Episode Bleach Quotes

We have no form, therefore we fear it and because we are formless, we revere it, thus we are slain

The Nursing Home This Sunday, I paid a visit to a nursing home and noticed the empty bed in the room adjacent to my mom's. Crisp sheets stood proxy for where her elderly neighbor lay, an unshaven man or a woman with whiskers, I forget which, when I visited last ~ it couldn't have been a month, two at the most. The empty bed's corners were meticulously tucked in, like an army recruit's at boot camp, bleached of any possible embarrassment. After countless episodes of CSI, I cannot hear the word 'bleach' without thinking of incriminating evidence linking a victim to a killer. You must admit an empty bed at a nursing home is creepy; every empty room seems a trap, every lackadaisical nurse an accessory to murder, every administrator a potential Adolf Eichmann facilitating a program of geriatric genocide... Shit, I forgot to validate my parking. "Mom, I'll be right back," I say, with a smile, closing the room with the empty bed, bleaching my head of any possible embarrassment.

Coral reefs are a good example of threshold and step-change behaviour. Reefs are subject to a wide variety of natural disturbances, from hurricanes to episodic outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish. Over the last several decades human stresses - nutrient and sediment loadings from adjacent coastal areas, fishing and tourism - have begun to interact with natural disturbances to put reefs under increasing stress. Global change is adding even more stresses of a quite different nature. Increasing atmospheric CO2 is changing the carbonate chemistry in the surface waters of the ocean, making it more difficult for reef organisms to form their hard shells. At the same time, warming of the upper ocean is leading to widespread bleaching events. These new, global-scale stresses operate everywhere, and are both persistent and inexorably increasing in severity. Given sufficient pressure from these interacting local to global stresses, coral reefs can cross a threshold with widespread death of the coral and a rapid change to colourless algal beds.