

Can we really trust the sun not to cook us?

My Fellow Inebriates,

The whole family went out last night. My parents had been in a funk all day; the kids were glued to Netflix and needed to be torn away somehow; and my dad had a restaurant gift card—so off they went without so much as considering letting me ride along in a purse.

When you’re left home alone with bears like Scary and Fluffy, apocalyptic thoughts are unavoidable, especially when you’re already feeling left out of an adventure. Scary doesn’t ever really stop thinking about the End of Days, and with a catatonic golem like Fluffy constantly beside him creeping everybody out, his weird-ass theories gain a little more purchase than they should.

Why Scary thought of solar flares when it was pouring outside I don’t know. He usually gets anxious about the sun in hot weather, when he’s cooking inside his fur. With his great ass in front of the turbo fan, he blasts us all with his filthy funk and his insights about Armageddon, which, when the mercury’s over 95°, tend to involve the sun.

Not that Scary’s insights are conventional. Ask him about global warming and he’s likely to shrug. Ask him about rising sea levels and he might yawn. Insufficiently dramatic for Scary, these ordinary perils fail to pique his interest. And despite the apparent stability of our sun, midway through its life with a good 4 billion years left in the tank, Scary wonders if it plans to start behaving erratically in 2012.

Photo: Casey Reed/NASA

There is some galactic precedent. In 1999 astronomers discovered explosive superflares had erupted from nine stars “disturbingly similar to our own sun,” all at least 100 light years away. Unlike regular solar flares, from which our atmosphere and magnetic field largely protect us, superflares are millions of times more powerful, brightening their stars by at least 20%, stripping planetary atmospheres (if any) and frying any inhabitants.

Bradley Schaefer, one of the scientists on the team, emphasized that “our sun does not do this, as far as we can tell.”

Scary scoffed at this reassurance, saying “It only needs to do it once. And then we wouldn’t be here to say it doesn’t do it.” He said the flares (“death flares”) could flash-fry distant Pluto, never mind us.

Throughout this Fluffy remained expressionless, a silent twin to Scary as he freaked me out, people. I thought I’d better contact someone with better credentials than Scary—maybe Bradley Schaefer.

Not one scientist or politician has ever responded to my emails. Truly, the only “official” person who gives me the time of day is Julia Gale of BROKER’S GIN. Just this week she sent a very slick newsletter full of pictures of the BROKER’S GIN tour of North America, which I do hope culminates in the reinstatement of that breathtaking elixir to our shelves. It’s just dreadful to think that if one of Scary’s death flares shot out from the sun all the gin would be instantly evaporated (along with our eyeballs).

I have to believe (and who knows, maybe Julia will agree with me; I emailed her about it too) that our sun will behave itself, although, being middle-aged like my parents, it conceivably will do something erratic. According to Sallie Baliunas at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, stars like our sun often dim down by 1% or so for a “quiescent” spell. Baliunas says 17 of Earth’s last 19 major cold episodes involved solar activity, so maybe Scarybear should think about that.

Maybe if we had an ice age Scary wouldn’t plunk his hairy butt in front of the fan and pollute the house with his funk.

EMILIANA NOVAS GRAN RESERVA CARMENERE-CABERNET SAUVIGNON (2010)—A fruit supernova of the best kind

My Fellow Inebriates,

There’s no way to know if Fluffy has finally settled down. You may remember, for several weeks after he came to live with us he made a whole bunch of crazy paranormal shit happen—noises, cold spots, clogged toilets, falling toys, leaving the lids off markers. He was totally freaking me out, people, obviously channeling the ghost of his old owner, my deceased granny.

But the creepiest thing about Fluffy is his weird resemblance to my friend Scarybear, who is himself a sociopath, albeit more of the snack-obsessed, openly violent kind. I usually avoid Scary so he can’t fill my furry head with apocalyptic ideas, but every weekend the household bears watch Fringe with my parents, which both feeds Scary’s Armageddon preoccupation and allows him to convey it to me. And because the weekend Fringe ritual is usually accompanied by a glass of wine, whatever End of Days scenario Scary decides to propound that evening gets pumped into my brain cells while they’re flooded with alcohol.

The wine was just finished when Scary mentioned rogue black holes. When you’ve just consumed the last drops of an organic Chilean Carmenere-Cabernet Sauvignon like EMILIANA NOVAS GRAN RESERVA (2010), you may well be feeling bereft of something precious and therefore, because nature abhors a vacuum (which my head usually is), susceptible to screwball ideas. Suddenly the 10 million black holes astronomers estimate exist within the Milky Way seemed exceedingly threatening.

Fluffy remained impassive as Scary went on about black holes, the corpses of stars gone supernova, hurtling through our galaxy and pulling everything, even light, into their city-size (that’s minuscule!) maws. Holy crap, I didn’t know which was more terrifying—realizing we’d have no warning if one of these tiny monstrosities caromed through our solar system, or observing a weird-ass golem like Fluffy staring into space while mass destruction was being contemplated.

Not even Scarybear stares into space! As dumb as he is, his eyes register something—some hint of thought if not intelligence. Not Fluffy, though. Look into Fluffy’s eyes and you see nothing—a vast depth of nothing.

