A few months after my arrival here at 约炮视频, I was astonished, during a conversation with several younger colleagues, to discover that the expression “canary in a coal mine” has been lost to the lexicons of (as far as I can tell) pretty much everyone under the age of 30. I suppose this shouldn’t have been such a shock, given how anachronistic soot-covered men in hard hats hauling their pickaxes down to the depths feels in our gleaming futuristic age (this despite the equally anachronistic-feeling—but unfortunately all-too-real—fact that nearly 40 percent of U.S. electricity is, today, generated by burning coal). It’s a shame, though; I’ve always been captivated by what a vivid, even heroic, symbol that sentinel canary is, carried deep into the Earth to die first in the event of a toxic-gas buildup, thus alerting the miners in time to get themselves out alive. The irony, of course, is that the expression has somehow relinquished its cultural resonance at the moment...