Summer has a way of making us oblivious to the world around us — especially here, hip-deep in the immersion zone, as smoke-filled skies tend to take up all the air in the room.

We get so focused on the immediate, in fact, that major news stories that otherwise would be front and center barely register as a blip on the old attention meter.

Take, for instance, the discovery of The Scorched Wastes and The Walls of Asgard.

See? You have no idea what I’m talking about … do you?

Well, to be fair, most people never have an idea about those topics on which I choose to pontificate — but, in the matter at hand, you would be wise to pay attention, at least for the next 500 words or so.

We might be calling The Scorched Wastes and The Walls of Asgard home some day.

It happened in mid-July, the 16th to be exact. I trundled down to the archives of this here news organization and could find no mention of the discovery in the July 18 edition — which was otherwise occupied by coverage of the Flat Fire and the future of the Yellow Basket drive-in.

No Scorched Wastes. No Walls of Asgard. Not even a mention of Telikanesia.

What you (and clearly, we) missed was the presentation of a map charting the outer-outskirts of our planet — the first depiction of what lies beyond The Ice Walls that ring the circumference of our Flat Earth.

I see you are dumbfounded by this news; but, trust me, it is true. I found it on the internet — where if there’s anything dumb to be found to dumbfound the rest of us, I’ll find it.

Credit where credit’s due, of course, for it was the modern-day Magellan known as CivicBulb9005 who apparently ventured past the Ice Walls and charted the previously uncharted territories — including the island system known as the Magellan Isles — and documented it for all to see.

It has been a magical summer for Flat Earth true believers. Last month, exhaustive research by a Kentucky-based betting website discovered that Alaska was tops in the U.S. of A. when it came to searches for information about our apparently pancake-shaped planet.

It makes some sense, given Alaska’s proximity to The Ice Wall that was said to keep the oceans from spilling out into the universe at the (literal) ends of the Earth — before we were informed that there is more there than we previously knew was there.

Also in August (it must have been the heat) another internet offering apparently showed a photograph depicting the Chicago skyline on the horizon of a place that definitely was not Chicago inscribed with the authoritative announcement that, “Only two problems with global warming; There’s no globe … there’s no warming …”

I, for one, would have been more upset about this obvious manipulative misinformation if I weren’t stewing over the misuse of the semicolon.

Speaking of globes, what used to be a fun diversion in a classroom — spin the globe, stop it with a finger, and see where you landed — are apparently themselves part of a systemic brainwashing attempt to indoctrinate our schoolchildren in what we’ll label (because, why not?) The Bogus Big Round Planet Theory.

Kanjis Taylor, a district chairman for the Georgia Republican Party, told listeners of her “Jesus, Guns, Babies” podcast in May that the preponderance of spherical representations of the Earth proved that … oh, we’ll let her tell you:

“All the globes, everywhere,” Taylor said, “I turn on the TV, there’s globes in the background … Everywhere there’s globes. You see them all the time, it’s constant. My children will be like, ‘Mama, globe, globe, globe, globe’ — they’re everywhere. That’s what they do, to brainwash.”

She added, “For me, if it’s not a conspiracy. If it is real, why are you pushing so hard everywhere I go? Every store, you buy a globe, there’s globes everywhere. Every movie, every TV show, news media — why? More and more I’m like, it doesn’t make sense.”

Something doesn’t make sense, that’s for sure. My theory is that Taylor, who received 3% of the vote in the 2022 GOP primary for governor, never could get her finger to land on Telikanesia.

I’m glad we had this opportunity to catch up on the news. It’s amazing what slips our grasp while waiting for the smoke to clear.