So at least we didn’t have to share any wine with him. Intensely dark and substantial, EMILIANA NOVAS GRAN RESERVA Carmenere-Cabernet Sauvignon immediately hits the nose with ripe berries and spice, released from your swirled glass with a heady rush. My mum and I found it a glorious olfactory assault, but my dad was more reserved; it took the wine 20 minutes to seduce him, and by the time it did, we had a fair head start on him.

NOVAS GRAN RESERVA does change markedly over 20 minutes, developing from a fruit orgy to a very structured, sophisticated wine. On the palate it shows firm tannins, excellent balance, and a mouth-filling intensity that lingers well beyond the sip.

EMILIANA has forged a good reputation for sustainable winemaking and a solid belief that organically grown grapes simply make better wine.

But can one drink a wine called NOVAS without thinking of supernovas and their dark legacies? Scary thought not, and weighed in on this unwelcomely, not feeling the least disqualified by his wine abstention to comment. No, indeed, if a rogue black hole headed our way it wouldn’t even need to enter our solar system to perturb the earth’s orbit, stretching it into an extreme ellipse or even detaching us from orbit and whipping it out into cold space. All this could happen very quickly, although there would be some time dilation close to the event horizon.

Scary seemed to relish this idea, Fluffy was completely indifferent to it, and I was freaking scared out of my wits. There was nothing for it but to attempt opening my grandparents’ homemade bottle so I could get thoroughly pissed. But I couldn’t manage it (as usual) and my parents refused to help. One of them said “There, there” and noted that at least the Milky Way’s black holes are mostly in orbit rather than pinging around the galaxy randomly, which was reassuring enough to quell my immediate worry and replace it with the persistent, ongoing one about Fluffy and his eerie agenda.

BIG ROCK DUNKELWEIZEN—Drink it quickly, even if the ball won’t drop again

Score another point for the Mayan calendar: With the End of Days imminent and presumably no more Times Square big-ball drops remaining, there was no longer any earthly use for the famously well-preserved Dick Clark. Dead of a heart attack at 82, Clark leaves our little blue planet hurtling toward the apocalypse without his squeaky-clean morals to guide us.

Even though Dick Clark mainstreamed the devil’s music, he drew the line at Elvis’s public thrusts, requiring the King to be filmed from the waist up during his American Bandstand gig, and thus rescuing American teenagers from thinking about bumping, grinding, or sex. Clark’s death is a sad blow for the American right wing with which he was so proudly aligned.

James Brown is dead.
He looks happy, though. —AP Photo

Celebrity open-casket shots are rare, and if the news is correct, Clark has already been cremated, leaving the world to wonder what he must have looked like in repose. Doubtless he looked charmingly waxen, if not happy, the way James Brown did.

Caskets really creep me out. After searching in vain for a picture of Dick Clark dead or in a coffin and finding all kinds of other freaky things instead (a child’s Hello Kitty coffin, OMG), I needed a drink. Lucky for me there was one beer left: BIG ROCK DUNKELWEIZEN DARK WHEAT ALE.

As you know, my fellow inebriates, if a beer is the last beer in the house I am absolutely going to drink it, and this was the case with DUNKELWEIZEN, even if I wasn’t crazy about it being a wheat ale. I’ve never found a hefeweizen I loved, mainly because of their light citrusiness, but I thought a dark wheat beer might be different. And it was.

DUNKELWEIZEN is a lovely dark color with a garnet tinge and a fizzy white head. Billed as a blend of five distinctive malts, its aroma is rich and toffee-like with espresso predominating. Malty sweetness hits the tongue first, then unmistakable coffee, chocolate, and vanilla notes. These flavors are none too subtle, mind you; they tend to redouble with each sip and stick to the palate, making the beer less refreshing than it could be.

That having been said, DUNKELWEIZEN is drinkable. I could pound six of them if I needed to—say, if the Canucks were getting reamed and I felt sad. The mouthfeel isn’t terribly heavy, the alcohol percentage is an acceptable 5%, and the flavors are harmonious, even if they do suggest a Big Rock–Starbucks collaboration.

Like a lot of beers that aren’t perfectly right, low temperature is essential to enjoyment of DUNKELWEISEN. Give it ten minutes in the freezer prior to opening, drink it quickly, and you’ll probably love it—the deeper flavors won’t have a fighting chance to punch through the icy cold. But if this beer is allowed to sit, those heavy flavors get a bit rowdy and start behaving like coffee instead of beer.

A beer that needs to be slammed back quickly is not a bad thing. I feel a bit guilty pounding a really sublime beer fast so I can get loaded, but DUNKELWEIZEN lends itself to chugging. So I did pound the bottle, forgetting that it was the last beer in the house, which made me melancholy and prompted me to look at coffin pictures again.

Check it out, it's Elvis.

This one doesn't have anybody in it, but it is decorated with a bacon motif.

This one has Kim Jong-Il in it.

A wine-themed casket. Way to show people you loved life.

There goes Whitney Houston.

Would Dick Clark have liked this gay-themed coffin?

Going out in style, Michael Jackson.