My lady-friend Lynda has a 7-year-old daughter named Myranda Bahr. Myranda is very precocious and she loves attention. From what I gather, her mom was reading my blog recently and Myranda saw that I was talking about Pokemon, the passion of her older brother. Myranda asked nicely if I would write a blog entry about her. I have a hard time resisting her, so to make it interesting, I decided to give Myranda a puzzle for her to solve: I scrambled the letters of another phrase to come up with this phrase:
Barry and Ham
Myranda Bahr, if you can solve this puzzle, write your answer in a comment.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Monday, September 25, 2006
Ernest Becker Part 2
Here are a few more quotes from Denial of Death by Ernest Becker regarding what it means to be neurotic:
"We call a man “neurotic” when his lie begins to show damaging effects on him or on people around him. Otherwise, we call the refusal of reality “normal” because it doesn’t occasion any visible problems. It is really as simple as that. After all, if someone who lives alone wants to get out of bed a half-dozen times to see if the door is really locked, or washes and dries his hands exactly three times every time or uses a half-roll of toilet tissue each time he relieves himself—there is really no human problem involved. These people are earning their safety in the face of the reality of creatureliness in relatively innocuous and untroublesome ways."
"But the whole thing becomes more complex when we see how the lies about reality begin to miscarry. Then we have to apply the label “neurotic.”"
"Generally speaking we call neurotic any life style that begins to constrict too much, that prevents free forward momentum, new choices, and growth that a person may want and need."
"It is one thing to ritually wash one’s hands three times; it is another to wash them until the hands bleed and one is in the bathroom most of the day. Here we see in pure culture, as it were, what is at stake in all human repression: the fear of life and death. Safety in the face of the real terror of creature existence is becoming a real problem for the person. He feels vulnerable—which is the truth! But he reacts too totally, too inflexibly. He fears going out in the street, or up in elevators, or into transportation of any kind. At this extreme it is as though the person says to himself "If I do anything at all…I will die.""
"We can see that the symptom is an attempt to live, an attempt to unblock action and keep the world safe. The fear of life and death is encapsulated in the symptom. If you feel vulnerable it is because you feel bad and inferior, not big or strong enough to face up to the terrors of the universe. You work out your need for perfection (bigness, invulnerability) in the symptom—say, hand washing or the avoidance of sex in marriage. We might say that the symptom represents the locus of the performance of heroism. No wonder that one cannot give it up: that would release all by itself the flood of terror that one is trying to deny and overcome. When you put all of your eggs in one basket you must clutch that basket for dear life. It is though one were to take the whole world and fuse it into a single object or single fear."
"The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead. There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself."
"Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or “bad” one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this “badness” by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his “creative” work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means of his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life. In this way he satisfies nature, which asks that he live and act objectively as a vital animal plunging into the world; but he satisfies his own distinctive human nature because he plunges in on his own symbolic terms and not as a reflex of the world as given to mere physical sense experience. He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem."
"From this point of view the difference between the artist and the neurotic seems to boil down largely to a question of talent. If the neurotic feels vulnerable in the face of the world he takes in, he reacts by criticizing himself to excess. He can’t endure himself or the isolation that his individuality plunges him into. On the other hand, he still needs himself to be the hero, still needs to earn immortality on the basis of his unique qualities, which means he still must glorify himself in some ways. But he can glorify himself only in fantasy, as he cannot fashion a creative work that speaks on his behalf by virtue of its objective perfection. He is caught in a vicious circle because he experiences the unreality of fantasied self-glorification. There is really no conviction possible for man unless it comes from others or from outside himself in some way—at least not for long."
"In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed. And what we call “cultural routine” is a similar license: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agent’s office at the height of the tourist season, or the torture of working with a jack-hammer all day on a hot summer street. The answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are “right” for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum."
“Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person’s relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it. All the analysis in the world doesn’t allow the person to find out who he is and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and how he can make his life a triumph.”
Back to the subject of Penn Gillette and his criticism of A.A. and the twelve steps: When Bill Wilson and Bob Smith started Alcoholics Anonymous, they shared Becker's insights regarding the inability of psychology to address the fundamental problem of alcoholism (or for that matter any other neurosis). Psychologists of that era were deeply frustrated with alcoholics. They understood that self-awareness was ineffective but they lacked the basic insight of Becker that any effective solution must be have a spiritual component or it is doomed to fail. More about this in my next blog entry.
"We call a man “neurotic” when his lie begins to show damaging effects on him or on people around him. Otherwise, we call the refusal of reality “normal” because it doesn’t occasion any visible problems. It is really as simple as that. After all, if someone who lives alone wants to get out of bed a half-dozen times to see if the door is really locked, or washes and dries his hands exactly three times every time or uses a half-roll of toilet tissue each time he relieves himself—there is really no human problem involved. These people are earning their safety in the face of the reality of creatureliness in relatively innocuous and untroublesome ways."
"But the whole thing becomes more complex when we see how the lies about reality begin to miscarry. Then we have to apply the label “neurotic.”"
"Generally speaking we call neurotic any life style that begins to constrict too much, that prevents free forward momentum, new choices, and growth that a person may want and need."
"It is one thing to ritually wash one’s hands three times; it is another to wash them until the hands bleed and one is in the bathroom most of the day. Here we see in pure culture, as it were, what is at stake in all human repression: the fear of life and death. Safety in the face of the real terror of creature existence is becoming a real problem for the person. He feels vulnerable—which is the truth! But he reacts too totally, too inflexibly. He fears going out in the street, or up in elevators, or into transportation of any kind. At this extreme it is as though the person says to himself "If I do anything at all…I will die.""
"We can see that the symptom is an attempt to live, an attempt to unblock action and keep the world safe. The fear of life and death is encapsulated in the symptom. If you feel vulnerable it is because you feel bad and inferior, not big or strong enough to face up to the terrors of the universe. You work out your need for perfection (bigness, invulnerability) in the symptom—say, hand washing or the avoidance of sex in marriage. We might say that the symptom represents the locus of the performance of heroism. No wonder that one cannot give it up: that would release all by itself the flood of terror that one is trying to deny and overcome. When you put all of your eggs in one basket you must clutch that basket for dear life. It is though one were to take the whole world and fuse it into a single object or single fear."
"The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead. There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself."
"Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or “bad” one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this “badness” by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his “creative” work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means of his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life. In this way he satisfies nature, which asks that he live and act objectively as a vital animal plunging into the world; but he satisfies his own distinctive human nature because he plunges in on his own symbolic terms and not as a reflex of the world as given to mere physical sense experience. He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem."
"From this point of view the difference between the artist and the neurotic seems to boil down largely to a question of talent. If the neurotic feels vulnerable in the face of the world he takes in, he reacts by criticizing himself to excess. He can’t endure himself or the isolation that his individuality plunges him into. On the other hand, he still needs himself to be the hero, still needs to earn immortality on the basis of his unique qualities, which means he still must glorify himself in some ways. But he can glorify himself only in fantasy, as he cannot fashion a creative work that speaks on his behalf by virtue of its objective perfection. He is caught in a vicious circle because he experiences the unreality of fantasied self-glorification. There is really no conviction possible for man unless it comes from others or from outside himself in some way—at least not for long."
"In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed. And what we call “cultural routine” is a similar license: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agent’s office at the height of the tourist season, or the torture of working with a jack-hammer all day on a hot summer street. The answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are “right” for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum."
“Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person’s relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it. All the analysis in the world doesn’t allow the person to find out who he is and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and how he can make his life a triumph.”
Back to the subject of Penn Gillette and his criticism of A.A. and the twelve steps: When Bill Wilson and Bob Smith started Alcoholics Anonymous, they shared Becker's insights regarding the inability of psychology to address the fundamental problem of alcoholism (or for that matter any other neurosis). Psychologists of that era were deeply frustrated with alcoholics. They understood that self-awareness was ineffective but they lacked the basic insight of Becker that any effective solution must be have a spiritual component or it is doomed to fail. More about this in my next blog entry.
Ernest Becker Part 1
Last week I caught the tail end of an episode of the cable TV show Bullshit starring Penn & Teller. Penn & Teller are members of the Skeptical Society, an organization that investigates claims of the paranormal and exposes them as, well... bullshit. It is a tradition that goes back to the days of Harry Houdini, when it became very popular to visit "spirit mediums" and chat with your dead relatives. Houdini exposed many of these people as con artists, and in this respect, Penn Gillette is continuing in the Houdini tradition.
The show Bullshit includes subjects like Scientology and UFO abductions, and it can be very entertaining to watch. Last week's show was about A.A. and the Twelve Steps.
Now this subject is near and dear to my heart and to watch it be attacked as irrational and religion-based by Penn Gillette, someone that I generally respect, stirred up a powerful desire in me to respond. There are a lot of things I would say to Penn Gillette in defense of A.A. and the Twelve Steps if I could. For example, there is the free market argument: If another approach was better, then why wouldn't IT be in 97% of the drug and alcohol treatment centers, and why wouldn't people be court-ordered to their meetings instead?
However, I believe the best argument I could make to a rational scientific minded atheist like Penn Gillette would be to introduce him to Ernest Becker. Dr. Becker helped me to see the exquisite rationality behind A.A.'s twelve steps and to my knowledge he never wrote one word on the subject. According to Wikipedia:
"Dr. Ernest Becker (1925-March 6, 1974, Vancouver, British Columbia), a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer, came to the recognition that psychological inquiry inevitably comes to a dead end beyond which belief systems must be invoked to satisfy the human psyche. The reach of such a perspective consequently encompasses science and religion...
Because of his breadth of vision and avoidance of social science pigeonholes (given the independence of his thinking in the 1960s), Becker was an academic outcast in the last decade of his life. It was only with the award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his 1973 book, The Denial of Death (two months after his own death from cancer at the age of 49) that his enormous contributions began to be recognized."
I reread much of "The Denial of Death" over the weekend and I copied down a few quotes that I wish to include in my blog. First here are some choice quotes from Dr. Becker about the nature of the problem, i.e. why we are all crazy:
"...the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic."
"We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality with finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew."
"Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries gill marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—-the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with."
"I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right..."
"[As Pascal put it] “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” Necessarily because the existential dualism makes an impossible situation, an excruciating dilemma. Mad because, as we shall see, everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness—agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same."
"The individual has to protect himself against the world, and he can do this only as any other animal would; by narrowing down the world, shutting off experience, developing an obliviousness to both the terrors of the world and to his own anxieties. Otherwise he would be crippled for action..."
"...to function normally, man has to achieve from the beginning a serious constriction of the world and of himself. We can say that the essence of normality is the refusal of reality. What we call neurosis enters precisely at this point: Some people have more trouble with their lies than others. The world is too much with them, and the techniques that they have developed for holding it at bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself. This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality."
"But we can also see at once that there is no line between normal and neurotic, as we all lie and are all bound in some ways by the lies. Neurosis is, then, something we all share; it is universal..."
In my next blog entry I will provide some Becker quotes on what it means to be really neurotic, in other words: neurotic in the eyes of our neurotic society. Alcoholics and drug addicts certainly fall into this category. Then I will provide some Becker quotes about the solution to the problem, and my own thoughts about how the twelve steps of A.A. fit in this picture.
The show Bullshit includes subjects like Scientology and UFO abductions, and it can be very entertaining to watch. Last week's show was about A.A. and the Twelve Steps.
Now this subject is near and dear to my heart and to watch it be attacked as irrational and religion-based by Penn Gillette, someone that I generally respect, stirred up a powerful desire in me to respond. There are a lot of things I would say to Penn Gillette in defense of A.A. and the Twelve Steps if I could. For example, there is the free market argument: If another approach was better, then why wouldn't IT be in 97% of the drug and alcohol treatment centers, and why wouldn't people be court-ordered to their meetings instead?
However, I believe the best argument I could make to a rational scientific minded atheist like Penn Gillette would be to introduce him to Ernest Becker. Dr. Becker helped me to see the exquisite rationality behind A.A.'s twelve steps and to my knowledge he never wrote one word on the subject. According to Wikipedia:
"Dr. Ernest Becker (1925-March 6, 1974, Vancouver, British Columbia), a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer, came to the recognition that psychological inquiry inevitably comes to a dead end beyond which belief systems must be invoked to satisfy the human psyche. The reach of such a perspective consequently encompasses science and religion...
