On Getting Skunked and the Disaster in the Arctic

My cat, Iris, got skunked this weekend, always fun. I woke in the middle of night to a horrible smell, wandered down the hall half-asleep into the living room, and—I’ve been dying to yank out this Weather Channel phrase—”It was like a war zone.” Well, a war zone minus all the IEDs, M-16s, replaced with a stinky cat. She looked chagrined, cowering there on the floor, emitting a skunk smell so strong I could barely breathe. It was a fog of musk. That intense, it doesn’t even smell like a skunk anymore, but something scorched and funky.
And to follow up my Heidi Cullen post a few days back, here’s a piece in the NY Times that sounds appropriately dire, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s “Disaster at the Top of the World”: