Climate change, pangolins and rude dates

Aaaaand we’ve done it, folks! Yes, the history books are ours: This summer of 2023 has now, officially, become the very hottest human civilization has ever experienced. Or rather, we’re now individually reduced to our very survival being dependent upon access to air conditioning. The sweltering citizens of Switzerland have even begun suing their government for not taking climate change seriously enough back when it still had the chance to. “Extreme fire behavior” is suddenly the worldwide, seasonal norm. Just ask Canada.

And here in Texas, with August firmly entrenched again, let us count our blessings that we’re merely residents of blazing Dallas where, this time of year, venturing outside always feels like opening the door to a blast furnace anyhow — as opposed to, say, Maui’s former capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Lahaina. Whoever imagined that verdant Hawaii could conflagrate so quickly? Or that the only way to survive would be by literally leaping into the sea and swimming away from shore fast as one’s legs could paddle?

What does it portend for our future when Canada and Hawaii are in flames, and the waters off Miami are hotter than the air? Will the summer of ’23 be looked back upon by historians of the future as our long-warned-of climactic “tipping point?” Is there truly no turning back from here now? Meanwhile, the noxious junk we have ignored at our peril and still keep pumping into our atmosphere sure ain’t gonna magically dissipate on its own anytime soon.

So let’s just get rabid dog-dazed right to it, shall we?

Dear Howard: My brother’s husband knocked on my door the other day with a pair of “souvenirs” he’d just brought back from their Vietnam summer vacation. Gary’s always dragging my homebody husband off to exotic locales; they once returned with a plastic garbage sack stuffed full of reeking, giant apple snails he’d plundered from some river in Uruguay. So I was prepared for anything this time — or so I thought, until seeing two live, miniaturized baby stegosauruses scramble from his swaddled elbows onto my kitchen countertop.

“Vietnamese penguins,” Gary clucked. “Aren’t they just the coolest critters, ever!”

Now I don’t know how this fool ever got his paws on any “Vietnamese penguins” or why they weren’t confiscated at customs, but the whole thing gives me the heebie-jeebies. I feel like an accessory to …. to I don’t know what. And I may not exactly be the sharpest point at the Fist-Fest, but I’ve sure seen penguins before, and I sure as heck know they don’t live in no jungles. Them things weren’t penguins!
— Wrecked Jimmy

Dear Jungle Jim: Yeah, well, that’s the thing about pangolins. They’re not remotely related to penguins to say nothing of even being birds. Think of them more as sort of anteaters with scales. Pangolins are by far the world’s most trafficked mammal, comprising up to 20 percent of all illegal wildlife trade. Assuming your brother-in-law is as dunderheaded as you make him out to be, perhaps he simply wasn’t aware of the very seriousness of such trafficking.

Grown pangolins range in size from that of a housecat to that of a large dog and are covered in scales composed of keratin (the same material human fingernails are made of). They resemble little more than oversized, waddling pinecones. They are timid, shy and harmless — in other words, they are the ideal exploitation animal. Their habitat once encompassed most all of Asia and Africa; yet, an estimated 1 million pangolins, in the past decade alone, have been poached. That’s about 300 per day. In Vietnam, pangolin scales — purported to possess mystically curative properties (think rhino horns) —can easily fetch northward of $1,000 dollars. Per pound!
Subsequently, all eight species of pangolins are now either in steep decline or critically endangered. Which brings us to the following existential question: If an animal goes extinct in plain sight, without anyone even really noticing at all, did the species even matter to begin with?

In Alabama, the state bird is the yellowhammer, a small woodpecker, presumably, and yellow in color (I’m guessing), but I certainly never recall seeing one growing up, and to my knowledge nobody else in Alabama ever has either.

Are yellowhammers extinct? Who knows?

Do we care what human advancements, or missed opportunities were forever lost with, say, the passenger pigeon, the thylacine, or the ivory-billed woodpecker, all of which exist now only as taxidermy? As for your brother-in-law’s illegally smuggled baby pangolins, please do keep me abreast as to how long he manages to actually keep them alive. Heck, and if you really want to be the good Samaritan, Jim, why not just contact the Dallas Zoo? Regardless, it hardly takes a clairvoyant to see into these creatures’ near-future a same shared rendezvous with destiny as the dodo.

Dear Howard: This new guy I’ve been seeing lately has a habit I find totally offensive. Whenever we’re together alone and I’m talking, he’s always on his phone texting or sexting or maybe just playing Candy Crush for all I know. The point is, his attention never seems focused on me, the live human in the room. Any advice?
— Prove You’re Not A Robot

Dear PYNAR: Check all the squares that have crosswalks. Seriously sweetie, as relationship offenses go, phubbing — which The New York Times’ pruriently refers to as “a portmanteau of ‘phone’ and ‘snubbing’” — may appear innocuous enough on the surface. But it can prove malignantly insidious so far as harboring any long-term hopes for a relationship goes. Phubbing by any definition is rude and offensive and shows a total lack of respect for whom you’re with. Howard’s rule of thumb regarding people choosing their phones for entertainment instead of engaging with the person sitting next to them is that they shall be shot at sunrise after first having their phones shoved up their anus.

—Howard Lewis Russell

Any scorcher questions, kidz, should you care to send me; well, y’all know where to find me: AskHoward@dallasvoice.com.