November 19th, 2007
Making a monkey out of nature
Seriously, stop it. It’s not doing any of us any good.
If nature has a personality it becomes responsible for its own actions, which means, ultimately, that we are not…
It’s not climate change, it’s the wrath of nature… we can’t do anything about that.
People are irrational, sometimes cruel and are required to make choices… do we really need to see nature in that light?
Because if I suspected for one second that a tsunami was intentional or a cyclone was plotted, then I would be marching off to the rain-forest, chainsaw in hand to teach nature a lesson.
Sean on 
Maddie on
today i wrote a thank-you letter to the sun
That’s a good point. Another excellent example of human stupidity. “Let’s personify nature so people will feel guilty about killing trees and then completely ignore the other repercussions that would arise if nature were an entity.” Ha, I really love this comic. =)
I think ppl who view nature as a sentient being with control over its actions are somewhat tapped. Like ppl who say that their pets display human emotion, *anthropomorphising*.
Even if nature is sentient, I doubt it would be comprhendable to humans.
I don’t think ppl ascribes sentience to nature to avoid responsibility, I think that they do it because it makes them feel more comfortable and safe, gives them that warm and fuzzy feeling inside.
It is silly and it has to stop.
I love the typos in my previous statement.
Pets don’t display human emotions, humans display pet emotions. Animals have emotions. ‘Tis true.
I like to personify things to make them seem like jerks. Nature is a jerk, the sun is a jerk, that thing that sticks off my dresser that I stub my pinky toe on is a jerk (AND I WILL REAP MY TERRIBLE VENGEANCE ON IT). I tend to think most people in general are jerks, so believing anthropomorphised inanimate objects would be jerks seems the logical choice.
I definitely don’t think that Earth/NatureWeather/Whatever’s got an AGENDA; I think it’s just what needs to happen. I think there are a lot of great, huge patterns going on around us that we just walked into without reading the script first. Natural Disasters happen because they need to happen.
And whether one believes Earth/Nature/Weather/Whatever is a being or not, we can still learn from the magnitude of disaster. Case in point: Katrina would probably not have been SO strong had we not been spending the last hundreds of years screwing up the wetlands.
I think essentially what I’m trying to say here is that humans have this tendency to try and fix what isn’t broken. THAT is silly. THAT needs to stop. For serious.
if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and if you can’t fix it don’t break it.
the other day i started thinking, for the thousandth time, about what people mean when they say ‘IT’S raining’. what is IT?
btw adam? maybe im just the laziest one here, but ive noticed that the comment box no longer remembers my name and email each time i come here, and i always forget to put it in. no pressure (its just because i’m lazy, remember that) but can you do anything about that?
That’s a really good point. if anyone needs be in the next few days, i’ll be sat in my room curled up on my bed trying to figure out what IT is. :p
I’ve never thought about it in that way. we always say “it’s raining” “it’s sunny” i guess it would be the weather, no? “the weather is sunny?”
i don’t know, really.
It does refer to ‘the weather’ in that case, yes.
~Melanthios
Grammar Ninja, proficient in Victorian English and other Exotic Grammatical Dialects.
You should meet my superhero Alter-ego, “MADAMAN”. she/he (we haven’t defined that bit yet) has many super powers. one of them is correct use of grammar and correcting other’s grammar. what a pointless super hero.
Hurrah for androgynes!
That is not a pointless superhero. I would adore being the sweetheart of that superhero. ‘O Madaman, save me from the horrible villain, Netspeak and his sidekick Typo! Eeee! *swoon*’
There need to be more lgbt superheroes, as a tangental note. For serious.
see i would have thought that ‘the weather’ is incapable of doing anything. they way i see it the rain is what MAKES the weather. the weather is rainY. i guess it could be like….um…the atmosphere is raining. but really, shouldnt the water be raining? because the water rains down on us? i have gotten myself thoroughly confused. someone please dig me out of this hole i seem to be in?
Well that is not the way that particular idiom’s grammar sees it, I suppose. Stylistically, the ‘it’ in ‘It is raining’ refers to the weather, or the sky. It’s a vague pronoun in that statement. English is funny like that, but I love it because it’s funny. Where else can you be *awfully* clever or *terribly* witty?
I asked people, some said they thought “It” was the the sky, others said the weather…one person said it was the sky peeing, not raining. i really ought to get them looked at.
oh wait. that person was me.
moving swiftly on…
what other things can you be clever and witty with? hmm.. i shall have a think melanthios.
Nature’s daughter, Weather, is a friend of
mine. It’s only when Weather is bad that
Nature gets angry. Normally, she’s cool.
Earthquake, Weather’s father, is unpredictable.
Earthquakes are quite predictable, really. Then again, I’m a California native; quakes are predictable because we expect them *all the time*. ‘Oh, the ground’s shaking; okay everyone, get to a doorway or under a desk. Right ho, careful of aftershocks.’
Being an Olympian Pagan, weather is the domain of a number of deities, though I attribute precipitation to Zeus and the winds to Zephyr. Not that they have any agenda, just whenever the weather is favourable (i.e. when it rains) I run about excitedly like a twitterpated bunny and get soaking wet while shouting, ‘Yay Rain! Yay Zeus! YAY RAIN! THANK YOU FOR THE WATER FROM THE SKY!!’ (I live in a desert. Water from the sky is nigh unto biblical.)
i live in the desert too, but when it rains here it can be rather destructive.
every monsoon season some fool drives into a flooded road and gets washed away
I live in a place that has no season for rain, though. We are supposed to expect 12″ a year.
I have worked on storm water drainage systems to deal with 300mm/hr.
Aus has been experiencing a 7 year drought, but right now, my gutters are overflowing, the ground is soaked and the roads are puddles.
I’ll stop teasing.