Because of his breadth of vision and avoidance of social science pigeonholes (given the independence of his thinking in the 1960s), Becker was an academic outcast in the last decade of his life. It was only with the award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his 1973 book, The Denial of Death (two months after his own death from cancer at the age of 49) that his enormous contributions began to be recognized."
I reread much of "The Denial of Death" over the weekend and I copied down a few quotes that I wish to include in my blog. First here are some choice quotes from Dr. Becker about the nature of the problem, i.e. why we are all crazy:
"...the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic."
"We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality with finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew."
"Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries gill marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—-the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with."
"I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right..."
"[As Pascal put it] “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” Necessarily because the existential dualism makes an impossible situation, an excruciating dilemma. Mad because, as we shall see, everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness—agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same."
"The individual has to protect himself against the world, and he can do this only as any other animal would; by narrowing down the world, shutting off experience, developing an obliviousness to both the terrors of the world and to his own anxieties. Otherwise he would be crippled for action..."
"...to function normally, man has to achieve from the beginning a serious constriction of the world and of himself. We can say that the essence of normality is the refusal of reality. What we call neurosis enters precisely at this point: Some people have more trouble with their lies than others. The world is too much with them, and the techniques that they have developed for holding it at bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself. This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality."
"But we can also see at once that there is no line between normal and neurotic, as we all lie and are all bound in some ways by the lies. Neurosis is, then, something we all share; it is universal..."
In my next blog entry I will provide some Becker quotes on what it means to be really neurotic, in other words: neurotic in the eyes of our neurotic society. Alcoholics and drug addicts certainly fall into this category. Then I will provide some Becker quotes about the solution to the problem, and my own thoughts about how the twelve steps of A.A. fit in this picture.
Monday, September 18, 2006
UFOs at the Zoo
Friday night was a very special night here in Oklahoma City. Our very own Flaming Lips played a magical concert at the Zoo Amphitheater. The Lips also took the opportunity to film their upcoming live DVD during that performance. I had a fantastic time as did everyone I knew that attended. In a prior article on this blog, I mentioned that I had met Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips and that we had several mutual friends. Well, in case you doubted me, here we are hanging out after the show.
More Future Disasters
The editors of Popular Science this month chose to commemorate the first anniversary of Katrina by listing the top 5 disasters that the U.S. can expect in the future. (I guess great minds think alike.) In my earlier article, I missed one completely and it is this:
Glacial melting in Greenland causes a freshwater cap in the North Atlantic. This stalls the circulation of warm water from the South and shifts the climate. All of civilization bordering the North Atlantic would be severely affected. The Eastern half of the U.S. and Canada along with all of Europe would experience a little ice age. Such a shift happened in the period 1550 to 1850. The worst part of this disaster is that if it only lasts 300 years like the last time we'll be lucky.
Also, I mentioned the possiblity of a big Tsunami hitting the U.S., but not mentioning La Palma was my bad. The following two paragraphs are straight from Wikipedia.
"La Palma is not only the steepest island in the world but has also been the most volcanically active of the Canary Isles in the past 500 years. The last few eruptions in the ridge were in 1470, 1585, 1646, 1677, 1712, 1949, and 1971. During the 1949 eruption, a two kilometer-long fracture opened and parts of the western half of the Cumbre Vieja ridge slipped several meters downwards towards the Atlantic Ocean. The fracture can quite easily be seen to this day. It is believed that this process was driven by the pressure caused by the rising magma heating and vaporizing water trapped within the structure of the island.
Scientists warn that in some future eruption within the next few thousand years the western half of the island, approximately 500km3 of land weighing an estimated 500 billion tons, will slide into the ocean -- a so called "lateral collapse". Should that happen, the resulting megatsunami would reach local heights of well over 300 meters and the speed of a jetliner, reaching the African coast in three hours, the coast of England in five, and the eastern seaboard of North America in eight. This could greatly damage if not completely destroy cities along the United States' east coast, such as New York, Boston, Washington, DC, Norfolk, Virginia, and Miami with 25 to 30m high waves."
Now how cool is that?
Finally, I also failed to adequately cover the potential devastation from a hurricane hitting the city of Miami directly. This oversite was natural given that I am a life-long OU football fan and I have an aversion to anything involving Miami Hurricanes.
Glacial melting in Greenland causes a freshwater cap in the North Atlantic. This stalls the circulation of warm water from the South and shifts the climate. All of civilization bordering the North Atlantic would be severely affected. The Eastern half of the U.S. and Canada along with all of Europe would experience a little ice age. Such a shift happened in the period 1550 to 1850. The worst part of this disaster is that if it only lasts 300 years like the last time we'll be lucky.
Also, I mentioned the possiblity of a big Tsunami hitting the U.S., but not mentioning La Palma was my bad. The following two paragraphs are straight from Wikipedia.
"La Palma is not only the steepest island in the world but has also been the most volcanically active of the Canary Isles in the past 500 years. The last few eruptions in the ridge were in 1470, 1585, 1646, 1677, 1712, 1949, and 1971. During the 1949 eruption, a two kilometer-long fracture opened and parts of the western half of the Cumbre Vieja ridge slipped several meters downwards towards the Atlantic Ocean. The fracture can quite easily be seen to this day. It is believed that this process was driven by the pressure caused by the rising magma heating and vaporizing water trapped within the structure of the island.
Scientists warn that in some future eruption within the next few thousand years the western half of the island, approximately 500km3 of land weighing an estimated 500 billion tons, will slide into the ocean -- a so called "lateral collapse". Should that happen, the resulting megatsunami would reach local heights of well over 300 meters and the speed of a jetliner, reaching the African coast in three hours, the coast of England in five, and the eastern seaboard of North America in eight. This could greatly damage if not completely destroy cities along the United States' east coast, such as New York, Boston, Washington, DC, Norfolk, Virginia, and Miami with 25 to 30m high waves."
Now how cool is that?
Finally, I also failed to adequately cover the potential devastation from a hurricane hitting the city of Miami directly. This oversite was natural given that I am a life-long OU football fan and I have an aversion to anything involving Miami Hurricanes.
Monday, September 11, 2006
A Tale of International Business
My girlfriend has a son that is totally into Pokémon. So, when I stumbled across an article about Pokémon at Wikipedia.com, I was curious enough to read it. The most interesting fact I learned about the Nintendo multi-billion dollar media franchise was that even though it is Japanese in origin, the name “Pokémon” is not Japanese, and Pokémon was not the original name under which the product was marketed in the United States. Originally, the name for the game was “Pocket Monsters.”
I think I know why Nintendo chose to change the name. It was to avoid the possible confusion that might result when overhearing this conversation in the back of a grade-school classroom:
“Dude, show Billy your Pocket Monster. I have been telling him how awesome it is ever since you showed it to me yesterday.”
“No way. If the teacher sees me playing with it, she’ll want to hold it until school gets out.”
Can you imagine the conversation about the name change decision in the Nintendo boardroom.
“Tajiri-san, we have to change the name of our Poketto Monsutā product in the English-speaking market. It will cost 30 million yen, and set our marketing plans back 18 months.”
“I don’t understand. Why must we do this?”
“Tajira-san, over 15% of our English-speaking focus group identified the English translation of Pocketto Monsutā as a possible slang term for a penis.”
"Surely, you are joking."
"No sir, I am very serious. The term is not commonly used in America. However, it is close enough to the commonly used penis metaphors: 'pocket rocket' and 'pocket weasel' that the interpretation cannot be avoided. The problem seems to be with the word pocket."
“I will never understand how these barbarians ended up running the planet.”
I think I know why Nintendo chose to change the name. It was to avoid the possible confusion that might result when overhearing this conversation in the back of a grade-school classroom:
“Dude, show Billy your Pocket Monster. I have been telling him how awesome it is ever since you showed it to me yesterday.”
“No way. If the teacher sees me playing with it, she’ll want to hold it until school gets out.”
Can you imagine the conversation about the name change decision in the Nintendo boardroom.
“Tajiri-san, we have to change the name of our Poketto Monsutā product in the English-speaking market. It will cost 30 million yen, and set our marketing plans back 18 months.”
“I don’t understand. Why must we do this?”
“Tajira-san, over 15% of our English-speaking focus group identified the English translation of Pocketto Monsutā as a possible slang term for a penis.”
"Surely, you are joking."
"No sir, I am very serious. The term is not commonly used in America. However, it is close enough to the commonly used penis metaphors: 'pocket rocket' and 'pocket weasel' that the interpretation cannot be avoided. The problem seems to be with the word pocket."
“I will never understand how these barbarians ended up running the planet.”
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Future Disasters
This week marked the anniversary of Katrina, and I thought it would be fun to make a list of all the disasters that I have read about that are certain to happen in the United States of America sometime in the future.
1. A major hurricane hits the City of New Orleans causing it to be flooded and resulting in hundreds of thousands of displaced residents. Done. Could it happen again? Damn straight.
2. Mount Rainier erupts. Rainier is covered with ice and the stability of the volcano is constantly being eroded by subsurface water. So when it erupts, it tends to collapse like Mt. St. Helens in a huge avalanche that flows into the sea. The last really big one was 5,000 years ago. If an eruption like that happened today, the towns of Tacoma, Payallup and Orting would be wiped out by pyroclastic mud flows. South Seattle would also be severely damaged. The good news is that Bill Gates would be likely to experience lengthy power and communications outages proving that there really is such a thing as karma.
3. A major earthquake along the New Madrid seismic zone wipes out the city of Memphis, causes major damage to St. Louis, disrupting telecommunications throughout the country and giving new meaning to the phrase Rocking at Graceland. The good news would be that the staff at the Memphis Holiday Inn Downtown would likely be casualties.
4. I like this one. A massive solar flare hits Earth just right causing the Earth’s magnetosphere to be temporarily disrupted. Satellites get fried. Astronauts in orbit get lethal doses of radiation (so sad). Jet airliners will drop out of the sky like DDT-soaked houseflies because their electronics become crispy-fried, marking the beginning of a new era of high-speed ocean travel. Most of the world is plunged into darkness because power grids are also crispy-fried. And here is the best part, the power outages last for months. The good news is that billions of people will discover for the very first time that there are stars in the sky at night.
5. An asteroid hits the planet. We all know this scenario. Supersonic shockwaves, tremendous heat. Mass extinction. Blah blah blah.
6. A big California quake hits S.F. or L.A. Blah³.
7. A BF rock hits the planet. This happens far more often than most people think. Rocks about 10 meters in size hit the atmosphere and blow up with the force of an atomic bomb blast about once a year. However, they are so high up, that their impact is not even felt on the ground. Much bigger rocks, say 100 meters across, blow up with hydrogen bomb type energies. They wipe out stuff on the ground. It appears to have last happened in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. If that happened today, it would look to everyone just exactly like a high altitude hydrogen bomb detonation. I don’t think that would be good.
8. Bird flu becomes contagious between humans. Blah etc. etc.
9. Huge underwater landslide causes massive tidal wave to hit US. Most likely this would hit someplace like Tacoma, Washington. So if Mt. Rainier erupted at the exact same time, that would be really cool.
10. Here is another of my favorites: The Super Volcano known as the Yellowstone Caldera erupts causing most of North America to be uninhabitable. There are other super volcanoes and any of them stepping on the throttle would make it bad for all of us, but I prefer to talk about our own little time bomb underneath Yellowstone National Park. It’s last major eruption was 640,000 years ago (give or take). It made Mt. Saint Helens look like one of those little wads of paper you throw on the sidewalk so it pops. It blanketed most of North America with volcanic ash. If this were to happen today, the good news is that the war by the U.S. to annex Mexico, Central and South America should be fairly short.
I am sure I’ll think of a few others. Have a nice day.
1. A major hurricane hits the City of New Orleans causing it to be flooded and resulting in hundreds of thousands of displaced residents. Done. Could it happen again? Damn straight.
2. Mount Rainier erupts. Rainier is covered with ice and the stability of the volcano is constantly being eroded by subsurface water. So when it erupts, it tends to collapse like Mt. St. Helens in a huge avalanche that flows into the sea. The last really big one was 5,000 years ago. If an eruption like that happened today, the towns of Tacoma, Payallup and Orting would be wiped out by pyroclastic mud flows. South Seattle would also be severely damaged. The good news is that Bill Gates would be likely to experience lengthy power and communications outages proving that there really is such a thing as karma.
