Not to be #thatperson but I feel like national news isn’t fully realizing how bad this is. Not to detract from the horror of Paradise and surrounding towns but this is really bad. And Sacramento is worse.
It is that bad, and you are not supposed to mind. You are supposed to accept the new normal. Sometimes American cities will be uninhabitable. Sometimes America will just burn. You will be encouraged to identify with this. It’ll probably be a whole thing, like how New Englanders take pride in driving in snowstorms.
The city of San Francisco currently has the worst air quality of anywhere in the world because of the wildfires. (This level of air quality, incidentally, is bad for people and kills them.) These once-in-a-lifetime wildfires will become more common in our lifetimes.
I think ! it’s okay! to say this isn’t fine!!
THIS IS NOT FINE
TEN YEARS AGO THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN TOP OF NEWS CYCLE DISASTER COVERAGE
THIS IS REALLY REALLY BAD AND WE SHOULD NOT LOOK AWAY
A few more things to think about:
a) This is happening in a region where the majority of the population does not have air conditioning in their homes, because the climate in the coastal parts of the Bay Area (including the East Bay, where we live) is typically very mild, and rarely gets warm enough to require cooling. Right now, it’s also not warm enough to require A/C for cooling, but A/C can also be used to filter indoor air. So most Bay Area residents do not have any technological means to filter the air inside their homes. When hbbo and I left earlier this week, the air inside was vastly better than the air outside, but the smoke was still so bad indoors that we were wearing N95 masks inside our apartment. Telling people to stay inside is a pretty inadequate way of protecting them when the air inside is so bad you taste ash every time you pull your mask down to take a sip of water.
c) N95 masks, the only protective mechanism most Bay Area residents have access to, frequently don’t fit children correctly, because their faces are too small to allow for a good seal, and a lot of public health outlets are just flat-out recommending against having children wear them. Just—think about that, for a second. The entire Bay Area and Central Valley are in the middle of a public health crisis that has, now, for large swathes of that area, lasted for over a week. There are very few places in that entire area, indoors or out, where you can go to get a full breath of clean air. So, throughout that area, most kids are just—breathing in smoke. All day. Every day. Indoors and out.
d) I grew up in Los Angeles and I’ve lived in California for most of my life (I’m 37), and yes, wildfires have always been a part of the California experience. But not in November. It used to be that California had a well-defined “fire season” that lasted from about May to about October, with the worst of the fire risk in the most heavily populated parts of the state coming between mid-August and mid-October, which is, for wide swathes of California, the hottest part of the year (I know this sounds bananas to non-Californians, but this is just what our climate’s like: our perceptual summer is dramatically late-shifted into the autumn, and our technical “summers” can actually be quite cool, especially if you’re near the coast, as is true in SF and LA).
e) You can use Breezometer to compare the air quality in the Bay Area to the air quality in your location. The air quality at our apartment is currently 18/100 on their scale (higher is better); it’s dipped as low as 12 at various points this week. As I’m writing this on Saturday morning, the air quality is noticeably improving for most of the state, but:
…last night, and for several days previous, that blob of red centered around Chico was contiguous all the way west to the coast, down the coast past Monterey, and all the way south (through that area that’s currently orange/yellow) down the middle of the state—the Central Valley—to Visalia, and orange down to Bakersfield. Because I think California scale is hard to grasp sometimes: it’s about a three hour drive in no traffic just from San Jose to the area that hbbo and I are staying, near San Luis Obispo (marked on the map as “San Luis” because the “Obispo” got cut off—green area on the western coast, near the bottom of this screencap). The actual fire, which is near Chico, is about 370 miles (595 km), or a five and a half hour drive, from the southern edge of its smoke cloud in Bakersfield.
what she means: the words “christmas tree” are used in the hobbit, and since we know that bilbo is the author of the hobbit, hobbits must have christmas which means there must be a middle earth jesus. but hobbits seem to be the only ones who have the concept of christmas which means it was probably a hobbit jesus. but frodo says in return of the king that no hobbit has ever intentionally harmed another hobbit so who crucified hobbit jesus?? were there other hobbit incarnations of religious figures?? was there hobbit moses?? did jrr tolkien even think about this at all??
