International media report that the coastal seawater where they’re supposed to have the sailing events for the Olympics are filled with green algae. [IHT, AP/Google]
Maybe it was in Historical Study A-13 where we learned that every Chinese dynasty needs a color. How about the current one? We’d probably have said ‘Red,’ except that the Olympics are getting Beijing to pay a lot more attention to being Green. Then the color Red became very angry and green with envy, so it sent a big, scary Red Tide. Except all the green paint they were spraying on the Beijing sidewalks and mountainsides ran off onto the nearest coastline and the red tide turned green. Back in Korea, every summer we used to hear about red tides happening in the Yellow Sea or the South Sea East China Sea Fuck you, so the problem isn’t entirely new in those parts. The remedy that Koreans typically apply for red tide is to pour loess (break up the soil first!) into the water from boats. China is overflowing with loess, why don’t they just try that instead of trying to manually haul the algae out of the sea (photo 2)?
