Quote: “I watch people attempt sleep in ways that would concern a physician. One man is folded over his tray table like a student who has given up during an exam. A child three rows back is fully unconscious, limbs splayed, sleeping better than any of us have slept in years. This is the last time in his life he will find an economy seat comfortable, and he doesn’t know it.” (Scott Monaco on Substack)

“From the kitchen to the incinerator, unsung workers keep Arctic research going” Quote: “I was the microbiologist for a bigger chocolate company,” she said. “And then that was sucking my soul, and I hated corporate life. I was like, I’m leaving a temperature-sensored kitchen area where I taste chocolate every hour — and I’m going to the tundra to get eaten alive by mosquitoes.”
Dana sez, I was just down the road at Galbraith and I remember it only too well. (great story from Alaska Public Media)

He was an old man who had started a war in a faraway Gulf, and he had gone one hundred and forty-three days now without reopening the Strait.
After forty days, a tentative ceasefire had been reached. Then another one. Then another one after that. Then another one that the old man had bragged about but that the enemy claimed no knowledge of. Then a memorandum that should have been a permanent ceasefire but lasted just eight days.
It was not the first time the old man had encountered such a setback. His entire life had been beset by similar misfortune.
That is the wrong word, he thought.
It was something worse than bad luck.

The Strait was rigged. –Carlos Greaves

Click through here to read Greaves channeling his inner Ernest Hemingway on McSweeney‘s. You’re welcome. (h/t John Naughton)

Thirty years later, this photo still scares the bejesus out of me. Are those creatures crawling into the hellmouth, or…crawling out?
(USGS, and h/t Kottke for the reminder)

Quote for the day

The world now has 3 terawatts of solar. The first terawatt took 20 years. The second took 33 months.

The third has arrived in 19 months. —Angus Hervey

Outro…

There is just no song this girl can’t cover and no note she can’t hit.

Chatter Lagniappe Sunday long haul flights Scott Monaco The Hellmouth Toolik Field Station