Wait wait I might actually have an answer
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit like waaaay before he even dreamed up the idea for Lord of the Rings, so when he DID dream up LotR, he had a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. Like plotholes galore
Like for example in the first version Gollum was a pretty nice dude who lost the riddle contest graciously and gave Bilbo the ring as a legit present and was very helpful and it was super nice and polite and absolutely nobody tried to eat anyone because this is a story for kids and that’s very rude
But that doesn’t work with LotR, so Tolkien went back and re-released an updated version of The Hobbit with all the lore changes and stuff to fix everything that didn’t work
This is the version we know and love today
BUT rather than pretend the early version never existed, Tolkien went and worked the retcon into the lore
If you pay attention in Fellowship, there’s a bit where Gandalf is telling Frodo about the ring and he mentions how Bilbo wasn’t entirely honest about the manner in which it was found
To us modern readers, this doesn’t make a ton of sense, so mostly we just breeze by it–but actually that line is referencing the first version of The Hobbit
The pre-retcon version of the Hobbit is canonically Bilbo’s original book. The original version with Nice Gollum is canonically a lie Bilbo told to legitimize his claim to the ring and absolve him of the guilt he feels for his rather shady behavior
Then the post-retcon version is an in-universe edited edition someone went and released later to straighten out Bilbo’s lies
So it’s 100% plausible that the in-universe editor who fixed up Bilbo’s Red Book and translated it from whatever language Hobbits speak was a human who knew about Christmas Trees and tossed the detail in to make human readers feel more at home, because that’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you have a translator editor person dressing up a story for an audience that doesn’t know the exact cultural context in which the original story was written
Tolkien was a medieval scholar and medieval stories are rife with that sort of thing, so like… yeah
Not only all that, but Tolkien was also working within a frame narrative that he wasn’t the real author, but a translator of older manuscripts; so, in-universe, the published The Hobbit isn’t actually Bilbo’s book, but rather Tolkien’s copy of an older copy of an older copy of an older copy of Bilbo’s book. So when errors and anachronisms came up, he would leave them there instead of fixing them, and he may have even put some in intentionally; what we’re supposed to get from the “Christmas tree” bit is that the first scribe to translate the book from Westroni to English couldn’t come up with an accurate analogue for whatever hobbits do at midwinter.
Yes. Another example of tolkien doing this is him using, for instance, Old High Gothic to represent Rohirric – not because the people of Rohan actually spoke that language, but because Old High Gothic had the same relationship with English that Rohirric had with Westron (Which is the Common Language spoken in the West of Middle-Earth). There’s tons of that stuff in the book.
Like, Merry and Pippin’s real names (In Westron) are Kalimac Brandagamba and Razanur Tûk, respectively (to pick just one example of this). Tolkien changed their names in English to names which would give us English-speakers the same kind of feeling as those names would to a Westron-speaker. Lord of the Rings is so much deeper than most readers realise.
tolkein’s entire oevre is just one epic in-joke with the oxford linguistics department imo
No that’s right! The basic point still stands and is neat but a lot of Rohirric names are translated as Old English, like Theodred and Eorl and so on. Another interesting thing is that he sometimes modernized them to modern English because, apparently, those names were intelligible to Westron speakers, either because Gondorians knew them or because the Hobbits recognized them from their dialects (they once lived near the Rohirrim and borrowed a bunch of words, including their name for themselves). Here’s a good link about it from Tolkien Gateway, it’s SUPER cool.
Also if I correctly recall (it’s been a while so I might not) there was a draft of TTT where Tolkien intended for Theoden to greet Our Heroes in Old English. This was in The Treason of Isengard and I have a very distinct memory of reading it at about fifteen and being completely floored and baffled by the fact that he just…wrote an entire speech in Old English for Theoden to say. Like, can you even believe. I absolutely love how much flavor and care he put into the languages in LOTR.
