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ecuscino | Created: 23 May 2024 | Updated: 24 May 2024
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More Pressing Matters

I invited the sandworm from Dune to Geopalooza and now everyone is mad at me. Honestly, I’m lucky to get a blog this month. It was touch and go in the G-I offices earlier this week; there was even talk of me being stripped of my ASCE membership for how poorly the “special mystery guest” event went over. I was told I needed to publicly apologize and that a notes-app statement on X (formerly-known-as-Twitter-dot-com) just wouldn’t cut it. I was also told it “needed to be an actual apology” and not a “defense of your poor judgment and planning.” So let me begin… I am very –

Well, before I begin, let me just provide a little context. I got an email from Brad the other week at 2:17 A.M. EST with the subject line URGENT – WE NEED A GUEST FOR GEOPALOOZA. I think it’s fair that my initial reaction to this frantic middle-of-the-night correspondence was an assumption: I’m being called up to serve as a panel guest or presenter. Of course I’ve always got material, so the wheels were already spinning two-thousand RPM in my brain as I processed the email’s list of recipients. The call had gone out to all the key players in the geotech community – as well as somehow me – that a big-name celebrity had just dropped out of their scheduled speaking engagement at Geopalooza so they could instead narrate a documentary series investigating the karst caverns of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania.

Side note: I googled it and the documentary project seemingly originates from a viral video on TikTok from several months ago. In it, a shaky phone camera records a massive sinkhole swallowing a 2007 Subaru Outback in an Arby’s parking lot. The amateur videographer peers over the edge of the freshly formed chasm, revealing a musty limestone chamber where “Vote for Dukakis” appears spray-painted on the far wall. The History Channel seized on this opportunity to greenlight a new series and hired our big-name guest to narrate their exploration of the caves, with a particular focus on their possible extraterrestrial origin. Cosmic Karst will be airing Tuesdays at 9 this Fall, part of the "Ancient Aliens" family of programming.

Obviously, I couldn’t get back to sleep after reading Brad’s email. My heart was racing at the prospect of saving the day and cementing my reputation among this cadre of experts. I could be the one to provide the perfect replacement guest. I knew we needed a big name in the world of soil/rock engineers and enthusiasts. It would be even better if they were both famous and incredibly relevant at this moment in pop culture. I thought about it for a moment and then the answer just came to me. I hastily typed “I HAVE SOMEONE” into my phone and hammered Reply All.

Now I should explain at the onset: I didn’t know the sandworm from Dune personally at the time I sent that email. I am fortunate, however, to know a guy who knows a guy who went to Oberlin with another guy whose sophomore year roommate may or may not have still been working in Hollywood as a production assistant. And the first guy in that chain owed me a favor for the time I went undercover at his 15-year-old son’s talent show as my original character, Benny “the Beat” Balladino. Benny is a world-famous music producer with inimitable flair who fashionably fills out a faded pair of skinny jeans, absolutely rocks a red frilly shirt, and refuses to remove his sunglasses indoors. He thought the teenage band’s cover of Seven Nation Army was out of this world.

“You kids are going to go far; just keep it clean and never lose focus on the music. And anywhere you go, you tell ‘em you know the Beat.”

(We should all be so lucky to have such supportive parents who devise elaborate schemes like these, by the way) Thankfully, calling in this favor got me a 10-minute FaceTime with the sandworm from Dune where I was able to explain the gist of what I needed:

“So Geopalooza comes once a year and it’s basically Lollapalooza except subtract the music and add some really great interviews with geotechnical engineers. And forget the crowds, it’s mostly virtual. And also don’t worry about the porta-potties, they’re not part of this at all. Lisan al Gaib? I’m not sure if he’ll be there… What I’m thinking is basically you come in and do a fairly standard guest appearance. Ideally you would say something like, ‘Hi, I’m Shai Hulud, you might recognize me from Dune, Parts One and Two’ and obviously you can pause for applause there and then maybe get into what it’s like living entirely underground beneath the sands of Arrakis. Maybe you highlight how much you love sand and how fun it is to eat sand for thousands of years? I don’t think we’ll want to sample the spice mélange during your talk, but I can double check.”

Personally, I thought the FaceTime went really well. Shai Hulud even said his people would take care of transportation and lodging. The only item on his rider was, predictably, “a room full of sand.” I decided against using the usual Geo-Wall providers because their competition sand was far too precious to order in bulk, especially on such short notice. So I reached out to a buddy from college who, as a result of an unfortunate typo, never quite fulfilled his dream of planning a tour for Kings of Leon but did become a pretty well-known sand manager. I placed an order for 8,000 cubic yards of ASTM C-33 concrete sand and we backfilled the auditorium at a nearby high school on a Saturday to host the talk. I was feeling pretty great about the whole thing.

Hindsight is, of course, 20/20. While I don’t entirely agree with the assessment of the G-I Board (that this plan “had as many red flags as the Moroccan embassy”), I can see some areas where I may have miscalculated. It was borderline impossible to tell from just FaceTiming him that Shai Hulud was 1,200 feet long and many hundreds of thousands of pounds and would instantly demolish the high school auditorium upon his arrival… along with the parking lot, the library, the Dairy Queen across the street, fourteen miles of I-95, and Granny Hartwell’s vegetable garden. Of all the damage, it truly breaks my heart that little Ricky and Samantha Hartwell won’t be picking plump tomatoes from their grandma’s garden this summer.

Now, we’ve all seen the news lately: Shai Hulud has apologized profusely for the destruction caused by his chosen method of travel. He did not realize burrowing through the DMV area would wreak such havoc on our nation’s infrastructure. And you know what? I can sympathize. I think we should all be a little more forgiving of the sandworm who is now stranded on our planet awaiting litigation, as well as the person (or let’s be honest, people!) who are responsible for his presence here. I’ve been told numerous times there’s a lesson to be learned here about planning in advance, making reasonable accommodations, and taking accountability for your actions. Frankly, once someone can explain said lesson to me, I’m all ears.

In conclusion: this is my apology. You read it. I am truthfully, honestly, very sorry that some people feel I should be apologizing for bringing an A-list Hollywood actor to town; providing national exposure for the Geo-Institute; and calling myself a “pretty big player in the geotech game” on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. I can’t promise nothing like this will ever happen again, but I do promise next year’s Geopalooza will take place on the moon. #LunarLunch&Learn #(The)MoonRocks