3. A major earthquake along the New Madrid seismic zone wipes out the city of Memphis, causes major damage to St. Louis, disrupting telecommunications throughout the country and giving new meaning to the phrase Rocking at Graceland. The good news would be that the staff at the Memphis Holiday Inn Downtown would likely be casualties.
4. I like this one. A massive solar flare hits Earth just right causing the Earth’s magnetosphere to be temporarily disrupted. Satellites get fried. Astronauts in orbit get lethal doses of radiation (so sad). Jet airliners will drop out of the sky like DDT-soaked houseflies because their electronics become crispy-fried, marking the beginning of a new era of high-speed ocean travel. Most of the world is plunged into darkness because power grids are also crispy-fried. And here is the best part, the power outages last for months. The good news is that billions of people will discover for the very first time that there are stars in the sky at night.
5. An asteroid hits the planet. We all know this scenario. Supersonic shockwaves, tremendous heat. Mass extinction. Blah blah blah.
6. A big California quake hits S.F. or L.A. Blah³.
7. A BF rock hits the planet. This happens far more often than most people think. Rocks about 10 meters in size hit the atmosphere and blow up with the force of an atomic bomb blast about once a year. However, they are so high up, that their impact is not even felt on the ground. Much bigger rocks, say 100 meters across, blow up with hydrogen bomb type energies. They wipe out stuff on the ground. It appears to have last happened in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. If that happened today, it would look to everyone just exactly like a high altitude hydrogen bomb detonation. I don’t think that would be good.
8. Bird flu becomes contagious between humans. Blah etc. etc.
9. Huge underwater landslide causes massive tidal wave to hit US. Most likely this would hit someplace like Tacoma, Washington. So if Mt. Rainier erupted at the exact same time, that would be really cool.
10. Here is another of my favorites: The Super Volcano known as the Yellowstone Caldera erupts causing most of North America to be uninhabitable. There are other super volcanoes and any of them stepping on the throttle would make it bad for all of us, but I prefer to talk about our own little time bomb underneath Yellowstone National Park. It’s last major eruption was 640,000 years ago (give or take). It made Mt. Saint Helens look like one of those little wads of paper you throw on the sidewalk so it pops. It blanketed most of North America with volcanic ash. If this were to happen today, the good news is that the war by the U.S. to annex Mexico, Central and South America should be fairly short.
I am sure I’ll think of a few others. Have a nice day.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
TWA Flight 800
As I write this entry to my blog, the top story of the morning is that in London, a plot to blow up airliners over the ocean has been foiled and security on international flights is now much stricter and they are confiscating all liquids and gels from people's luggage. Coincidentally, last night I watched a documentary on the crash of TWA Flight 800 on the History Channel.
As you may recall, Flight 800 was a New York to Paris Boeing 747 that exploded over Long Island in 1996 killing all 230 passengers. You can read all about it here: Wikipedia on Flight 800.
Now, before I share my thoughts on Flight 800 and this documentary, I want to say that I am a very skeptical guy when it comes to conspiracy theories. I believe that most conspiracy theories are nonsense invented by someone that finds more comfort in believing that there is some evil cabal running world events, then the stark truth, which is that no one is running anything. Furthermore, the reason the truth is often hard to believe is usually due to somebody's unfathomable incompetence.
I am fairly confident that the Roswell crash was a top secret ballooning experiment. I think it is most likely that Oswald acted alone. I think it likely that Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah building.
That said, I must say that Flight 800 is a different story. If I am to believe the official version, then I must accept that the jet spontaneously blew itself up, kinda like the Hindenburg. I am to believe that this is the first time a commercial airline has done this in the entire history of passenger travel. Furthermore, there have been no groundings of 747s because of this tendency for spontaneous combustion. I am to believe that it was a one time thing. Don't worry about it. It won't happen again.
I'm sorry but I can't be that gullible. I just can't. I want to be. Don't get me wrong. I really don't want to believe that the Clinton Administration chose to lie to the American public and cover up a terrorist attack on an airline -- information that could have prevented 9/11. Or there is the other theory, that perhaps the plane was brought down by our own military in a top secret accident. I don't want to believe either scenario, but the eyewitness accounts of a rocket trail, the early reports of explosive residue on the plane, not to mention subsequent history -- dammit I just can't do it! I am with the conspiracy nuts on this one, folks.
As you may recall, Flight 800 was a New York to Paris Boeing 747 that exploded over Long Island in 1996 killing all 230 passengers. You can read all about it here: Wikipedia on Flight 800.
Now, before I share my thoughts on Flight 800 and this documentary, I want to say that I am a very skeptical guy when it comes to conspiracy theories. I believe that most conspiracy theories are nonsense invented by someone that finds more comfort in believing that there is some evil cabal running world events, then the stark truth, which is that no one is running anything. Furthermore, the reason the truth is often hard to believe is usually due to somebody's unfathomable incompetence.
I am fairly confident that the Roswell crash was a top secret ballooning experiment. I think it is most likely that Oswald acted alone. I think it likely that Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah building.
That said, I must say that Flight 800 is a different story. If I am to believe the official version, then I must accept that the jet spontaneously blew itself up, kinda like the Hindenburg. I am to believe that this is the first time a commercial airline has done this in the entire history of passenger travel. Furthermore, there have been no groundings of 747s because of this tendency for spontaneous combustion. I am to believe that it was a one time thing. Don't worry about it. It won't happen again.
I'm sorry but I can't be that gullible. I just can't. I want to be. Don't get me wrong. I really don't want to believe that the Clinton Administration chose to lie to the American public and cover up a terrorist attack on an airline -- information that could have prevented 9/11. Or there is the other theory, that perhaps the plane was brought down by our own military in a top secret accident. I don't want to believe either scenario, but the eyewitness accounts of a rocket trail, the early reports of explosive residue on the plane, not to mention subsequent history -- dammit I just can't do it! I am with the conspiracy nuts on this one, folks.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
More Wisdom From Eckhart
"Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people's lives are due to unconciousness. They are self-created, or rather ego-created. I sometimes refer to these things as "drama." When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into your life anymore. Let me remind you briefly how the ego operates and how it creates drama.
Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher. The ego perceives itself as a seperate fragment in a hostile universe, with no real inner connection to any other being, surrounded by other egos which it either sees as a potential threat or which it will attempt to use for its own ends. The basic ego patterns are designed to combat its own deep-seated fear and sense of lack. They are resistance, control, power, greed, defense, attack. Some of the ego's strategies are extremely clever yet they never truly solve any of its problems, simply because the ego itself is the problem.
When egos come together, whether in personal relationships or in organizations or institutions, "bad" things happen sooner or later: drama of one kind or another, in the form of conflict, problems, power struggles, emotional or physical violence, and so on. This includes collective evils such as war, genocide, and exploitation -- all due to massed unconsciousness. Furthermore, many types of illnesses are caused by the ego's continuous resistance, which creates restrictions and blockages in the flow of energy through the body.
Whenever two or more egos come together, drama of one kind or another ensues. But even if you live totally alone, you still create your own drama. When you feel sorry for yourself, that's drama. When you feel guilty or anxious, that's drama. When you let the past or future obscure the present, you are creating time, psychological time -- the stuff out of which drama is made. Whenever you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama.
Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life. They have their whole sense of self invested in it. Even their -- usually unsuccessful -- search for an answer, a solution, or for healing becomes part of it. What they fear and resist most is the end of their drama. As long as they are their mind, what they fear and resist most is their own awakening.
When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life. Nobody can even have an argument with you, no matter how hard he or she tries. You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person. An argument implies identification with your mind and a mental position, as well as resistance and reaction to the other person's position. The result is that the polar opposites become mutually energized. These are the mechanics of unconsciousness. You can still make your point clearly and firmly, but there is no reactive force behind it, no defense or attack. So it won't turn into drama. When you are fully conscious, you cease to be in conflict."
--Eckhart Tolle, The Power Of Now, pages 150-151
Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher. The ego perceives itself as a seperate fragment in a hostile universe, with no real inner connection to any other being, surrounded by other egos which it either sees as a potential threat or which it will attempt to use for its own ends. The basic ego patterns are designed to combat its own deep-seated fear and sense of lack. They are resistance, control, power, greed, defense, attack. Some of the ego's strategies are extremely clever yet they never truly solve any of its problems, simply because the ego itself is the problem.
When egos come together, whether in personal relationships or in organizations or institutions, "bad" things happen sooner or later: drama of one kind or another, in the form of conflict, problems, power struggles, emotional or physical violence, and so on. This includes collective evils such as war, genocide, and exploitation -- all due to massed unconsciousness. Furthermore, many types of illnesses are caused by the ego's continuous resistance, which creates restrictions and blockages in the flow of energy through the body.
Whenever two or more egos come together, drama of one kind or another ensues. But even if you live totally alone, you still create your own drama. When you feel sorry for yourself, that's drama. When you feel guilty or anxious, that's drama. When you let the past or future obscure the present, you are creating time, psychological time -- the stuff out of which drama is made. Whenever you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama.
Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life. They have their whole sense of self invested in it. Even their -- usually unsuccessful -- search for an answer, a solution, or for healing becomes part of it. What they fear and resist most is the end of their drama. As long as they are their mind, what they fear and resist most is their own awakening.
When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life. Nobody can even have an argument with you, no matter how hard he or she tries. You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person. An argument implies identification with your mind and a mental position, as well as resistance and reaction to the other person's position. The result is that the polar opposites become mutually energized. These are the mechanics of unconsciousness. You can still make your point clearly and firmly, but there is no reactive force behind it, no defense or attack. So it won't turn into drama. When you are fully conscious, you cease to be in conflict."
--Eckhart Tolle, The Power Of Now, pages 150-151
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Diet & Exercise
I have battled with obesity since I was a little kid and so I’ve read a lot of books and magazine articles over the years about the subject of how to lose weight. Few subjects in our society are more clouded with complete bullshit than this one. One day, a few years ago, I discovered the truth on this subject. I discovered everything I will ever need to know. I knew it was the truth because it was an insight that fit with all of the knowledge I had gathered over many years of reading and it would have predicted all the things I knew to be true if I had started with that insight and nothing else. I felt like an early astronomer who had studied the heavens for years and then one day got turned on to Copernicus and Calculus and found out that suddenly I can predict where everything in the sky is going to be at any time with exact precision.
So now I am going to share this insight with you, dear reader. Why? Because I care. That is why. I want you to live as long as possible and to be as healthy as possible. So here it is:
How can I lose weight? There is one and only one way to lose weight. That is to consume less calories than you burn. Period. End of story. The biggest crock that I consistently hear is that you can do something to increase your metabolism so that it burns more calories while you sleep or some variation. If I know your age, sex, weight and what you are doing, I can calculate how many calories you are burning and it will be spot on. Why? Because you are a human being and we are all alike in this way. Everything that contradicts this is bullshit.
So once you know all this, how do you apply it? Well, you can count every calorie you put in your mouth, thereby making absolutely sure that you will achieve your weight loss goal (Weight Watchers). Or, you can pay someone else to count the calories for you (Jenny Craig). Or, you can change your diet to be closer to what it naturally should be and watch your appetite disappear (Atkins).
So what do I mean by what our diet naturally should be? Well, you and I are animals. We are leaves on the evolutionary tree just like every other animal on this planet. And just like every other animal on this planet, the best diet for us to eat is the one that is closest to the diet in our natural habitat. The same is true for exercise.
In the wild, animals have a natural system that regulates their appetites so they don’t get fat. Even in places where there is an imbalance and perhaps an over-abundant food supply, you don’t see a bunch of fat wolves. Wild animals don’t eat more than they need to stay healthy. However, this self-regulating system evolved around an animal’s specific diet. Start feeding wolves foods that are alien to their diet, like perhaps Snickers bars, and I bet you could make some fat wolves.
That is why our society is so fat and so sick. We are eating lots of sugar and starch and trans-fats (Crisco) that are alien to our natural diet. It would be like pouring butter and candle wax and WD-40 into your gas tank periodically. They all burn, so what is the problem? A whole lot of people’s lives are cut short as a result.
If you want to find out what our natural diet is like, I suggest you go to some really remote area like Alaska (I recommend August) and don’t bring any food with you. You will soon be eating the same diet that the bears eat, mostly wild game and berries. And you will be getting a hell of a lot of exercise chasing your wild game and running away from bears. You will be getting as much exercise as a marathon runner, and you’ll have to eat about 10,000 calories a day not to starve.
