Word: nino
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...moderns are too sophisticated to believe such nonsense. (And anyway, where would we find a virgin?) Instead, we blame all our earthly woes on...El Nino...
...Nino panic is in full bloom. It's been blamed for an invasion of Argentine ants in Southern California, for starving seabirds off Oregon, for albatrosses abandoning their nests in the Galapagos Islands. An Israeli scientist thinks El Nino irregularities occasioned the biblical famine that led to the Jews' entry into Egypt--thus offering the nice ecumenical touch of El Nino, Spanish for the Christ Child, accounting for Passover...
...there is nothing unusual about an El Nino. It is a perfectly normal cycle of Pacific waters' warming every two to seven years, altering jet-stream flows and cloud formation. This changes the weather over most of the globe in fairly predictable, entirely natural ways. It alternates with the La Nina cycle, which cools the waters and creates mostly contrary effects. It's been going on, as far as we can tell, for millennia...
...then the hysteria? This El Nino appeared from early data to be particularly strong. Hence the emergency preparations everywhere from California to South Africa. The major anticipated event for California is heavy rain. Some meteorologists, however, remain skeptical and distinctly unimpressed by the grim Noachian predictions. For example, Jan Null of the National Weather Service in Monterey, Calif., points out that in the eight heaviest El Nino years, California experienced on average only about a one-third increase in rainfall. In fact, two of these years, 1965 and 1991, brought drought...
Morris beautifully orchestrates the four stories (helped by Caleb Sampson's music, which gaily purloins motifs from Nino Rota and Philip Glass). The film blends interview and location footage with clips from old movies and Super 8, black and white and color. As the styles merge, so do the stories. The real lions, the leaf elephants, the robot insects and the insectoid rodents overlap, abut, merge in a gorgeous fugue of hard work and abiding love. This is a funny, thrilling tribute to people's urge to find play and profundity in the work they...