attack of manbearpig

just walked a mile in what weather.com says feels like 10-degree weather. some of the snowbanks up the street are taller than me. I could literally disappear into them. Boston is a polar ice cap right now, snow-cover-wise.

you know what else Boston is? it's built on a landfill, same as San Francisco, or most of it is anyway. where I'm sitting right now, this whole part of town, used to just be the Massachusetts Bay. and if there's ever an earthquake of significant magnitude in New England, close enough to the city, the loosely-packed ground under this dorm will liquefy and the whole Back Bay neighborhood will sink into it, anywhere from a few inches to several feet. that includes Fenway Park, and that includes everywhere I've ever lived away from home. there have been earthquakes out here, too. nothing in the last hundred years to compete with the West Coast, but out on the Cape there was one in the 1800s that they felt in New Hampshire and western Mass and all over.

get to the edges of the country while you can, yo. New Orleans is sinking as the water's rising, the next great coastal earthquakes could cripple San Fran and Boston. there's great stuff out here, come see it before we all have to move to Kansas.

earth science is the only science that's ever been remotely interesting to me, you see (besides space'n'planets, that is...and dinosaurs...okay, applied science can be awesome, it's just bio/physics/chem that I hate). how the Midwest is flat like it is because it got rolled over by glaciers during the last Ice Age, how New York and New England are actually rising upward, 18,000 years later, as a result of those glaciers retreating off of them. how it was probably a volcano in Mexico that got the dinosaurs, and you can still go see the crater.

100 percent unrelated to all this, MLB Network named Andrew McCutchen the best center fielder in baseball today. my boy. I couldn't be prouder of him and I think they're right. kid's going places.

my dad and I were discussing the Pirates a couple months ago and he was being pessimistic as ever, and I said, "well, my great hope for Walker and McCutchen is that they end up Red Sox, so I can still watch and love them." he said, very earnestly and seriously all of a sudden, "no, you know what? my great hope is that they win the World Series as Pirates in 2014, and Neil Walker wins the Series MVP." and he walked away.

the moral of this post: Boston may be hit by an earthquake and fall into the bay before the Pirates win the World Series, but that doesn't mean I'll stop believing.