That is it. That is the major insight that will allow you to cut through all the bullshit about diet and exercise. You don’t need to know anything else. From this kernel of knowledge, you can deduce the answer to every question in nutritional science.
For example: Why are some ethnic groups more prone to circulatory or digestive diseases than others? Usually this is correlated to how many generations in their family tree have been exposed to all of these alien foods. White Europeans, Orientals, and middle-easterners have been farming for thousands of years; African and Native Americans, perhaps less than two-hundred years. So for some groups, the alien foods that make up the American diet are a lot more alien than for others. For example, yesterday I read that 70% of the women in the Pima Indian tribe will get gallbladder disease by the time they are 30 years old. That is stunning.
In conclusion: If you don’t want to count calories, and for optimum health, eat lean meats, green vegetables, berries (remember tomatoes are berries), fruits, and occasionally nuts, and avoid sugar, grains, legumes, processed dairy, Crisco, and excessive salt. And you can’t possibly get too much exercise. And anything you hear or read that disputes these recommendations is bullshit.
So now I am going to share this insight with you, dear reader. Why? Because I care. That is why. I want you to live as long as possible and to be as healthy as possible. So here it is:
How can I lose weight? There is one and only one way to lose weight. That is to consume less calories than you burn. Period. End of story. The biggest crock that I consistently hear is that you can do something to increase your metabolism so that it burns more calories while you sleep or some variation. If I know your age, sex, weight and what you are doing, I can calculate how many calories you are burning and it will be spot on. Why? Because you are a human being and we are all alike in this way. Everything that contradicts this is bullshit.
So once you know all this, how do you apply it? Well, you can count every calorie you put in your mouth, thereby making absolutely sure that you will achieve your weight loss goal (Weight Watchers). Or, you can pay someone else to count the calories for you (Jenny Craig). Or, you can change your diet to be closer to what it naturally should be and watch your appetite disappear (Atkins).
So what do I mean by what our diet naturally should be? Well, you and I are animals. We are leaves on the evolutionary tree just like every other animal on this planet. And just like every other animal on this planet, the best diet for us to eat is the one that is closest to the diet in our natural habitat. The same is true for exercise.
In the wild, animals have a natural system that regulates their appetites so they don’t get fat. Even in places where there is an imbalance and perhaps an over-abundant food supply, you don’t see a bunch of fat wolves. Wild animals don’t eat more than they need to stay healthy. However, this self-regulating system evolved around an animal’s specific diet. Start feeding wolves foods that are alien to their diet, like perhaps Snickers bars, and I bet you could make some fat wolves.
That is why our society is so fat and so sick. We are eating lots of sugar and starch and trans-fats (Crisco) that are alien to our natural diet. It would be like pouring butter and candle wax and WD-40 into your gas tank periodically. They all burn, so what is the problem? A whole lot of people’s lives are cut short as a result.
If you want to find out what our natural diet is like, I suggest you go to some really remote area like Alaska (I recommend August) and don’t bring any food with you. You will soon be eating the same diet that the bears eat, mostly wild game and berries. And you will be getting a hell of a lot of exercise chasing your wild game and running away from bears. You will be getting as much exercise as a marathon runner, and you’ll have to eat about 10,000 calories a day not to starve.
That is it. That is the major insight that will allow you to cut through all the bullshit about diet and exercise. You don’t need to know anything else. From this kernel of knowledge, you can deduce the answer to every question in nutritional science.
For example: Why are some ethnic groups more prone to circulatory or digestive diseases than others? Usually this is correlated to how many generations in their family tree have been exposed to all of these alien foods. White Europeans, Orientals, and middle-easterners have been farming for thousands of years; African and Native Americans, perhaps less than two-hundred years. So for some groups, the alien foods that make up the American diet are a lot more alien than for others. For example, yesterday I read that 70% of the women in the Pima Indian tribe will get gallbladder disease by the time they are 30 years old. That is stunning.
In conclusion: If you don’t want to count calories, and for optimum health, eat lean meats, green vegetables, berries (remember tomatoes are berries), fruits, and occasionally nuts, and avoid sugar, grains, legumes, processed dairy, Crisco, and excessive salt. And you can’t possibly get too much exercise. And anything you hear or read that disputes these recommendations is bullshit.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Serendipity
Just what exactly women find attractive about men has always been a mystery to me. So the day I became invisible to women in their early twenties passed almost without notice. If I had to guess, that day happened while I was in my mid-thirties. Anyhow, I am used to the invisibility by now. However, I am still recovering from when an attractive woman in her twenties recently called me “sir”. That was horrible.
Now after all this time, I have discovered an antidote to the invisibility and the “sir” calling. If only I had learned this sooner. To think of all the humility I would have spared myself. The cure? A Bonnaroo T-shirt. Who knew?
Now after all this time, I have discovered an antidote to the invisibility and the “sir” calling. If only I had learned this sooner. To think of all the humility I would have spared myself. The cure? A Bonnaroo T-shirt. Who knew?
Friday, June 23, 2006
A Tale From Beyond The Grave
Sixteen years ago, my father died of colon cancer. He was only 51. By the time he died, my father and I had become very close friends. It is one of the many great blessings in my life that the two of us were able to mend our differences and grow so close before he passed on.
About a week before my dad died, a liver enzyme test came back and showed that his liver was no longer functioning. The doctors said that there was nothing more they could do. My dad took this news with relief. He was happy that he could stop fighting and finally surrender to the inevitable. At this point, he and I had a conversation I will never forget. My father talked about his excitement about dying. Yes, excitement. He was like an explorer about to set out on a journey to an undiscovered land. He was sorry to leave his loved ones behind, to be sure. But he was truly looking forward to the adventure. I have never been so proud of my father as I was that day.
At one point in the conversation, I said to my dad, “If you can figure out how to contact me from the other side, I would appreciate a postcard or something. Just don’t scare me. That would not be cool.” My dad sat up and said, “I will definitely do that. If at all possible, I will contact you. That is a promise.”
I didn’t think much about that promise until the year 2000. It was in late September and I was playing cards with some friends and we were talking about OU football. One of the things my father and I shared was a passion for OU football. During the very roughest times in our relationship, we maintained that connection. Sometimes, especially during my late teens, OU football was the only safe subject for us to discuss. When the topic came up, I remembered a dream that I had just a few nights before. In the dream, my father was talking with me about the 2000 OU football season. He told me that this would be the best season ever. He said that OU would go 13-0 and win the national title in 2000. At the time I remembered this dream, the likelihood of that happening seemed pretty remote. I dismissed the dream as being meaningless and thought nothing more of it – that is until the Sooners went 13-0 and won the national title in 2000.
Still, as I watched my father’s prediction come true, I did not seriously consider the possibility that this constituted contact from beyond. After all, I always want the Sooners to go 13-0 and win the national title. So, why wouldn’t I dream that every year? It was just a freaky coincidence.
But then I had a similar dream in 2001 and I have had a similar dream as the OU football season begins every year since. In the 2001 dream, my father told me that the Sooners would lose at the end of the regular season and blow their chances for a national title. As the season unfolded, despite one loss to Nebraska, the Sooners looked like a sure bet to go to a national title game. All they had to do was beat an unranked and frankly terrible OSU in their last regular season game. But they lost. And no one predicted it. No one that is, except my father.
My dream in 2002 was a repeat of the year before. My father told me the exact same thing and the exact same thing came true. The Sooners lost their last regular season game to OSU. By now, I was starting to take these dreams seriously.
In 2003, my father told me that it would be a great season, but that the Sooners would lose in post season play. The Sooners went undefeated and lost both the Big 12 Championship and the National Title games. Exactly as my father had predicted.
In my 2004 dream, my father was more specific. He said that the Sooners would go undefeated into the national title game, and then be blown out by their opponent. He said it would be one of the most humiliating defeats in OU history. As the national title game approached with USC in 2004. I could no longer keep these experiences to myself. When my girlfriend at the time asked me if I was excited about the game, I said that I would be a lot more excited if it weren’t for these dreams. Furthermore, I told her that if my father’s prediction came true that USC would crush OU. As I am sure you are aware, OU lost by 36 points.
When I had my dream in September 2005, my father was incredibly specific about the OU season. He said it would be ugly and that the Sooners would suffer four losses. This was hard for me to take. I was very excited about the 2005 Sooners. I thought Paul Thompson would do well at quarterback and that OU had another shot at the title. In spite of my strong desire to dismiss these dreams as a series of coincidences, I couldn’t ignore the track record, and so last year, risking ridicule, I did not keep the dream to myself. I told two of my best friends all about the dreams and the four loss prediction just before the 2005 season began. If the prediction came true, and I prayed that it wouldn’t, I wanted witnesses.
If you are an OU fan, then you know that the Sooners lost four games in 2005. That is the official number anyway. The referees at Texas Tech threw the game. It was awful. Nevertheless, OU went into its bowl game as an underdog to Oregon, and my friend Bob called me the night before and asked if he should bet his house, since OU had already suffered four losses. I regret not being more encouraging.
This story doesn’t have an ending. I will have to wait until late August or early September to see if I have another OU forecast dream with my father. If it doesn’t happen, I won’t be surprised. I have received the postcard.
The fact that every one of the predictions my father made in my dreams has been accurate, and that I now have witnesses, is intriguing but also more than a little disturbing. It implies that my father may be alive and well in another dimension and with the ability to communicate with me while I am asleep, but presumably not while I am awake. There is nothing troubling about that. However, it also implies that in my father’s dimension, he is aware of the outcomes of events that exist in my future – events that are influenced by huge numbers of seemingly random influences. The philosophical implications of this are. . .. I have to go now. My brain is on fire.
About a week before my dad died, a liver enzyme test came back and showed that his liver was no longer functioning. The doctors said that there was nothing more they could do. My dad took this news with relief. He was happy that he could stop fighting and finally surrender to the inevitable. At this point, he and I had a conversation I will never forget. My father talked about his excitement about dying. Yes, excitement. He was like an explorer about to set out on a journey to an undiscovered land. He was sorry to leave his loved ones behind, to be sure. But he was truly looking forward to the adventure. I have never been so proud of my father as I was that day.
At one point in the conversation, I said to my dad, “If you can figure out how to contact me from the other side, I would appreciate a postcard or something. Just don’t scare me. That would not be cool.” My dad sat up and said, “I will definitely do that. If at all possible, I will contact you. That is a promise.”
I didn’t think much about that promise until the year 2000. It was in late September and I was playing cards with some friends and we were talking about OU football. One of the things my father and I shared was a passion for OU football. During the very roughest times in our relationship, we maintained that connection. Sometimes, especially during my late teens, OU football was the only safe subject for us to discuss. When the topic came up, I remembered a dream that I had just a few nights before. In the dream, my father was talking with me about the 2000 OU football season. He told me that this would be the best season ever. He said that OU would go 13-0 and win the national title in 2000. At the time I remembered this dream, the likelihood of that happening seemed pretty remote. I dismissed the dream as being meaningless and thought nothing more of it – that is until the Sooners went 13-0 and won the national title in 2000.
Still, as I watched my father’s prediction come true, I did not seriously consider the possibility that this constituted contact from beyond. After all, I always want the Sooners to go 13-0 and win the national title. So, why wouldn’t I dream that every year? It was just a freaky coincidence.
But then I had a similar dream in 2001 and I have had a similar dream as the OU football season begins every year since. In the 2001 dream, my father told me that the Sooners would lose at the end of the regular season and blow their chances for a national title. As the season unfolded, despite one loss to Nebraska, the Sooners looked like a sure bet to go to a national title game. All they had to do was beat an unranked and frankly terrible OSU in their last regular season game. But they lost. And no one predicted it. No one that is, except my father.
My dream in 2002 was a repeat of the year before. My father told me the exact same thing and the exact same thing came true. The Sooners lost their last regular season game to OSU. By now, I was starting to take these dreams seriously.
In 2003, my father told me that it would be a great season, but that the Sooners would lose in post season play. The Sooners went undefeated and lost both the Big 12 Championship and the National Title games. Exactly as my father had predicted.
In my 2004 dream, my father was more specific. He said that the Sooners would go undefeated into the national title game, and then be blown out by their opponent. He said it would be one of the most humiliating defeats in OU history. As the national title game approached with USC in 2004. I could no longer keep these experiences to myself. When my girlfriend at the time asked me if I was excited about the game, I said that I would be a lot more excited if it weren’t for these dreams. Furthermore, I told her that if my father’s prediction came true that USC would crush OU. As I am sure you are aware, OU lost by 36 points.
