Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Gyrations

Beginning to research a new book topic --I went to the library yesterday. This is my favorite step, like going to the candy store!

I've already learned a new word: gyre (as applied to oceans): systems of large circulating ocean currents caused by wind patterns and Earth's rotation.

Moby-Duck is about thousands of bathtub toys (like rubber duckies) that fell off a container ship in the North Pacific Gyre and made their way, over many years, up past Alaska, through the Bering Strait, and down to the beaches of New England.

Rubber duckies may eventually spin out of a gyre, but gyres are graveyards of plastic crap, such as the plastic microbeads we wash into water every day when we spit out our toothpaste or wash off our cosmetics.

I know the word gyre from the opening lines of "Jabberwocky":
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
   Did gyre and gimble in the wabe....

and Gerard Manley Hopkins (where?)---maybe I can use his lines,
  All is sèared with trade, blèared, smeared with toil
    and wears man's smudge and shares man's smell.
The book won't all be dreadful though---there's lots of hopeful and fun stuff, like [links to the blog] The Scavengers' Manifesto: A Guide to Freeing Yourself from the Endless Cycle [gyre] of Buying More and More Stuff...  

I'm off to work now.
This morning there was an e-mail from nursing letting me know yet another person is coming for Activities. If I'd had any doubts about my decision to quit... Well, I didn't, but that just made me even more relieved that I only have six more shifts.

2 comments:

Zhoen said...

Just need a little creature with the right enzyme that can eat the plastic.

I love research, never know what will bob up.

Frex said...

And we'll need a lot of those little creatures:
"as much as 12.7 million metric tons of plastic is entering the global ocean annually, and unless waste management practices are improved, the flux of plastics to the oceans could increase by an order of magnitude
within the next decade."
--http://marinedebris.info