排便 Happens

Help wanted--Immediate Opening: Nuclear Heroes.

Maintenance and repair workers needed for nuclear power plant at seaside location in beautiful Pacific archipelago. Record earthquake and Tusnami have created need for emergency workers to prevent catastrophic meltdown. Preference given older workers, who will probably die of something else before the cancer risks from radiation exposure.

Japan consists of 6,852 islands located in a volcanic zone of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Earthquakes pulled Japan away from the mainland of Asia about 15 million years ago.

The word Tsunami is Japanese for “harbor wave“ or “wave train.” Japan has experienced 195 Tsunami in its recorded history. Before Westerners learned about Tsunami, the same event was called a Tidal Wave. Television taught us the word Tsunami when one killed a quarter of a million people in Asia just a few years ago. During WWII, New Zealand attempted and failed to create with explosives a Tsunami for use as a weapon.

In addition to earthquakes and Tsunami, Japan has a vivid nuclear history and involuntary experience with radiation poisoning from Ground Zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So why did Japan build a nuclear reactor in an earthquake zone with an ocean view? Somebody forgot the famous maxim from the Shinto shrine: "排便 Happens." It does indeed. Serious 排便.

One good thing to result from the current disaster in Japan is the sudden appearance on television of people who actually know their isotopes from a hole in the ground, intelligent gray haired people who went to math and science classes in their youth.

Here’s a lesson from one of those classes:

About 70,000 years ago, a volcano erupted at Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia, one of the earth’s largest known eruptions. It deposited a layer of ash throughout Asia. The climate effects of the Toba eruption triggered a global ecological disaster, including worldwide vegetation destruction, and severe drought. Famine and a 6-to-10-year volcanic winter reduced the world's human population to 10,000 survivors or perhaps a mere 1,000 breeding pairs.

The Lake Toba super volcano eruption was two orders of magnitude greater than the largest volcanic eruption in recorded historic times, at Mount Tambora, Indonesia, which caused 1816 to be the "Year Without a Summer" in the northern hemisphere