When I had my dream in September 2005, my father was incredibly specific about the OU season. He said it would be ugly and that the Sooners would suffer four losses. This was hard for me to take. I was very excited about the 2005 Sooners. I thought Paul Thompson would do well at quarterback and that OU had another shot at the title. In spite of my strong desire to dismiss these dreams as a series of coincidences, I couldn’t ignore the track record, and so last year, risking ridicule, I did not keep the dream to myself. I told two of my best friends all about the dreams and the four loss prediction just before the 2005 season began. If the prediction came true, and I prayed that it wouldn’t, I wanted witnesses.
If you are an OU fan, then you know that the Sooners lost four games in 2005. That is the official number anyway. The referees at Texas Tech threw the game. It was awful. Nevertheless, OU went into its bowl game as an underdog to Oregon, and my friend Bob called me the night before and asked if he should bet his house, since OU had already suffered four losses. I regret not being more encouraging.
This story doesn’t have an ending. I will have to wait until late August or early September to see if I have another OU forecast dream with my father. If it doesn’t happen, I won’t be surprised. I have received the postcard.
The fact that every one of the predictions my father made in my dreams has been accurate, and that I now have witnesses, is intriguing but also more than a little disturbing. It implies that my father may be alive and well in another dimension and with the ability to communicate with me while I am asleep, but presumably not while I am awake. There is nothing troubling about that. However, it also implies that in my father’s dimension, he is aware of the outcomes of events that exist in my future – events that are influenced by huge numbers of seemingly random influences. The philosophical implications of this are. . .. I have to go now. My brain is on fire.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Bonnaroo Part III - The Performances
And now for a few images from the performances Olivia and I attended at Bonnaroo. Eat your heart out.
RADIOHEAD
BECK
ELVIS COSTELLO
BRIGHT EYES
SOUL LIVE
Olivia had me take her picture with the remarkably talented singer that performed with Soul Live. Unfortunately there was some operator error and the picture is terrible but here it is anyway:
THE STREETS
RADIOHEAD
BECK
ELVIS COSTELLO
BRIGHT EYES
SOUL LIVE
Olivia had me take her picture with the remarkably talented singer that performed with Soul Live. Unfortunately there was some operator error and the picture is terrible but here it is anyway:
THE STREETS
Bonnaroo Part II
Monday, June 12, 2006
Showcasing My Art
I have been exercising (or is it exorcising?) my right brain lately and having some fun with my photography. Here is a sample of my first completed image. It is titled "Bus Station in the Crab Nebula." My plan is to make a series of surreal images by combining elements of one of my photographs with elements of others, or in this case with a public domain image from a space telescope. Many thanks to Adobe Photoshop. I hope you like it.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Fun With Space Telescopes
I found a very cool MPEG movie on Harvard's website. It is time lapsed video of the Crab Nebula in Taurus taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It totally rocks:
Click Here
The Crab Nebula is 6,000 light years away, and about 10 light years across. I also hear they have delicious crab there.
The Crab Nebula is the most famous and conspicuous remnant of a supernova, and one of only a handful of supernovae witnessed on Earth in recorded history. It happened sometime around 5,000 BC. It took around 6,000 years for the light to travel to Earth, and in the year 1054 was witnessed and recorded by monks in both Europe and China. According to records, it was visible in daylight for 23 days, and to the naked eye in the night sky for 653 days. There are petroglyphs in the Southwestern U.S. that many believe memorialize the supernova of 1054.
The supernova is about my favorite topic in astrophysics (a subject that was my major in college for two years). To me, supernovae are not just the mothers of all explosions. God's recipe for life in the Universe includes the instruction "Mix Well." Supernovae are God's Cuisinarts. I also can't think of anything else that has given us more insight into the Universe than Supernovae. So, here's to you Mr. Supernova-Man; blowing the hell out of everything and outshining whole galaxies and leaving behind pulsars and black holes and cool-looking nebula and messing with astronomer's heads with your gamma ray pulses and stuff.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Stoicism
Lately, my good friend Dave Walker, author of the world famous DaveTown blog, has been teaching me about Stoicism. As an introduction, he emailed me the text of a talk on the subject that was given by Vice Admiral James Stockdale. The talk is plain and simply one of the most powerful things I have ever read. To describe it is to diminish it, so I won't. But I urge you to put aside any preconceived notions about Stockdale you may have from the 1992 presidential race (he was Ross Perot's running mate), and just read the whole speech. It is worth it. I promise.
The speech is in an Adobe Acrobat PDF file format and it is a big file. It takes a minute or so to load even with high speed Internet. If you don't have high speed access, then why the hell not? Are you Amish or something?
The speech is in an Adobe Acrobat PDF file format and it is a big file. It takes a minute or so to load even with high speed Internet. If you don't have high speed access, then why the hell not? Are you Amish or something?
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Heads Up Angry War Protestors
For those of you who are angry about the war in Iraq, Neil Young has just released a new album called Living With War that is like a primal scream therapy session. Gone is the melancholy Neil dealing with his feelings of growing old that we have endured through Harvest Moon & Prairie Wind. The Godfather of Grunge Rock has returned, and he is here to kick some ass. Don't get too excited though. None of the cuts off this album rank with his two pissed-off classics Southern Man and Ohio. But it is well worth a listen.
In an Abbie Hoffmanesque gesture, Neil has made the entire CD available for streaming download. You can listen to it by clicking here:
Neil Young's Living With War
Enjoy.
In an Abbie Hoffmanesque gesture, Neil has made the entire CD available for streaming download. You can listen to it by clicking here:
Neil Young's Living With War
Enjoy.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Fear
For those of you that don’t already know this, I am a member of several spiritual fellowships based on the twelve steps and twelve traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous. I would tell you specifically to which fellowships I am referring. However, one of the traditions is that members be anonymous on the level of press radio and film. And it seems to me that a blog counts as press, although that is a very loose interpretation when only 5 family members and friends read it.
Anyway, I have been a member of these fellowships for a very long time. I began attending one when I was 18, because drugs and alcohol had become a big problem in my life. I was very fortunate and the program worked for me. I have not drank alcohol or used any mood altering chemicals for over 24 years.
Through practicing The Twelve Steps, I have come to discover some truths about myself that I want to share here. The first of these subjects I feel compelled to talk about is fear.
Seen at its most basic level, most mental illnesses and certainly alcoholism and drug addiction are diseases fueled by fear, and The Twelve Steps is a spiritual tool kit for combating fear. Now everyone experiences fear, however I believe that alcoholics and drug addicts experience fear differently than normal people. Alcoholics and addicts are more in touch with the basic fear that comes from being aware of your own mortality. On a very deep core level, they are relentlessly terrorized by the possibility of the extinguishing of self.
Now, don’t get me wrong. We all have that fear. All of us know on some level that we could be dead tomorrow, or for that matter later on today. But we all have elaborate systems of denial (personal faith if you will) that allow us to function in spite of that knowledge. For a variety of reasons, these systems aren’t working consistently in alcoholics and drug addicts. For recovery to take place, the alcoholic/addict needs to find a new system; a faith that works.
Ironically, this faulty denial system and the accompanying sense of impending doom causes alcoholics and drug addicts to be quite cavalier about risking death. If you make the mistake of telling a newly recovering drug-addict that his core problem is the fear of death, then he will probably tell you that he is not at all afraid of death – that he risks death all of the time. Often times alcoholic/addicts aren’t even aware that they are in discomfort. The feeling has been with them for as long as they can remember. And even if they are aware of the feeling, they don’t usually have the capacity to recognize the underlying cause. Furthermore, the risk of death creates a rush of adrenaline which serves to diminish the core fear that is causing so many problems. So they go back and do it again.
For example, I once believed that I was fearless. I took up sky-diving shortly after quitting drugs and alcohol. I thoroughly enjoyed it until one day I came very close to death - twice. My main parachute malfunctioned and I had to cut it away and pull my reserve. My reserve 'chute was, to put it diplomatically, minimal. It saved my life, but it gave me almost no maneuverability, and I came very close to landing in some very high voltage power lines. Imagine almost dying, feeling miraculously saved, then almost dying again in about 3 minutes. It threw a breaker switch in my brain. I learned not only do I fear death, but I fear it a lot. I learned that I am really a wimp.
Anyway, today I am 24 years away from my last drink or drug. And The Twelve Steps have diminished that core fear by attacking it from both sides. I have a much stronger faith in a higher power than I once had, and I have more humility than I once had. But I still look for some addictive behavior to engage in the minute I get triggered by fear. Any activity that will keep my mind occupied so that I don’t have to experience the fear will work -- writing this entry in my blog, for example.
Anyway, I have been a member of these fellowships for a very long time. I began attending one when I was 18, because drugs and alcohol had become a big problem in my life. I was very fortunate and the program worked for me. I have not drank alcohol or used any mood altering chemicals for over 24 years.
Through practicing The Twelve Steps, I have come to discover some truths about myself that I want to share here. The first of these subjects I feel compelled to talk about is fear.
Seen at its most basic level, most mental illnesses and certainly alcoholism and drug addiction are diseases fueled by fear, and The Twelve Steps is a spiritual tool kit for combating fear. Now everyone experiences fear, however I believe that alcoholics and drug addicts experience fear differently than normal people. Alcoholics and addicts are more in touch with the basic fear that comes from being aware of your own mortality. On a very deep core level, they are relentlessly terrorized by the possibility of the extinguishing of self.
Now, don’t get me wrong. We all have that fear. All of us know on some level that we could be dead tomorrow, or for that matter later on today. But we all have elaborate systems of denial (personal faith if you will) that allow us to function in spite of that knowledge. For a variety of reasons, these systems aren’t working consistently in alcoholics and drug addicts. For recovery to take place, the alcoholic/addict needs to find a new system; a faith that works.
Ironically, this faulty denial system and the accompanying sense of impending doom causes alcoholics and drug addicts to be quite cavalier about risking death. If you make the mistake of telling a newly recovering drug-addict that his core problem is the fear of death, then he will probably tell you that he is not at all afraid of death – that he risks death all of the time. Often times alcoholic/addicts aren’t even aware that they are in discomfort. The feeling has been with them for as long as they can remember. And even if they are aware of the feeling, they don’t usually have the capacity to recognize the underlying cause. Furthermore, the risk of death creates a rush of adrenaline which serves to diminish the core fear that is causing so many problems. So they go back and do it again.
For example, I once believed that I was fearless. I took up sky-diving shortly after quitting drugs and alcohol. I thoroughly enjoyed it until one day I came very close to death - twice. My main parachute malfunctioned and I had to cut it away and pull my reserve. My reserve 'chute was, to put it diplomatically, minimal. It saved my life, but it gave me almost no maneuverability, and I came very close to landing in some very high voltage power lines. Imagine almost dying, feeling miraculously saved, then almost dying again in about 3 minutes. It threw a breaker switch in my brain. I learned not only do I fear death, but I fear it a lot. I learned that I am really a wimp.
Anyway, today I am 24 years away from my last drink or drug. And The Twelve Steps have diminished that core fear by attacking it from both sides. I have a much stronger faith in a higher power than I once had, and I have more humility than I once had. But I still look for some addictive behavior to engage in the minute I get triggered by fear. Any activity that will keep my mind occupied so that I don’t have to experience the fear will work -- writing this entry in my blog, for example.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
More Quotable Wisdom
This is good stuff:
"Most human interactions are confined to the exchange of words -- the realm of thought. It is essential to bring some stillness, particularly into close relationships.
No relationship can thrive without the sense of spaciousness that comes with stillness. Meditate or spend silent time in nature together. When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home, become comfortable with being in stillness together. Stillness cannot and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is already there, but is usually obscured by mental noise.
If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there it can contain anything." Eckhart Tolle
"Most human interactions are confined to the exchange of words -- the realm of thought. It is essential to bring some stillness, particularly into close relationships.
No relationship can thrive without the sense of spaciousness that comes with stillness. Meditate or spend silent time in nature together. When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home, become comfortable with being in stillness together. Stillness cannot and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is already there, but is usually obscured by mental noise.
