By Fester:
I grew up in a beer-sex-weed town. Beer was my way of passing my teenage years as weed was uninteresting as I could get to far more interesting places with plenty of caffeine and sleep deprivation or a five mile swim while sex was always sought, seldom realized. There was not a whole lot else to do that was winked upon by the authorities and affordable.
The same applies to spending the winter in Antartica... there is not a whole lot one can do for six months of darkness. Or at least that is the implication of this story that the Cunning Realist caught:
One of the last shipments to a U.S. research base in Antarctica before the onset of winter darkness was a year's supply of condoms, a New Zealand newspaper reported Monday.
Bill Henriksen, the manager of the McMurdo base station, said nearly 16,500 condoms were delivered last month and would be made available, free of charge, to staff throughout the year to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to buy them....About 125 scientists and staff are stationed at McMurdo base, the largest community in Antarctica, during the winter months when there is constant darkness...McMurdo's population will start to increase again in September when supply flights resume, peaking at more than 1,000 during the summer period.
First if you can't buy a condom because you're embarrassed, you probably should not be having sex. Secondly, wow, there really is nothing to do besides each other. Assuming an average daily population of 550 people, the expected condom usage per capita is 30 per year. Assuming McMurdo's population is anything like MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon or any other elite techie/science school, eighty percent of the sex is being had by twenty percent of the population, the high end users won't have enough time for their experiments...
Does it say something about me that I figured that this was just the supply for the winter population of 125 for four to eight months until the next sealift season starts? Granted, going on four months works out to just over one a day for every individual, but I�m sure there are regular flights and turnover for some, um, �fresh meat� to take up the slack.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, if McMurdo is anything like the geo camps or communities I'm familiar with in the north, I'd be very surprised if this was a one-time annual shipment.
I am curious about how they handle the beer and liquor side of things. Being on the opposite side of the globe, this is the time of year that we all look to get a few friends together to order the beer pallets. Pallet=144 cases of 24 cans ea.=5-10 people ave. And that doesn�t consider the hard liquor or the bars in town.
Granted in a scientific station you don�t want the people drinking too heavily, but you get stuck in white-out conditions where you can�t go outside for a week, and even when you can go out, it isn�t for very long because it�s too blasted cold, you need something to keep you occupied and amused for many long hours. Even with willing partners, sex doesn't fill them all up. Sitting around shooting the shit over a few (dozen) brews passes the time amazing well.
Back in the 80s when I was a university student, an ecologist friend of mine signed up for the British Antarctic Survey so that he could practise his bagpipes without complaints from neighbours. Hamish would take projects out on the ice in the summer months, miles from anyone, take his pipes and play for the penguins.
ReplyDeleteRegards, C
take his pipes and play for the penguins.
ReplyDeleteYeah, we still don't have an SPCA chapter here either. :D
The primary use for condoms in Antarctica is to protect research instruments--hydrophones and similar--from fluid damage.
ReplyDelete