Hey, remember that Antarctic team drilling into that lake…

that’s been sealed away for twenty million years?  Yeah, well, they haven’t been heard from in almost a week.  Of course.  They were apparently within forty feet of breaking through to the miles-deep lake, racing against time, and using a system to stabilize the drill hole with kerosine…

Kerosine.

Look, I know that this isn’t a horror movie, and that the real worry is that these folks have simply frozen to death: but they could have still used a lot fewer cliches when setting up this scenario, OK?

(Via Instapundit)

Any treaty that keeps you from century-old Scotch…

…is by definition a BAD TREATY.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A beverage company has asked a team to drill through Antarctica’s ice for a lost cache of some vintage Scotch whiskey that has been on the rocks since a century ago.

The drillers will be trying to reach two crates of McKinlay and Co. whiskey that were shipped to the Antarctic by British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton as part of his abandoned 1909 expedition.

The New Zealanders have agreed to try to retrieve some bottles, although the rest must stay under conservation guidelines agreed by 12 Antarctic Treaty nations.

A human being put that whiskey there; human beings should be able to dig it back up. And then drink it – except for the sample needed for SCIENCE!, so that we can then reverse-engineer the process and have it whenever we like.  Because that’s what AMERICA is all about.

And, err, SCOTLAND.

Via @baseballcrank.

Moe Lane

PS: I’m not seeing a consensus online about how the stuff will taste after a century frozen in the Antarctic, but damned if there aren’t a lot of people prepared to volunteer to be test subjects.