If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there it can contain anything." Eckhart Tolle
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Movie Review
I saw the movie Akeelah and the Bee this weekend. This movie is supposed to be the ultimate feel good family movie. It is about a little black girl from the ghetto whose dream it is to win the national spelling bee. To achieve her dream she must overcome many evil forces that are out to stop her. Her coach, a former spelling bee champion from the ghetto himself is played by Laurence Fishburne (aka Cowboy Curtis), who also produced the movie. Akeelah's evil forces come in many forms and many are her own personal biases, like her unwillingness to ask for help from others. I thought that was a great message. However, another clear message was that if you are a white, upper-middle class, private-school-educated male, uh... just like me, then you have no business even seeing this movie. People like me are lined up like shooting gallery ducks throughout the movie so that Akeelah can destroy them in spelling bee competitions. For me, this was not the ultimate feel good movie. Rather, it made me want to volunteer my services to some charity like Homeboy Industries just to relieve some of this godawful guilt.
Friday, May 05, 2006
United 93
One of the legacies of United flight 93 is that no one will ever be successful at hijacking a commercial airline ever again. Prior to 9/11, passengers on hijacked airlines had a very reasonable expectation that if they just cooperated, they'd get out alive. That all changed on 9/11 and United 93 was the result. United 93 illustrates what happens when just a small subset of the 200 passengers is aware that they are going to die. The hijackers don't have a chance. Imagine what would happen today if you stood up on a commercial airline and announced that you were taking over the plane. It wouldn't matter if there were air marshalls on board or not. It wouldn't matter if you had a machine gun. You would look like you'd been through a meat grinder by the time the other passengers were through.
Think about that the next time your toenail clippers are confiscated by homeland security.
Think about that the next time your toenail clippers are confiscated by homeland security.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Rambling Thoughts
Why does windshield wiper fluid come in 1 gallon containers, but in every car I have ever owned, the reserve is less than 1 gallon?
I met a new friend over the weekend and he is originally from Iran. Our conversation turned to the current Iran/US tension and he made a comment I found rather humorous. He said that some of his other Iranian friends has suggested (tongue in cheek, I am sure) that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was actually a CIA stooge. I researched this on the web and discovered that the idea of accusing Iranian presidents of working for the CIA has been around since about 2000. It was first floated by a political rival of Ahmadinejad's predecessor, Mohammed Khatami. I found this article from that period:
click here
That Ahmadinejad is maintaining that he needs a nuclear energy program when his country is the 2nd largest producer of oil in OPEC is ludicrous enough. However what makes him really cartoon-like is his vocal hatred of Israel. I would almost sympathize with his desire for a nuclear bomb with the U.S. military on his flank. I understand the need to maintain sovereignty. But to express hatred for Israel while you are building nuclear bombs is such an open invitation for Bush to bomb your breeder-reactor, that if someone wrote this in a movie script, it would be panned for being too stupid to believe. Maybe in this high stakes poker game, Ahmadinejad wants Bush to bomb his reactor facility, for some reason I can't fathom. I don't know, but can you imagine how the people that work there must feel right now. How would you like to be the night watchman at the Iranian breeder reactor facility? It gives me shivers just thinking about it.
I met a new friend over the weekend and he is originally from Iran. Our conversation turned to the current Iran/US tension and he made a comment I found rather humorous. He said that some of his other Iranian friends has suggested (tongue in cheek, I am sure) that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was actually a CIA stooge. I researched this on the web and discovered that the idea of accusing Iranian presidents of working for the CIA has been around since about 2000. It was first floated by a political rival of Ahmadinejad's predecessor, Mohammed Khatami. I found this article from that period:
click here
That Ahmadinejad is maintaining that he needs a nuclear energy program when his country is the 2nd largest producer of oil in OPEC is ludicrous enough. However what makes him really cartoon-like is his vocal hatred of Israel. I would almost sympathize with his desire for a nuclear bomb with the U.S. military on his flank. I understand the need to maintain sovereignty. But to express hatred for Israel while you are building nuclear bombs is such an open invitation for Bush to bomb your breeder-reactor, that if someone wrote this in a movie script, it would be panned for being too stupid to believe. Maybe in this high stakes poker game, Ahmadinejad wants Bush to bomb his reactor facility, for some reason I can't fathom. I don't know, but can you imagine how the people that work there must feel right now. How would you like to be the night watchman at the Iranian breeder reactor facility? It gives me shivers just thinking about it.
Friday, April 28, 2006
A Failure of Imagination
I checked out this link today to see what the cost of the War in Iraq has become www.costofwar.com. The number when I checked was roughly $277 billion. To give some needed perspective, there are according to the CIA factbook, roughly 27 million Iraquis. This means that our government has now spent over $10,000 for every man woman and child in Iraq.
But wait. That is not all. Our problem with Iraq was not with every member of the population. Our problem was not with Kurdistan. The Kurds love us and they are roughly 20% of the Iraqi population. Our problem was not with women (50% of the population) or children (39.7% of the population). This eliminates all but 6.5 million Iraquis. These are the guys that we had a big problem with - not all of them of course, but most of them. Their behavior needed to be modified. They were making bad choices. They had a very bad leader. These men needed to make much better choices. Because they sit on an ocean of oil, their bad choices could seriously impact us. They could contribute to a future where our country is cut off from oil and our economy screeches to a halt, and the whole country suddenly looks like the New Orleans Superdome.
So our leaders decided to force them to make better choices, militarily. In so doing, Bush et al has spent $43,000 on each of these guys. There have been almost 2,400 American lives lost. There have been approximately 45,000-50,000 Iraqis killed, about 10,000 of whom were military.
Now whether or not you agreed with the need to force regime change in Iraq, does this seem like a sensible use of all that money? I mean, my job is not to think of stuff like this but why not put that money into say, building roads and bridges and schools and hospitals for the Kurds, for example. I mean, what would the rest of Iraq have done if they saw their northern neighbors go from herding goats to driving Jaguars. I'd have to think that a lot of them would say, "We need to rethink this whole Death to America thing. Being a friend to America seems to have nice benefits."
I'm sure there were people in the Pentagon that were paid to think up clever ways to affect change in Iraq. I'm sure they had great ideas that made my pour-money-on-the-Kurds idea look really absurd. But we'll never know what those ideas were. They are all moot now. They were made impotent by our leader when he told us that we had no time. He told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that they intended to use them against us. No time meant no choice but war. If they had found WMDs in Iraq, I don't know how I would feel about George Bush. But knowing that was all a lie, I really have a hard time with the guy. I used to love politics. I used to love watching Meet the Press and Face the Nation and This Week with Cokie Roberts (just kidding about the last one). Now I can't even turn that stuff on without seriously wanting to throw a brick through my TV. January 2009 can't get here fast enough.
But wait. That is not all. Our problem with Iraq was not with every member of the population. Our problem was not with Kurdistan. The Kurds love us and they are roughly 20% of the Iraqi population. Our problem was not with women (50% of the population) or children (39.7% of the population). This eliminates all but 6.5 million Iraquis. These are the guys that we had a big problem with - not all of them of course, but most of them. Their behavior needed to be modified. They were making bad choices. They had a very bad leader. These men needed to make much better choices. Because they sit on an ocean of oil, their bad choices could seriously impact us. They could contribute to a future where our country is cut off from oil and our economy screeches to a halt, and the whole country suddenly looks like the New Orleans Superdome.
So our leaders decided to force them to make better choices, militarily. In so doing, Bush et al has spent $43,000 on each of these guys. There have been almost 2,400 American lives lost. There have been approximately 45,000-50,000 Iraqis killed, about 10,000 of whom were military.
Now whether or not you agreed with the need to force regime change in Iraq, does this seem like a sensible use of all that money? I mean, my job is not to think of stuff like this but why not put that money into say, building roads and bridges and schools and hospitals for the Kurds, for example. I mean, what would the rest of Iraq have done if they saw their northern neighbors go from herding goats to driving Jaguars. I'd have to think that a lot of them would say, "We need to rethink this whole Death to America thing. Being a friend to America seems to have nice benefits."
I'm sure there were people in the Pentagon that were paid to think up clever ways to affect change in Iraq. I'm sure they had great ideas that made my pour-money-on-the-Kurds idea look really absurd. But we'll never know what those ideas were. They are all moot now. They were made impotent by our leader when he told us that we had no time. He told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that they intended to use them against us. No time meant no choice but war. If they had found WMDs in Iraq, I don't know how I would feel about George Bush. But knowing that was all a lie, I really have a hard time with the guy. I used to love politics. I used to love watching Meet the Press and Face the Nation and This Week with Cokie Roberts (just kidding about the last one). Now I can't even turn that stuff on without seriously wanting to throw a brick through my TV. January 2009 can't get here fast enough.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Reasons Why Oil Prices Should Lower
It appears that we are in a runaway speculative bubble in the price of gasoline. Throughout history, there have been periods where the markets lost touch with reality and began bidding the prices up of something or other for the sole reason that the price was going up. This seems to be one of those times.
The fundamentals aren't there. It is true that we are using oil at nearly 100% of refining capacity, but that fact alone would only justify a price of $50 per barrel or so. At the time of this writing, oil is between $73 and $75 per barrel. There are four reasons that the market has bid the price so high.
1) Iran. The market thinks that we might ultimately invade Iran and Iran is a huge oil producer. They are second only to Saudi Arabia in OPEC. But I believe that Iran is bluffing about their nuclear ambitions. They know we will never let them have nukes. They are trying to get the U.S. to sit down with them and offer concessions that we won't invade them and topple their government just because we really don't like them. It is high stakes poker and Iran doesn't have any cards. They aren't crazy. At least I don't think they are crazy. Okay I really hope they aren't crazy. Fuggetaboudit.
2) Nigeria. Nigeria has already experienced a huge disruption in the flow of oil. Their government has lost $1.5 billion in oil revenue. It can only get better from here.
3) Al Qaieda. Those evil-doers recently tried to blow up a Saudi refinery. This probably means that from now on, major refineries will be top on the list of terrorist targets. I agree that this is bad news for oil prices, but let us look on the bright side. They FAILED to blow up a Saudi refinery. FAILED. C'mon guys.
4) Prices are going up and demand is not dropping. The biggest reason oil prices are climbing is because they can. It seems that demand for oil is, as the economists say, inelastic. In other words, we'll buy it regardless of the price. Well this just isn't true. There is a time lag. When you pay $3 per gallon at the pump, you don't sell your SUV that day and trade it in for a PRIUS. It takes some time. But it will happen. And when it does, look out below.
Without the fundamentals supporting current oil prices, any good news (a cease fire in Nigeria, a deal with Iran, Osama on a stick) will shock the markets into a very swift sell off. Oil will settle at a price that is more in keeping with its fundamentals. In other words, it will settle at the price that OPEC wants it to be, which is to say $50 per barrel or so.
The fundamentals aren't there. It is true that we are using oil at nearly 100% of refining capacity, but that fact alone would only justify a price of $50 per barrel or so. At the time of this writing, oil is between $73 and $75 per barrel. There are four reasons that the market has bid the price so high.
1) Iran. The market thinks that we might ultimately invade Iran and Iran is a huge oil producer. They are second only to Saudi Arabia in OPEC. But I believe that Iran is bluffing about their nuclear ambitions. They know we will never let them have nukes. They are trying to get the U.S. to sit down with them and offer concessions that we won't invade them and topple their government just because we really don't like them. It is high stakes poker and Iran doesn't have any cards. They aren't crazy. At least I don't think they are crazy. Okay I really hope they aren't crazy. Fuggetaboudit.
2) Nigeria. Nigeria has already experienced a huge disruption in the flow of oil. Their government has lost $1.5 billion in oil revenue. It can only get better from here.
3) Al Qaieda. Those evil-doers recently tried to blow up a Saudi refinery. This probably means that from now on, major refineries will be top on the list of terrorist targets. I agree that this is bad news for oil prices, but let us look on the bright side. They FAILED to blow up a Saudi refinery. FAILED. C'mon guys.
4) Prices are going up and demand is not dropping. The biggest reason oil prices are climbing is because they can. It seems that demand for oil is, as the economists say, inelastic. In other words, we'll buy it regardless of the price. Well this just isn't true. There is a time lag. When you pay $3 per gallon at the pump, you don't sell your SUV that day and trade it in for a PRIUS. It takes some time. But it will happen. And when it does, look out below.
