I was
reading a news article today about how much the glaciers around the world have
melted in the past year. The report was gathered by the World Glacier
Monitoring Service (WGMS). This is a real organization; I’m not making it up.
Right
under our noses, WGMS has been gathering and disseminating glacier news for
almost 100 years. Where have we been for a century? What have we been doing
while some guy named Brett has been staring at glaciers all day, writing down
pertinent numbers and such? I don’t know for sure, I’m only guessing, but I see
Brett having a thick, wiry beard and married to a lovely woman named Debbie.
But wait,
there’s more.
The WGMS
works closely with The United States National Snow and Ice Data Center
These are
real things people!
Monty
Python had the Ministry of Silly Walks and the Society of Putting Things on Top
of Other Things, but they were products of fertile imaginations, and again I’m
only guessing, mounds of colorful, dried opiates.
The
organizations I read about actually exist. Grown men and women work for and
draw paychecks from them. They have health insurance and company picnics. Brett
and Debbie bring her world famous organic deviled eggs with pimento and avoid
Darryl from level 3 who collects ceramic birch tree figurines.
It begs
the question, “How many more of these clandestine, arcane organizations are
there?” Are people being paid to watch formations of sedimentary rock to
measure how many micrometers it moves in a year? Do we keep track of the
domestic take of all Tom Hanks movies to compare it to the overseas numbers for
Morgan Freeman, looking for a correlation that would explain the continued
popularity of Alec Baldwin? Is someone watching the growth rate of the mold in
my shower? Because I’m sure as hell not.
