Cold Storage

In this way, Darryl Griffin became the latest in a long line of Homo sapiens killed not for being an asshole, but by being an asshole.

In 1950, Shenzhen, China, was a fishing village with three thousand inhabitants. By 2025, twelve million people will live there.

Bartles & Jaymes, like many wine coolers and wine products in general, uses the maximum amount of sulfur dioxide permitted by FDA regulations as a preservative. SO2 is one of the most effective antimicrobials on the planet and is highly antagonistic to growth. In its gaseous form, SO2 can be lethal to any air-breathing creature and is in fact the leading cause of death in a volcanic eruption. It’s the poison gas that gets you, not the lava.

But in liquid form, and in the right concentration, SO2 can be quite helpful. It not only prevents invasive microbial growth in human digestive systems, but it can actually clean and preserve a glass wine container itself, during both the fermentation and the storage process.

Mooney’s last bottle of Exotic Berry, aside from being tasty and intoxicating, was also a superb growth inhibitor. Whereas the fungus’s takeover of its previous human victims had been a blitzkrieg, in Mooney’s wine-cooler-besotted state, it was more of a slow and steady infantry assault through mud.

It’s funny. Some things improve with closer inspection. He sure did.

WHAT ROBERTO KNEW ABOUT WESTERN AUSTRALIA COULD FIT INTO A very small book. More of a flyer, really: one page and with large type.