serving almost winked out of existence as people stopped believing in trees, rocks, and the rest of Creation. Fortunately for God, Berkeley’s theorem was refuted in 1753 when an idea fell on his head.)
Bishop Berkeley: Destroyer of Gods, Wearer of Hats.
To make matters worse, the number of gods was growing at an unbelievable rate. We all knew why this was. Olympus, where the new pantheon had their headquarters, had come to be known as “Mount” Olympus, so regularly was it shaken with the thunderous passions of the deities. The countryside surrounding it had become a quagmire of heavenly fluids, and vast, dirty underwear could be seen snagged in trees across half the earth. It was only the sudden onset of an ice age that prevented the entire planet from having to be dry-cleaned.
Heart of Darkness
I was fond of glaciers, slow but amiable giants that bulldozed all the monocular and snake-haired skulls of the Age of Myth beneath them. I used to like watching them as they flowed into the sea to calve, the infant icebergs squealing and squawking with delight as they drifted away from the shore, while the mother glaciers broke out in bergschrunds and shed meltwater from every moulin in their fringe.
Ice, Ice Babies.
After the initial attack of hypothermia, the ensuing bouts of deadly frostbite, and the subsequent starvation of millions of people, my workload slackened. Humankind was forced to regress and regroup, and I was intrigued to watch the adaptations and innovations this new situation prompted. In my opinion, the most notable advance that the Ice Age fostered came with the rise of the Evil Villain.
Famous nowadays for tying damsels to train tracks, Evil Villains were not always so prevalent, or ingenious. Indeed, up until the Ice Age the early practitioners of Evil Villainy had been hampered in their calling by a lack of fast-moving locomotive devices with which to crush their victims in a suitably spectacular and horrifying manner. The rise of the glaciers, however, offered Evil Villains a temporary solution. Captive damsels were tied tightly to the snow line, and inch by inch, the giant tongues of ice slowly ran them over. Admittedly there were teething problems. The devilish process usually took from six months to two years, depending on the weather and the width of the damsel, and the Evil Villain was forced to keep his victim fed, watered, and warm throughout, if the full, shocking nature of his plan were to succeed. Many Evil Villains suffered hernias from having to sustain their diabolical cackling for months on end, and the lengthy intervening period between capture and slaughter meant rescues and escapes were common. I was assured, however, by the handful of people who were killed in such a manner that their ends had been “somewhat dastardly.”
Trains: Represented a Significant Technological Advance over Glaciers.
As all things must, even the glaciers had to die. I remember watching them retreating back to the poles, shrinking under the sun’s gaze, until in a lonely cwm, corrie, or cirque, they exhaled their final icy breaths and thawed into puddles, whereupon I popped out their dripping souls and sent them on their way. The earth returned to a more temperate clime, Evil Villains set to work creating the internal combustion engine, and the Age of Civilization finally began.
It was the Sumerians who kicked things off. Imagine, if you can, an entire race of people grimly obsessed with the weather and you get some inkling of ancient Mesopotamia. Such meteorological obsessions seemed to stem from the fact that nascent society had located itself on a monotonous landscape of mudflats and marshland, the tedium of whose prospects was matched only by the certainty of its inundation. “Is it raining?” was the fashionable conversational entrée for more than fifteen hundred years (when it was eventually supplanted by the typical forthrightness of the
Bishop Berkeley: Destroyer of Gods, Wearer of Hats.
To make matters worse, the number of gods was growing at an unbelievable rate. We all knew why this was. Olympus, where the new pantheon had their headquarters, had come to be known as “Mount” Olympus, so regularly was it shaken with the thunderous passions of the deities. The countryside surrounding it had become a quagmire of heavenly fluids, and vast, dirty underwear could be seen snagged in trees across half the earth. It was only the sudden onset of an ice age that prevented the entire planet from having to be dry-cleaned.
Heart of Darkness
I was fond of glaciers, slow but amiable giants that bulldozed all the monocular and snake-haired skulls of the Age of Myth beneath them. I used to like watching them as they flowed into the sea to calve, the infant icebergs squealing and squawking with delight as they drifted away from the shore, while the mother glaciers broke out in bergschrunds and shed meltwater from every moulin in their fringe.
Ice, Ice Babies.
After the initial attack of hypothermia, the ensuing bouts of deadly frostbite, and the subsequent starvation of millions of people, my workload slackened. Humankind was forced to regress and regroup, and I was intrigued to watch the adaptations and innovations this new situation prompted. In my opinion, the most notable advance that the Ice Age fostered came with the rise of the Evil Villain.
Famous nowadays for tying damsels to train tracks, Evil Villains were not always so prevalent, or ingenious. Indeed, up until the Ice Age the early practitioners of Evil Villainy had been hampered in their calling by a lack of fast-moving locomotive devices with which to crush their victims in a suitably spectacular and horrifying manner. The rise of the glaciers, however, offered Evil Villains a temporary solution. Captive damsels were tied tightly to the snow line, and inch by inch, the giant tongues of ice slowly ran them over. Admittedly there were teething problems. The devilish process usually took from six months to two years, depending on the weather and the width of the damsel, and the Evil Villain was forced to keep his victim fed, watered, and warm throughout, if the full, shocking nature of his plan were to succeed. Many Evil Villains suffered hernias from having to sustain their diabolical cackling for months on end, and the lengthy intervening period between capture and slaughter meant rescues and escapes were common. I was assured, however, by the handful of people who were killed in such a manner that their ends had been “somewhat dastardly.”
Trains: Represented a Significant Technological Advance over Glaciers.
As all things must, even the glaciers had to die. I remember watching them retreating back to the poles, shrinking under the sun’s gaze, until in a lonely cwm, corrie, or cirque, they exhaled their final icy breaths and thawed into puddles, whereupon I popped out their dripping souls and sent them on their way. The earth returned to a more temperate clime, Evil Villains set to work creating the internal combustion engine, and the Age of Civilization finally began.
It was the Sumerians who kicked things off. Imagine, if you can, an entire race of people grimly obsessed with the weather and you get some inkling of ancient Mesopotamia. Such meteorological obsessions seemed to stem from the fact that nascent society had located itself on a monotonous landscape of mudflats and marshland, the tedium of whose prospects was matched only by the certainty of its inundation. “Is it raining?” was the fashionable conversational entrée for more than fifteen hundred years (when it was eventually supplanted by the typical forthrightness of the
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