Five Bullets 9.13.24
Mdou Moctar, Arctic Espionage, Earth Vibrations & more
Good Morning and Happy Friday!
It’s another beautiful and mild day here in New York City. The late summer weather has been perfect lately - not too hot, with almost no rain or cloudy skies.
Somehow I ended up with two bullets about the Arctic today, not that I’m thinking about winter yet! But we’re only days away from the end of summer.
How are you spending the remaining days of summer?
Five Bullets:
Film: Actor James Earl Jones passed away earlier this week at age 93. As a child Jones stuttered and even refrained from talking until a high school english teacher encouraged Jones to write poetry and read it aloud to the class, helping him work through his stuttering. Jones went on to capture audiences in plays and movies and his first Hollywood role was in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. For George Lucas’s Star Wars, Jones voiced the evil monotone of Darth Vader for which he requested to be uncredited until the third film Return of the Jedi. [One of my favorite Jones roles is in The Sandlot as former baseball-player and father of the giant english mastiff nicknamed the Beast].
Music: Mdou Moctar Tiny Desk. Taureg rocker Mdou Moctar and band visited NPR to play a few tunes off their recent album Funeral For Justice. Moctar’s high-octane desert blues reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix meets Tinariwen features hypnotic grooves and searing guitars as Moctar sings about political and cultural issues affecting both the continent of Africa and his home country of Niger.
NYC: Where’s Happy the elephant? Happy hasn’t been seen at the Bronx Zoo in months. The zoo and a federal inspection both assured the public that Happy is doing well but that the Asian elephant isn’t choosing to visit the pasture where she can be seen by visitors. Animal rights activists have renewed their plea to end Happy’s captivity. In 2022, a court case citing Happy’s right to habeas corpus was brought before the New York Court of Appeals, which determined that the right applied only to humans.
Science: We Now Know Why Earth Vibrated for Nine Days in 2023. For nine days in September 2023 seismographs around the world reported a strange vibration within the Earth and it wasn’t an earthquake. Researchers have determined that the cause was a massive sheet of rock and ice which fell off a glacier in Greenland causing a giant tsunami that moved back and forth between the walls of a fjord. The arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world which will likely cause more unprecedented natural disasters.
Spy games: Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic. Across the border from Russia and only a few miles from the home of Russia’s Northern Fleet and nuclear submarines is the small Norwegian town of Kirkenes. Spy games between the two countries have played out for the past decade with Russia ramping up attempts since it’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and with the recent war in Ukraine to subvert Kirkenes local population, rewrite the area’s history, gain intelligence on Norway’s military, and more hybrid warfare tactics. Ben Taub reports from the polar night in Norway to investigate how Russian intelligence services are using Kirkenes as a testing ground for operations throughout Europe because, Taub writes, Russia is at war with the West.
The glacier story is fascinating—and quite sobering to know that nothing is an isolated event from an environmental standpoint. An extreme example of the butterfly effect.
I guess the question is if Happy is really happy or not!