Tomorrow, November 2nd, is Dia de los Muertos and my birthday. It also roughly marks ten years since I arrived at South Pole Station one glaringly bright and cold Antarctica day. I bring this up because it’s already my birthday in Antarctica and I have a story to share.

For those that don’t care about my birthday blithering, you’d probably like to know the BBotE status report. Madison, Dublin (Ireland), Santa Barbara, and soon Portland’s Ambassadors were all resupplied this week. This week also sees the inauguration of regular BBotE service to Boston courtesy of your new Ambassador, Talena! She is a recent transplant from Portland and acolyte of the Caffeinatrix. You may drop her a line for 750ml bottles by email at bahstun [dot] bbote [at] gmail [dot] com. I somehow suspect they may go quickly.

Now for the Way Back Machine, but first a glossary…

“The Ice” (n) – Colloquial name for the continent of Antarctica.

“The Dome” (n) – Colloquial name of the part of Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station covered by the geodesic dome weather skin to help keep buildings from getting buried by snow. Commissioned in 1975, demolished in 2005. Replaced by the new Elevated Station.

Club 90 South (n) – Bar at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Built by the Navy well-beloved by me.

Polie (n) – A person who has wintered-over at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

Polie (adj.) – 1. Pretaining to the actions, people, or places at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. 2. Patently crazy, primarily evidence being the willing agreement to spend a year at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

Winter-Over (n) – A person who has stayed at one of the Antarctic stations through an Austral winter.

Winter-Over (adj.) – Crazy

Skua (n) – 1. A large, evil minded, dust mop of a Southern Ocean gull that has no fear of Man and has, in fact, learned that things in Man’s hands are often tasty and will steal them. 2. A central location in the station for excess/junk items to be stockpiled for general use by anyone rather than just throw them away.

Toast (n) – The state of diminished faculties associated with a winter spent at one of the Antarctic stations, likely related to thyroid hormone imbalance due to extended darkness and cold.

Toasty (adj.) – A descriptor of foolish acts or person who is likely suffering thyroid hormone imbalances due to a winter-over conditions.

Taking from these definitions, you may note that a Polie is double crazy.

On Halloween 2002, after almost two weeks of weather delays and mechanical failures in Christchurch, NZ before getting to McMurdo Station and then a cold snap that made it impossible to fly into Pole, the first flight of the summer season, P001, arrived at South Pole Station and I was on it. We then dropped off our gear and tromped to the not yet complete galley of the new elevated station. The NSF representative welcomed us new folks (note: he flew in with us), congratulated the previous winter’s crew for making it and handed out the Antarctic Service Medal to them, and then the station opening party began. I was the only new person that got out there on the dance floor and danced the Time Warp with the old winterover crew, thus earning me another nickname and access to Club 90 South while the winterovers were still hiding in it from the new people. This should have been a sign to everyone when people who’d already been stuck at Pole for a year considered me to me alright and normal.

There are two parties not particularly set on the calendar in Antarctica because they are dictated by weather: Station Opening and Station Closing. Roughly speaking for Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, the first flight in is some time around Halloween and the last flight out is Valentine’s Day-ish. However, these are not the big parties. The big two are Halloween and Midwinter (AKA the austral winter solstice, every day from there is a day closer to light). Halloween, in particular, is big because it is the fleeting moment when the previous year’s winterovers are there and the first planeload of new people has showed up. Not without coincidence, the first cargo pallet to come off the first plane of the season is not medicine, or mail, but beer. However, parties happen on Sundays because that’s the day off. Halloween fell on a Friday that year, so the party was delayed until the 2nd. My birthday.

Halloween, of course, demands costumes. To this end, the nice folks back at HQ in Centennial, CO had loaded several large, palletized, tri-wall boxes full thrift store clothes and generic accessory crap from the Goodwill Bargain Barn (motto: “VALUES BY THE POUND”) and sent them to Antarctica. Pole had them lined up to the skua bins. McMurdo had a goddamn Costume Closet for special events, which tended to cause a lot of men dressing in drag for some reason (ACTUAL REASON: Navy tradition).

PROTIP: DO NOT dress in drag around the Russians freshly released from a two year stint at Vostok. They. Do. Not. Care. Anymore.

CHICKENHEAD and his faithful, but inebriated, sidekick General Assistant!

I did my best under the trying circumstances to find something that fit. I had no other clothes than the expedition grade stuff I had arrived with in the go-bag I was carrying; the rest of my possessions were still stuck in McMurdo and wouldn’t arrive for another two weeks. The resulting horror was a hybrid of snowpants and boots, brass toned expedition thermal underwear, a blue seersucker jacket, and a chicken hat.  When I eventually find the picture of this, I’ll put it up.