Without the fundamentals supporting current oil prices, any good news (a cease fire in Nigeria, a deal with Iran, Osama on a stick) will shock the markets into a very swift sell off. Oil will settle at a price that is more in keeping with its fundamentals. In other words, it will settle at the price that OPEC wants it to be, which is to say $50 per barrel or so.
Friday, April 21, 2006
Scott Crossfield 1921-2006
The year was 1987. My father and I were traveling to Minneapolis for the weekend. As I stood in line at the ticket counter of the Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City, I noticed a man a few places in line in front of me. My first thought was that he looked like Walt Disney. Then I had the oddest sense of déjà vu. I seemed to remember seeing this man before recently, perhaps on T.V., and thinking that he looked like Walt Disney then too. I wracked my brain trying to figure out where I had seen this guy. It was driving me nuts. I asked my father, “Does that guy look familiar to you?” My dad just shrugged.
A few minutes later we took our seats aboard the aircraft. My dad took the window seat, and I had to sit in the middle seat. The Walt Disney-looking guy soon sat down in the aisle seat. I was trying to muster up the courage to ask him who the hell he was when I saw his name engraved on a brass plate on the front of his briefcase. It read: Scott Crossfield. I remembered where I had seen him.
“Jesus Christ Dad, that guy is Scott Crossfield!” I practically had to yell at my father over the whine of the jet engines warming up.
“No way, really?”
“Look at his briefcase.”
My dad looked at the briefcase, and then a transformation came over him. I wasn’t sitting next to my dad anymore. I was sitting next to his inner child.
I need to break from this story to tell you about my father. My dad loved everything about flying. When my father was in his 20’s he bought and restored half a dozen World War II fighter aircraft, and he flew them in airshows around the country with a group called The Confederate Air Force. One of the founders of the Confederate Air Force was astronaut Gus Grissom. My dad talked about Gus Grissom like he was a god. He also talked with the same reverence about the one other astronaut he had met, Wally Shira.
I think my dad’s first dream in life was to be a military pilot. And as a military pilot, my dad would have done anything to fly the fastest thing he could possibly fly. In other words, my dad’s ultimate dream would have been to be an astronaut. But that could never happen. The military wouldn’t take my dad. He was blind in one eye. So restoring World War II fighters was the closest thing he could get to being an astronaut. My dad settled for a P-51 Mustang, the fastest propeller driven aircraft ever built. The dragster of the sky.
My dad’s dream was so strong that I took it on. I spent much of my childhood dreaming of being an astronaut. I devoured every bit of information about the space program. I think at one time I could name every American astronaut. Imagine how I felt to be sitting with Scott Crossfield on one side of me and my father on the other.
“Quick dad, what rank is he? Is he a colonel or what?”
“I don’t know. It seems that I remember him being in the Navy. I think he is a Navy commander.”
I couldn’t risk using a title without more certainty.
“Uh, Mister Crossfield, excuse me I couldn’t help noticing who you are. I have a videotape of the PBS documentary “Spaceflight” at home and I was just watching it last week. You are interviewed extensively in that program. I just wanted to say what an honor it is to meet you.” I didn’t bother to mention that he looked like Walt Disney.
He looked a little startled.
“Well it is nice to meet you too, uh…”
“Chris Kavanaugh, sir, and this is my father Dan Kavanaugh. He is a big admirer of yours as well.”
My dad’s inner child reached out to shake his hand.
“It is nice to meet you both.” He said.
The uncomfortable silence that followed was interrupted by the stewardess lecturing us on all kinds of valuable information like what to do in the event of a water landing during the flight from Oklahoma City to Dallas Fort Worth. Just in case we crash into Lake Texoma, I thought. It could happen.
By the time she was through, Scott Crossfield had leaned his head back and shut his eyes.
Great, I thought. He isn’t going to talk to me at all. He is going to sleep all the way to Dallas. Wonderful.
I sat there for several minutes and watched him sleep. I went through three of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages. Denial – He is not really sleeping. Anger – Goddammit, can’t he see how important it is to talk to me. Bargaining – Maybe if I wake him he won’t be that pissed off. I was somewhere between depression and acceptance when the drink cart lady came by and said “Care for something to drink?”
My dad and I both gave our drink orders and then Crossfield opened his eyes, “I’ll have a cup of coffee.” He said.
Crossfield straightened himself in his seat, then he turned to me and said, “What documentary did you say you saw me in?”
“Spaceflight. Have you not seen it?”
“No, I remember them interviewing me though. I haven’t seen it. Is it good?” He asked.
“It’s really good. Martin Sheen narrates it. It has tons of footage of you being interviewed and it is spliced in with some amazing old footage of the X-15. They showed footage of the X-15 breaking in half on landing. . .”
Crossfield chuckled. “That was quite a day.”
“. . .they also showed footage of when the X-15 caught on fire with you in it.”
“Yeah. A man risked his life to save mine when that happened.” Crossfield’s eyes were twinkling now. “I guess I’ll have to get a tape of it.”
I noticed my father straining to hear our conversation. Unfortunately, the whine of the engines was too loud. I knew he could only hear bits and pieces. It served him right for taking the window seat.
“So where are you flying to today?” I asked.
“I am going back to Washington, D.C. I had some work in Oklahoma and now I am headed home.”
“So what are you doing these days?”
“Well, I work for Congress. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the National Aerospace Plane. . .”
I nodded.
“It’s designed to take off from a runway, accelerate to hypersonic speed, and propel itself into orbit. Well, I am sort of an intermediary between Congress and the contractors on the project. Some of the work is being done in Oklahoma.”
“How close are we to having an Aerospace Plane?” I asked.
“We are about seven years away from testing prototypes.”
“Wow, that’s unbelievable.” I said. Apparently, I was right.
“So, I am dying to ask you a question. . .What does Scott Crossfield think about the Challenger disaster?”
The Challenger disaster happened in January of 1986, a little over one year before our conversation. The wound was still fresh. Crossfield winced.
“It was fucking criminal is what I think.” Crossfield said. “People should go to jail.”
And so it began. The real Scott Crossfield poured out.
“How they could put a school teacher on that rocket. . . It’s unbelievable. Those astronauts knew the risks, but a school teacher? It’s criminal.”
“When Reagan came out and declared the Space Shuttle operational, what a joke. Operational. Mark my words, one day history will show that Kennedy set the space program back 50 years by taking it out of the hands of aeronautical engineers and handing it to the fucking missileers.”
Apparently “missileers” was a derogatory slur of missile engineers.
“Operational. The missileers idea of operational is if 80% of their rockets don’t blow up on the launch pad, its operational.”
He shook his head.
“We are sitting in an aircraft that was designed and built in 1969 - 1969!! – and you don’t see a bunch of assholes standing around the runway applauding, do you?”
I laughed. “No, you have a point.”
I have no idea how Crossfield knew in what year our plane was built. The McDonnell Douglas DC9 was manufactured from 1965 – 1982. I suspect he was guessing and bullshitting me a little bit.
I had read the book “The Right Stuff,” by Tom Wolfe. Wolfe spent a lot of time describing the amazing egos of these test pilots. He described them like brain surgeons, how they had to be completely lacking in humility to do what they do. Tom Wolfe had Scott Crossfield pegged.
“So have you seen the movie “The Right Stuff?”
“No. And I never will. But I did read the book, though.”
“Why won’t you see the movie?” How could you not see a movie in which an actor plays you, I wondered.
“Some friends of mine saw it and they said the movie made Pancho Barnes look like a worn out old alcoholic. There is no way I’ll ever watch that. That woman was a saint.”
“Hmm. But did you like the book?”
“Yeah. The book was alright. He got a few things right in the book.”
“Did you ever get interviewed by Tom Wolfe?”
“No. I have never talked to the man. But some of my friends did.”
“Well, the movie especially made it look like there was this big rivalry between you and Chuck Yeager. What do you think about all the attention he’s been getting lately?”
He laughed. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll never forget watching Johnny Carson, and he introduced Yeager as ‘the greatest pilot that ever lived.’ Shit, there were dozens of pilots at Edwards that could wax his tail any day. The greatest pilot that ever lived.” He shook his head.
“You mean to tell me that there was nothing special about Chuck Yeager?”
“Well, he did do one thing that impressed me. Yeager put an F104 into a flat spin. Those planes were really easy to put into a flat spin. Anyway, most pilots would have punched out, but Yeager thought to lower the landing gear. That provided enough drag to lower the nose and get him out of the spin. That was pretty clever. I was impressed with that.”
“Well, with all those ads he’s doing these days, Yeager must be making a fortune.” I said. “If I were you, I’d call his agent. Maybe you and Yeager could do an ad where you are bantering about who the best test pilot is.”
He laughed. “No way. You’ll never see me selling spark plugs.”
The short flight to Dallas ended way too soon. I said goodbye to Scott Crossfield and thanked him for making my flight so interesting. As soon as he was out of sight, my father's inner child turned to me and said “You will now repeat every single word he said.”
Rest in peace, Scott Crossfield.
A few minutes later we took our seats aboard the aircraft. My dad took the window seat, and I had to sit in the middle seat. The Walt Disney-looking guy soon sat down in the aisle seat. I was trying to muster up the courage to ask him who the hell he was when I saw his name engraved on a brass plate on the front of his briefcase. It read: Scott Crossfield. I remembered where I had seen him.
“Jesus Christ Dad, that guy is Scott Crossfield!” I practically had to yell at my father over the whine of the jet engines warming up.
“No way, really?”
“Look at his briefcase.”
My dad looked at the briefcase, and then a transformation came over him. I wasn’t sitting next to my dad anymore. I was sitting next to his inner child.
I need to break from this story to tell you about my father. My dad loved everything about flying. When my father was in his 20’s he bought and restored half a dozen World War II fighter aircraft, and he flew them in airshows around the country with a group called The Confederate Air Force. One of the founders of the Confederate Air Force was astronaut Gus Grissom. My dad talked about Gus Grissom like he was a god. He also talked with the same reverence about the one other astronaut he had met, Wally Shira.
I think my dad’s first dream in life was to be a military pilot. And as a military pilot, my dad would have done anything to fly the fastest thing he could possibly fly. In other words, my dad’s ultimate dream would have been to be an astronaut. But that could never happen. The military wouldn’t take my dad. He was blind in one eye. So restoring World War II fighters was the closest thing he could get to being an astronaut. My dad settled for a P-51 Mustang, the fastest propeller driven aircraft ever built. The dragster of the sky.
My dad’s dream was so strong that I took it on. I spent much of my childhood dreaming of being an astronaut. I devoured every bit of information about the space program. I think at one time I could name every American astronaut. Imagine how I felt to be sitting with Scott Crossfield on one side of me and my father on the other.
“Quick dad, what rank is he? Is he a colonel or what?”
“I don’t know. It seems that I remember him being in the Navy. I think he is a Navy commander.”
I couldn’t risk using a title without more certainty.
“Uh, Mister Crossfield, excuse me I couldn’t help noticing who you are. I have a videotape of the PBS documentary “Spaceflight” at home and I was just watching it last week. You are interviewed extensively in that program. I just wanted to say what an honor it is to meet you.” I didn’t bother to mention that he looked like Walt Disney.
He looked a little startled.
“Well it is nice to meet you too, uh…”
“Chris Kavanaugh, sir, and this is my father Dan Kavanaugh. He is a big admirer of yours as well.”
My dad’s inner child reached out to shake his hand.
“It is nice to meet you both.” He said.
The uncomfortable silence that followed was interrupted by the stewardess lecturing us on all kinds of valuable information like what to do in the event of a water landing during the flight from Oklahoma City to Dallas Fort Worth. Just in case we crash into Lake Texoma, I thought. It could happen.
By the time she was through, Scott Crossfield had leaned his head back and shut his eyes.
Great, I thought. He isn’t going to talk to me at all. He is going to sleep all the way to Dallas. Wonderful.
I sat there for several minutes and watched him sleep. I went through three of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages. Denial – He is not really sleeping. Anger – Goddammit, can’t he see how important it is to talk to me. Bargaining – Maybe if I wake him he won’t be that pissed off. I was somewhere between depression and acceptance when the drink cart lady came by and said “Care for something to drink?”
My dad and I both gave our drink orders and then Crossfield opened his eyes, “I’ll have a cup of coffee.” He said.
Crossfield straightened himself in his seat, then he turned to me and said, “What documentary did you say you saw me in?”
“Spaceflight. Have you not seen it?”
