Welcome back, my mortal morsels, to the annual Halloween Countdown, where we are preparing for a celebration of the dead, the dangerous, the dreary and the delectably dark. Once again, we find ourselves thirteen nights from Halloween. And in case you've failed to remember... the reason why we begin our countdown /now/ is because today is my birthday
Happy Birthday to you... but Beware what you do...I struggled to find a theme for this year's Halloween Countdown - some guiding principle behind which to power the engine that is this macabre metric. But, in the absence of my success, I had an epiphany. If there's one thing that has defined this year - perhaps even the last few years on this miserable, little planet - it is failure.
Or this might be the last time, That we sing this to you.
The Word of the Day is: FAIL
Fail /fayl/ v.i. 1. To fall short or be wanting in action, detail, or result. 2. To be insufficient or absent: Our supplies may fail. 3. To fall off; dwindle. ♦v.t. 4. To neglect to perform: Despite her promise, she failed to help. 5. To prove of no use or help to: Words fail me. 6. To take (an examination, etc.) without passing: He failed Maths this year. 7. To declare (a person) unsuccessful in a test, course of study, etc.: The teacher failed him in class. ♦n. 8. Without fail, for certain; with certainty.
You Have all Failed.
When it comes to handling the plague, we all had choices to make, to decide how many would die. At best, three thousand (~300,000) people would die; but, if we completely failed to act, then over one hundred and fifty million (~150,000,000) people would die.
At time of writing, just over six million, five-hundred thousand (6,500,000) people have died. Now, I'm no mathematician - I'm not even a mathy-mortician - but six and a half million is a lot more deaths than three-hundred thousand. And the numbers are still, slowly but surely, rising...
When it comes to the end of the world as we know it, we are running out of time. The boffins have set a 2030 deadline to prevent the global climate from rising 2°C or more... but these numbers betray a much darker truth.
A rise of one degree will change our climate for the worse, and currently we've changed the global climate by 1.2°C (2.2°F); and, as anyone with eyes and skin can attest, it already has. The climate has become more volatile over the last few years. But, most people know this - the response is palliative, not preventative - but now even the experts are saying that their deadline was optimistic, and it may already be too late...
When it comes to freedom, safety and education we are regressing. Nazis and bigots of the world were given the reins for far too long in recent years, leading to record highs of human rights abuses in recent years. Not only this, but it's lead to distrust, paranoia and conflict amongst the rest of the human cattle.
In the face of these fundamental, human failures you could be crushed under the weight of your own incompetency, allow yourself to be destroyed by your own delicious deficiencies.
Or, you could step back, stand above, look down at the pitiful peasantry, and celebrate their inadequacies. There's no turning back now, we're haemorrhaging out vital fluids and there's no putting the blood back in this dying body. So, let's watch it die, and autopsy the remains... and as I always say, if you're going to cut into someone, you might as well have a smile on your face while you're doing it.
I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and in the following nights, I'm going to explore some of our most damning, devastating failures, and everything that comes with it. Until then, if you're going to fail, you might as well go down in flames.
