Crossover Earth '98

Forecast is...El Mongo!

by Duke Barren

Special to the Gazette

 

Choking smoke in Kuala Lumpar, gale-intensity winds pummeling Baha California, Marlin caught in the usually cold waters off Washington State -- El Niņo 1998 has indeed left its mark.

El Niņo, a mass of warm water now in the southern Pacific, is having a worldwide impact on the climate. The warm water raises the water vapor over the Pacific and the Earth’s ordinary weather pattern. The result: heavy rains in the usually dry Southwest and firestorms in the drought-afflicted rain forests of Malaysia.

Named "the Child" because it was originally discovered by Peruvian fisherman during Christmas roughly 200 years ago, El Niņo is a habitual, and colossal, marvel. This year's is one and half times the size of the United States, has enough water to brim the Great Lakes 30 times over and has approximately 90 times the energy Americans extracted from fossil fuels in 1997.

I watch, with bated breath, how El Niņo metamorphoses into the whipping boy for each misadventure, for every ill fate, for all shenanigans. Shucks, the Philadelphia Flyers are out of the Stanley Cup play-offs! Don’t blame them because El Niņo crossed their path. John Q. Public just happened to lose his car keys? Well, well, that because El Niņo swept them away. Chalk it any way you like, outrageous faultfinders are crazy for this nature’s centennial phenomenon.

Some say that El Niņo is a super-villain.

What are you laughing about? It’s true.

Just last month a Los Angeles high school visited the Scripps Institute in San Diego to learn more about the El Niņo hysteria. But halfway through the guided tour, they were interrupted as one of the doors exploded off its hinges. And a man the size of a professional wrestler came walking into the building.

"Mongo must stop Mr. El Niņo!" he yelled. "Mr. El Niņo take snow away and Mongo here to stop him!"

This surprise encounter starteled the crowd of students and instructers, rousing them to flee the area in a chaotic mass of panic. Obviously no one recognized that the man was indeed named Mongo, the same man named Mongo who saved celebrity model Christey Brinkley but months ago. The same man named Mongo that refers to himself in the third person.

Mongo continued to ransack the Scripps Institute, children and adults thronging out of nearby exits. As everyone retreated from Mongo’s wake of destruction, the teenaged heroine Blur made her presence known. She immediately peppered some punches across Mongo’s body. She, however, had a better chance hurting solid rock than trying to keep Mongo at bay.

And then Mongo leaped skyward, crashing through the ceiling. At such closed confines there should had been no cover and no escape from the collapsing debris. But Blur reacted with great speed, and in honor of her namesake, her body became a bleary outline as she plucked and moved every single scatter fragment from mid-air, before they could do any harm.

Mongo was gone, perhaps looking for El Niņo elsewhere.

So, what is it with El Niņo? The phenomenon has fallen from its niche in modern meteorology, and has infiltrated the callings of myth and mass delirium. But if you discover a thrashed ski resort or decimated weathervane, don’t be too quick to accuse El Niņo. Mongo, after all, is on a violent pursuit.

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