armageddon

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.

BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL (2010)—worth keeping on hand for the End of Days

My Fellow Inebriates,

The four-year-old recently took the scissors to Glen Bear, who ended up with a surprisingly restrained fur trim, which nevertheless prompted my mum to put the scissors in a high-up cupboard until the “paper only” rule is better internalized by the kids.

Thankfully not Glen or any of us

Glen has fewer brain cells than I do, which puts him into the negative numbers, but now he also looks like a dork. And even though he doesn’t care or really realize what happened, I’m shaking in my fur. It could have been any of us! And who knows? If the kid had been feeling especially demonic, Glen could have been decapitated.

Rattled by this incident, I started thinking about how illusory our sense of safety is. If you’re enjoying computer access and have the leisure to read an alcoholic bear’s ruminations, it’s a good guess that your basic physiological needs—food, water, air—are taken care of, as well as security concerns such as shelter and privacy too. But as my friend Scarybear likes to remind me constantly, we are just one semi-apocalyptic event away from chaos.

For me that event might consist of scissors-wielding kindergartners, but Scarybear is thinking about much larger destabilizing events. We talked about asteroids (and hemorrhoids) recently, but Scary finds the asteroid scenario, in all its preventability, boring. He’s thinking a gamma-ray burst will do us in this year.

Of course gamma-ray bursts occur all the time. They’re invisible to our eyes, which means we’re blissfully unaware of the daily gamma flashbulb that goes off, bathing our little blue marble in gamma radiation and then winking out. These bursts are 10 quadrillion times stronger than the sun. They don’t even come from our own galaxy—they come from other, distant galaxies (a long time ago, hitting us now) and are thought to be caused by collapsed stars merging. Wow!

So, Scary says in the brief pause he takes from snarfing an entire container of ice cream, what if two collapsed stars in OUR galaxy merged? OMG!

Uncertainty is frightening. I feel exactly the sort of trepidation Scary does about gamma-ray bursts when I’m considering buying a new bottle of wine. Like lots of wine drinkers, I have “go-to” wines that are always reliable; they hit the sweet spot between price and quality that allows you to feel good about dropping $15 to $20 in your local booze shop and pounding your purchase in front of the TV. It sucks to go out on a limb and come home with some barnyardy vinegar and have to drink it knowing you could and should have bought one of your old reliables.

So when our friend Robert came over with one of his old reliables, I took notice. BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL (2010) certainly hits the sweet spot on price ($11.97) and boasts a reasonable alcohol content (13.5%). Made from 30-year-old monastrell (mourvedre) vines, this Spanish table wine is opaque and violet with a fresh berry nose. In the glass it sports generous legs and likewise coats the mouth with a plush, hearty mouthfeel. Stone-fruit top-notes and structured tannins make for a satisfying palate pleaser with a moderate to long finish.

BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL is striking for being unassuming. The flavors are balanced without jockeying among themselves for prominence, which makes the wine undistracting—an excellent choice for a party, an involving conversation, or a really gripping episode of Breaking Bad. And if you’re fretting about the End of Days, BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL can help you relax.

Not Scarybear, though. He was freaked out by Glen’s dorky haircut and worried about his little humans getting ideas about performing ursine surgery, so he transferred all this worry to thoughts of Armageddon—gamma rays especially.

He has a point. The Milky Way is pretty big and pretty old, and collapsed stars aren’t so easy to detect, never mind two of them spiraling into one another. Even if it happened a thousand light years away it would look like a second sun on our horizon, and our atmosphere would get cooked. With our ozone layer fried off, we’d all get skin cancer, but even if we hid indoors, the burst would annihilate all the ocean plankton, destroying the basis of our food chain.

Scarybear figures this could happen any time, meaning that it has already happened in our galaxy and the deadly burst is racing toward us at light speed, ETA Mayan End of Days.

Which means we have just 306 days left to stock up on some reliable wine.

What’s your “old reliable” at the liquor store? Are you stocked up?

In case you were wondering what happened to those decapitated bears