Chatterbox Wednesday

Just to be clear, I don't dream about Wallace. Unless it's Danny or William.

is that the offspring of sheep2 and his one night stand with a penguin that he tried to keep quiet all those years ago?!

Danny Wallace was one of the great if onlys for me.
I was really excited when he signed for Birmingham. A genuine quality player after some dreadful years
But he only managed 16 games and never seemed right.
It was about 12 months after he left us he was diagnosed with MS and it became clear just why he had struggled.
I always regretted he didn't get the chance to show us how good he really was.

Climate change may be behind fall of ancient empire, say researchers

www.theguardian.com/science/2019/nov/13/climate-change-may-be-behind-fall-of-ancient-empire-say-researchers

What do you say about this tenthenemy ? Were these guys blasting the ozone layer by burning everyone else to death? Did King Nyarlathotep II deny the scientific consensus?

ah, so they are the ones that stole Greta's future.

What the fuck is going on in here? I was planning to waltz in and threaten to send Lady Mondegreen after you all, but it's too fucked for that. Twats.

Absolutely. Their carbon sandal footprint was through the cedar beam roof and the unpopular chariot congestion charge for Nineveh city centre was too little too late. Eventually their fate was sealed when the prophetic maiden Gereta was forced to undergo the River Ordeal although she couldn't swim. She was avenged by a coalition of radicalised Babylonian vegans and Median eco-warriors who demonstrated to the Assyrians that meat is murder.

Spend centuries fighting the Medes and the Persians and then it turns out Cyrus' secret weapon is a protest singer with an acoustic lute.
What a way to go.

That's true, my problem with this theory is that while documentation for the last years of the Neo-Assyrian Empire is sparse, the drought period is supposed to have lasted until ca. 550, i.e. more or less throughout the entire length of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. That is a period that is extremely well documented and as far as we know the economy was booming. Since Babylonian agriculture was completely dependant on irrigation that ultimately relied on rainfall in the north I'm not entirely convinced, although the authors claim that Babylonian irrigation was less vulnerable to "megadrought".

In addition to that the period of plentiful rainfall coincides with an earlier crisis of the Assyrian Empire in the 8th century that isn't even mentioned.

It's also a bit disingenuous not to talk about the role that Turkish damming on the upper Euphrates played in the recent droughts.

Interesting. We do seem to be having a moment in which people are starting to believe that scientists will soon be able to explain everything ever, and prove it with data, once and for all. The G is fully signed up to it, hence that weird Long Read article yesterday that was like something from the 1880s, and their adulation for Stephen pinkers terrible history books. Which is not to say that vlimate change isnt sometimes the answer, but when you have the hammer of climate data, every problem starts to look like a nail. (That's a Morrissey b side btw).