We don’t know what Nicolas Cage is. Is he an action hero? If so, he’s a depressed one. A film noir Spiderman? Seriously?
Is he a family man? Horribly depressed.
Is he a romantic lead? If so, he’s… very depressed. He’s arriving and then leaving Las Vegas in a state of grandiose misery.
Or is he a Moonstruck baker? “I ain’t no freakin’ monument to justice! I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride!”
And now, Nic Cage has got a thirty-foot hole in his Malibu driveway thanks to climate change, El Niño, and three (count ‘em, three!) hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean that look like a scene from a disaster movie because we really need a morbidly depressed disaster flick hero during these times.
When we send the Trumpanzees to prison, I’m going to insist that Cage plays future Attorney General Jack Smith in the 666-part Netflix series that covers all the criminality, mayhem, and unbridled hate from these last ten years.
I love me some Jack Smith, but let’s face it, he looks clinically depressed in every single news photo he’s in (and who can blame him?).
Alas, I digress.
Back to Malibu and Nic’s thirty-foot hole.
The “hole” thing started when Tropical Storm Marie, one of the three twins in the photograph, hammered the Los Angeles area with high winds and rain and tore away yet more sand from the Malibu shoreline.
This is where I must admit to a mea culpa. Technically, the photo isn’t three hurricanes. It’s two hurricanes and one tropical storm, but we live in a world where science and grammar and other such things don’t matter, so I just don’t care anymore. Do you?
Editor’s note: I care, FFS, Bastille. Anyway, it was either admit this mea culpa or be sent on a writing assignment to cover the Republican “midterm” convention for Bulwark.
Malibu has been eroding for years, and those poor celebrities have been having to do all kinds of crazy things to keep their palaces from sliding into the ocean.
Most of their grand estates are now on stilts or something cooler and much more expensive that are driven deep enough into the ground that, hopefully, probably, may not result in beautiful bedroom sets floating in the seas when the Day After Tomorrow hits their shores.
Editor’s note: Bastille is an idiot. They’re not stilts, FFS. Those are for Florida Man. Or people dumb enough to own a home on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. No, these are million-dollar pillars. Pillars!!!
But Malibu driveways, of course, are not reinforced in such a way (yet), so Nic’s driveway split open into an eight-foot sinkhole. No big deal, right? Come on, Nik, do what we peons would do and snag yourself a few wheelbarrows full of Sakrete and some overalls and get to work.
Oh, whoops! Before you can say “Nic,” the damn thing gaped and yawned itself into a thirty-by-thirty-foot hole that crept towards his house.1 Some reports say the thing is sixty feet deep now, while others are reporting that if you peer down long enough, you’ll see the beady eyes of South Park Satan staring back at you.
Malibu residents quickly gathered around his home, shovels in hand, preparing to sacrifice their lives to defend it from destruction.
Editor’s note: They did not do this. They bravely ignored the situation and continued doing what Malibu people do on a rainy, windswept Los Angeles day — they escaped to the Caymans.
The heat of El Niño
If you’re wondering just how hot El Niño is making the oceans, here’s a cool graphic infochart:
I know, that doesn’t help me much, either. See all the red? That means the ocean is getting very warm.
Research meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, Alexander Gershunov, says that this year’s El Niño has the potential to be the warmest ever.2 The warmer ocean currents of traditional El Niño events can create conditions for crazy weather. Most climatologists agree that climate change is making El Niño events more common and more intense.
These normal weather patterns typically take place in the eastern and central parts of the Pacific Ocean, but they affect the climate everywhere in the world.
According to Michelle L’Heureux, a climate scientist at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, who probably deserves an award for avoiding the Trump regime’s budget hacks, a wild and crazy El Niño will not lead to devastating storms. Just possibly more frequent ones, like the one that the Los Angeles area is currently experiencing.3
In the words of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center: “El Niño is strengthening, with a greater than 90% chance of a very strong event during the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter 2026-27.”4
One thing I like about scientists working in the trenches in a world of science denial and insipid budget cuts is that they post their findings to BlueSky (haha, Trumpanzees!). Click/tap the little arrow button at the bottom of this embedded BlueSky post if you want to watch a video that explains what El Niño is:
In other words, El Niño is not a doomscrolling event, so no need to add that to your list. Instead, with warmer currents, it’s part of the cumulative effect of long-term climate change (which should already be on your list). I also don’t think you need a scientist, as helpful as they are, to guess what Mother Nature has in store for us with future El Niño events at our current pace of climate change.
One of these days, hopefully, Nic Cage will portray one of us, or all of us all at once: Depressed, everyday people, many of them pacifists by nature, ready to throttle the idiots who voted against science in the 2024 election.
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Footnotes
Ellina Abovian. “‘Then All Hell Broke Loose’: Massive Sinkhole Opens Beneath Nicolas Cage’s Malibu Driveway.” LAmag, September 8, 2026. https://lamag.com/news/then-all-hell-broke-loose-massive-sinkhole-opens-beneath-nicolas-cages-malibu-driveway/.
FitzGerald Guth, Anna. “This Year’s Unusual El Niño Just Got Even Stronger.” SFGATE, September 10, 2026. https://www.sfgate.com/weather/article/el-nino-new-forecast-22422569.php.
SFGATE, ibid
CPC Webmaster. “Climate Prediction Center.” Noaa.gov, 2026. https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/.
Agreed on Nic casting for the role of Jack. Love his line in Leaving Las Vegas when he's shopping for booze and says he's gonna drink himself to death, -that was my attitude once upon a time.
One of the many terrible consequences of the ocean heating is that fish have to swim to deeper, cooler water. But these fish are the food of sea birds like pelicans. The pelicans cannot dive deep enough to catch them. International Bird Rescue has Los Angeles and San Francisco area facilities that take birds in who are injured. They treat them and release them back to the wild. But I still worry that they still won't find enough food. The climate catastrophe makes me want to scream, actually. It did not have to be like this.