What do you get when you combine a great cheese, a mind-blowing book, and Juice Newton?
(And if that's not the setup for the strangest joke ever, I don't know what is).
Anyway, every so often the Marquette Food Co-op has a very interesting cheese on sale. If you ever see it in stock, I HIGHLY recommend their Lavender Jack Cheese. It's a semi-creamy goat cheese with flecks of Lavender in it. Yeah, I know. I had the same thought as you're probably having right now. But you know what?
It works, and it works deliciously. If you have the chance, definitely check it out!
Now, how does Juice Newton play into all of this? Well, while we were enjoying the cheese, Loraine was also thumbing through one of our Billboard music chart books and came across the name Juice Newton. Since we had no idea if (unlike Olivia Newton-John) she was even still alive (spoiler alert—she is, and is still touring) we had to dig a little deeper, and that's when the song “Queen of Hearts” got stuck in my head, and would not leave.
Trust me—I've had MANY stupid songs stuck in my head over the decades, songs that take up residence in my brain and won't let go. But having Juice Newton's “Queen of Hearts” stuck on auto-repeat in my sub-conscious?
No human being should have to go through that. Unless, of course, you're Juice Newton (available to play your private corporate gig, according to her website!)
Finally, the book that blew my mind? It's called “Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth”, written by paleo-climatologist Curt Stager. It's a fascinating read about how climate change is re-shaping life and land on the planet, and it had a concept that blew my (Juice Newton-infected) mind. Stager says we should stop burning fossil fuels by the year 2100 (if not before) for two reasons, the first being that if we keep burning them at the rate we're burning them, we'll irreparably change the climate for the next 50,000 years. The other reason we should stop burning fossil fuels by 2100?
To save some for future humans to start climate change all over again.
According to Stager, 50,000 years from now, the planet's climate will shake off the damage we've done to it and get back to “normal”. Unfortunately, “normal” means things like an occasional ice age or two. And in 60 or 70 or 100,000 years, what can humans (or our robot overlords, or whatever replaces us) do to stave off the ice age? Take whatever fossil fuels we've left them, start burning them like we've been doing the past 200 years, and make the climate warm enough to keep the ice at the poles.
Weird, right? But it makes sense, if only in a very counter-intuitive way. Do what we're doing now, but do it for good, instead of evil. I'm surprised no one's came up with that idea before, if only for a big-budget Hollywood disaster-thon.
But wow. Between that concept, lavender goat cheese, and Juice Newton, it's amazing I'm even able to write today.
8-)
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