EDIT: Picture found!

In the ship store, I discovered they sold both Maker’s Mark and sweet vermouth. I’d brought my own bitters with me, so I bought one of the travel mugs to use as a shaker, chipped some ice off the side of the Dome and made a manhattan. We were warned that we who weren’t accustomed to altitude and probably shouldn’t do any drinking. I made a second one to go out to the Summer Camp huts for the party.

My Antarctic Manhattan Travel Mug

On my arrival at the hut, I was greeted by my friend Mark, with a bottle of Glenfiddich in hand. “PHIL!” he bellowed. “YOU NEED DRINK AND BLOOD!” I then was ordered to take a swig from the bottle and fake blood was poured all over my face and chicken hat. Mark had already had great fun with the fake blood and his head looked like he’d just recently pulled it out of the carcass of a freshly killed pig.

The night gets a bit hazy after that. Pinatas happened. We summoned Mark, a gifted mountain climber, down from the ceiling with the promise of shots of whiskey. There was also a chainsaw. A chainsaw happened to a pinata.

As this kicks off the ten year anniversary of Phil’s Antarctic Adventures, there’ll probably be a few more of these posts popping up between now and next Halloween as we hit more milestones. I hope you’ll enjoy.

Alright, as of tomorrow, resupply cases for all your local BBotE Ambassadors (except for College Station, TX and Dublin, Ireland) are either there or on their way. In fact, Portland may be out of stock again and in need of another. I am to understand the case for Delta City (AKA Detroit) has disappeared into a black hole somewhere between Oaktown and the Motown so a replacement may need to go out. Per Justin, Ambassador of London, that the clouds cleared over his blighted city for the first time in months and angels could be heard singing. That might be a titch of hyperbolic exaggeration, but he sure was happy to get resupply.

And I am pleased to announce that I can finally repay New Zealand for all the kindness it’s shown me for the last decade or so. Next week I will be shipping the inaugural case to the BBotE Ambassador of Wellington, Ms. Meredith Yayanos. Do you not know Meredith? Allow me to acquaint you. Admittedly, this entry needs a bit of an update as she is now a denizen of Wellington, which is California’s loss but New Zealand’s gain.

You see, back in the dawn of BBotE Warren Ellis asked, pretty please, if would I drop a bounty of BBotE on his co-conspirator Ariana Osborne (AKA She Who Turns Warren’s Muttered Ramblings Into Things & Stuff) to see what wonders might result if she slept even less than normal. The story gets a bit fuzzy after that but, somehow, a bit of that bounty made it Meredith’s hands, an edition of Coilhouse was published in record time, new music projects were contemplated, the Pacific Ocean was leapt in a single bound, and other Pythonesque feats as well. So drop her a line, New Zealand!

On a completely unrelated note, my brain sometimes works slow but the background processes are always turning away. Roughly a year ago, I offered to do some science nerding for a friend’s 10yo daughter. He somewhat apologetically waved me off and said that, much like her dad, while she was interested in science, the math skills weren’t really there (much like him) and that music & art were really her passions.

Last night, while enjoying the zen like meditative state of a BBotE extraction, I had a realization and answer to that.

I have forgotten more math than most people ever learn. I feel like a case study of “use it or lose it” as, at one point, I had to shove more or less an entire undergraduate math degree in my head in six months in order to complete my BS in physics. Tensor analysis, bra-ket notation, Legendre polynomials, Bessel & Von Neumann functions…all those things I used to be rather good at in order to do quantum mechanics, GONE. I remember what they were for and why I’d want to use them, but I’d need to spray a whole lot of WD-40 into my brain to free those rusty gears and actually do something.

But honestly, the shape of those things is what was important in the first place. The ability to look at the world, tilt my head slightly to the right, squint, and say to myself “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it works that way.” The math to prove it is an afterthought, the confirmation with elegant numbers & equations that the universe works like you intuitively thought it did. The name I’ve been calling this for as long as I can remember is Physical Intuition; that deep down knowledge of how physics works that changes how you see the world around you.

I don’t see waves on the ocean, I see possibilities of what the ocean floor looks like and wind/water interaction. I don’t see a rock with crystals in it, I see the Earth baking in a magmatic kitchen with temperature-pressure diagrams vs. different chemical concentrations. I don’t see a satellite TV dish out the window, I see the perfect curvature for impedance matching for receiving a electromagnetic beam originating in Low Earth Orbit like the last puzzle piece dropping in place.

This is an artistic way of looking at the wonder of world. The math is just another way of trying to express it. So, don’t let the fear of math, or perceived incompetence, keep you away from trying to find a deeper understanding of the world. The worst that can happen is you learn something new when you’re wrong.