“No, I remember them interviewing me though. I haven’t seen it. Is it good?” He asked.
“It’s really good. Martin Sheen narrates it. It has tons of footage of you being interviewed and it is spliced in with some amazing old footage of the X-15. They showed footage of the X-15 breaking in half on landing. . .”
Crossfield chuckled. “That was quite a day.”
“. . .they also showed footage of when the X-15 caught on fire with you in it.”
“Yeah. A man risked his life to save mine when that happened.” Crossfield’s eyes were twinkling now. “I guess I’ll have to get a tape of it.”
I noticed my father straining to hear our conversation. Unfortunately, the whine of the engines was too loud. I knew he could only hear bits and pieces. It served him right for taking the window seat.
“So where are you flying to today?” I asked.
“I am going back to Washington, D.C. I had some work in Oklahoma and now I am headed home.”
“So what are you doing these days?”
“Well, I work for Congress. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the National Aerospace Plane. . .”
I nodded.
“It’s designed to take off from a runway, accelerate to hypersonic speed, and propel itself into orbit. Well, I am sort of an intermediary between Congress and the contractors on the project. Some of the work is being done in Oklahoma.”
“How close are we to having an Aerospace Plane?” I asked.
“We are about seven years away from testing prototypes.”
“Wow, that’s unbelievable.” I said. Apparently, I was right.
“So, I am dying to ask you a question. . .What does Scott Crossfield think about the Challenger disaster?”
The Challenger disaster happened in January of 1986, a little over one year before our conversation. The wound was still fresh. Crossfield winced.
“It was fucking criminal is what I think.” Crossfield said. “People should go to jail.”
And so it began. The real Scott Crossfield poured out.
“How they could put a school teacher on that rocket. . . It’s unbelievable. Those astronauts knew the risks, but a school teacher? It’s criminal.”
“When Reagan came out and declared the Space Shuttle operational, what a joke. Operational. Mark my words, one day history will show that Kennedy set the space program back 50 years by taking it out of the hands of aeronautical engineers and handing it to the fucking missileers.”
Apparently “missileers” was a derogatory slur of missile engineers.
“Operational. The missileers idea of operational is if 80% of their rockets don’t blow up on the launch pad, its operational.”
He shook his head.
“We are sitting in an aircraft that was designed and built in 1969 - 1969!! – and you don’t see a bunch of assholes standing around the runway applauding, do you?”
I laughed. “No, you have a point.”
I have no idea how Crossfield knew in what year our plane was built. The McDonnell Douglas DC9 was manufactured from 1965 – 1982. I suspect he was guessing and bullshitting me a little bit.
I had read the book “The Right Stuff,” by Tom Wolfe. Wolfe spent a lot of time describing the amazing egos of these test pilots. He described them like brain surgeons, how they had to be completely lacking in humility to do what they do. Tom Wolfe had Scott Crossfield pegged.
“So have you seen the movie “The Right Stuff?”
“No. And I never will. But I did read the book, though.”
“Why won’t you see the movie?” How could you not see a movie in which an actor plays you, I wondered.
“Some friends of mine saw it and they said the movie made Pancho Barnes look like a worn out old alcoholic. There is no way I’ll ever watch that. That woman was a saint.”
“Hmm. But did you like the book?”
“Yeah. The book was alright. He got a few things right in the book.”
“Did you ever get interviewed by Tom Wolfe?”
“No. I have never talked to the man. But some of my friends did.”
“Well, the movie especially made it look like there was this big rivalry between you and Chuck Yeager. What do you think about all the attention he’s been getting lately?”
He laughed. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll never forget watching Johnny Carson, and he introduced Yeager as ‘the greatest pilot that ever lived.’ Shit, there were dozens of pilots at Edwards that could wax his tail any day. The greatest pilot that ever lived.” He shook his head.
“You mean to tell me that there was nothing special about Chuck Yeager?”
“Well, he did do one thing that impressed me. Yeager put an F104 into a flat spin. Those planes were really easy to put into a flat spin. Anyway, most pilots would have punched out, but Yeager thought to lower the landing gear. That provided enough drag to lower the nose and get him out of the spin. That was pretty clever. I was impressed with that.”
“Well, with all those ads he’s doing these days, Yeager must be making a fortune.” I said. “If I were you, I’d call his agent. Maybe you and Yeager could do an ad where you are bantering about who the best test pilot is.”
He laughed. “No way. You’ll never see me selling spark plugs.”
The short flight to Dallas ended way too soon. I said goodbye to Scott Crossfield and thanked him for making my flight so interesting. As soon as he was out of sight, my father's inner child turned to me and said “You will now repeat every single word he said.”
Rest in peace, Scott Crossfield.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Last night's Nova and Global Dimming
Last night I watched Nova and it messed with me more than a little. To save you the trouble, the show was about the relatively new discovery that air-pollution particles have a very powerful cooling effect on our atmosphere.
That there is an effect is not news. I remember Carl Sagan talking about how we would have a "nuclear winter" following an H-bomb party with the Ruskies (or an asteroid collision) when I was a little kid. The big news had to do with the impact on global temperatures of the grounding of all commercial airline flights following 9/11. You see, jet exhaust creates contrails, artificial clouds that reflect the Sun's heat back out into space. While the scientists expected a very tiny impact on global temperature ranges from these commercial jet groundings, what they saw instead was the largest spike in global temperature range (hotter days, cooler nights) ever recorded (just over 1 degree Celsius).
There is not much chance that was a coincidence, and it isn't like the research might be in error, because anyone can calculate global temperature range. The data from weather stations around the world is freely available. No this is the real thing: a totally overlooked MAJOR cooling influence on the Earth's climate. And because this effect (called "Global Dimming") is so much more powerful than anyone ever dreamed, then all the atmospheric scientists are having to admit that the warming effect of greenhouse gases is correspondingly much more powerful than anyone has heretofore theorized.
If you want to read about it:
Click Here Dude
So what does all this mean? It means that:
With new polution-scrubbing coal-burning power plants popping up all over India and China, and catalytic converters on all their shiny new cars, global warming is more likely to accelerate faster in the coming years than anyone but the fringe ever thought possible. Sure there remains uncertainty, but in poker-terminology, we seem to have fewer outs. It is less likely that we can just kick back and ignore the problem until fossil fuel reserves run out and we transition to some other source of power (probably nuclear) like the George Bushes and Rush Limbaughs of the world might advise.
There is an upside. I won't have to move to a warmer climate in my old age. It will come to me. Also, I may fund my retirement by short selling Florida real estate and investing the profits in Greenland real estate.
Still, in all seriousness, solutions like this one may start to look a lot less radical in the coming years:
Dude Click Here
What I want to know now is: what conditions are necessary to create a contrail? Since high-altitude jets do it by accident, what would an aircraft be like that was designed for the purpose of creating contrails? It seems to me that a zillion robotic contrail-makers buzzing all over the planet would be a cheaper solution to global warming than making a ring around the equator in space.
That there is an effect is not news. I remember Carl Sagan talking about how we would have a "nuclear winter" following an H-bomb party with the Ruskies (or an asteroid collision) when I was a little kid. The big news had to do with the impact on global temperatures of the grounding of all commercial airline flights following 9/11. You see, jet exhaust creates contrails, artificial clouds that reflect the Sun's heat back out into space. While the scientists expected a very tiny impact on global temperature ranges from these commercial jet groundings, what they saw instead was the largest spike in global temperature range (hotter days, cooler nights) ever recorded (just over 1 degree Celsius).
There is not much chance that was a coincidence, and it isn't like the research might be in error, because anyone can calculate global temperature range. The data from weather stations around the world is freely available. No this is the real thing: a totally overlooked MAJOR cooling influence on the Earth's climate. And because this effect (called "Global Dimming") is so much more powerful than anyone ever dreamed, then all the atmospheric scientists are having to admit that the warming effect of greenhouse gases is correspondingly much more powerful than anyone has heretofore theorized.
If you want to read about it:
Click Here Dude
So what does all this mean? It means that:
With new polution-scrubbing coal-burning power plants popping up all over India and China, and catalytic converters on all their shiny new cars, global warming is more likely to accelerate faster in the coming years than anyone but the fringe ever thought possible. Sure there remains uncertainty, but in poker-terminology, we seem to have fewer outs. It is less likely that we can just kick back and ignore the problem until fossil fuel reserves run out and we transition to some other source of power (probably nuclear) like the George Bushes and Rush Limbaughs of the world might advise.
There is an upside. I won't have to move to a warmer climate in my old age. It will come to me. Also, I may fund my retirement by short selling Florida real estate and investing the profits in Greenland real estate.
Still, in all seriousness, solutions like this one may start to look a lot less radical in the coming years:
Dude Click Here
What I want to know now is: what conditions are necessary to create a contrail? Since high-altitude jets do it by accident, what would an aircraft be like that was designed for the purpose of creating contrails? It seems to me that a zillion robotic contrail-makers buzzing all over the planet would be a cheaper solution to global warming than making a ring around the equator in space.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
An Article for Olivia
I found this news story and clipped it because it directly relates to an inside joke between me and my daughter Olivia. The rest of you are welcome to read it if you like, and you can guess at the joke. But Olivia and I will never tell.
Man allegedly gets neighbor's cat euthanized
Associated Press
Apr. 17, 2006 10:22 AM
WEST ISLIP, N.Y. - A man who didn't get along with his neighbor trapped her cat in his back yard and then took it to an animal shelter to be euthanized, police said.
Regina Fagone searched the neighborhood for two days earlier this month after her cat disappeared, and then went to the Town of Islip Animal Shelter.
Employees there broke the news to her: Her cat, a Russian blue, had been euthanized that day.
Richard DeSantis, 56, was arrested Saturday and was charged with criminal mischief, criminal possession of stolen property and making a punishable false written statement, police said. He was issued a desk appearance ticket and will be arraigned June 5.
DeSantis, reached by telephone at his home Sunday, said there are two sides to every story and then hung up.
Police said an investigation found DeSantis had captured the cat and dropped it off at the shelter to be killed.
Man allegedly gets neighbor's cat euthanized
Associated Press
Apr. 17, 2006 10:22 AM
WEST ISLIP, N.Y. - A man who didn't get along with his neighbor trapped her cat in his back yard and then took it to an animal shelter to be euthanized, police said.
Regina Fagone searched the neighborhood for two days earlier this month after her cat disappeared, and then went to the Town of Islip Animal Shelter.
Employees there broke the news to her: Her cat, a Russian blue, had been euthanized that day.
Richard DeSantis, 56, was arrested Saturday and was charged with criminal mischief, criminal possession of stolen property and making a punishable false written statement, police said. He was issued a desk appearance ticket and will be arraigned June 5.
DeSantis, reached by telephone at his home Sunday, said there are two sides to every story and then hung up.
Police said an investigation found DeSantis had captured the cat and dropped it off at the shelter to be killed.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Things I Found Interesting While Web Surfing Today
I found some interesting stuff while web surfing today. I read on a site, which I didn't bother to save, that part of the reason that we have kept the pagan fertility tradition of Easter eggs is that poultry farmers needed to get rid of all the eggs that piled up due to the drop in demand from Lenten fasting. True or not, I love thinking that this holiday was commerce driven, even in the middle ages.
I also discovered a web site with all kinds of interesting facts about our government and taxes. It is www.taxfoundation.org. There I learned many things, the most interesting of which was that since 1977, our government has made about $60 billion per year on gasoline taxes at the pump on average, while the combined profits of the major oil companies has averaged about $30 billion per year. I will no longer wonder why our government isn't doing more to encourage alternative energy investment.
I also discovered a web site with all kinds of interesting facts about our government and taxes. It is www.taxfoundation.org. There I learned many things, the most interesting of which was that since 1977, our government has made about $60 billion per year on gasoline taxes at the pump on average, while the combined profits of the major oil companies has averaged about $30 billion per year. I will no longer wonder why our government isn't doing more to encourage alternative energy investment.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
1998
(While looking through the writings of my past for stuff to put up on my blog, I found this particular piece interesting for its nostalgia. It took me right back to 1998.)
In the last year, several things have occurred in the world that would seem too ridiculous to believe if they were fiction. I have concluded that I have somehow lost all touch with reality and I am dreaming. Perhaps I am in a coma. Since I don't know how I got here, I have no idea how to get out. Here is my collection of evidence that supports this contention. I would welcome any suggestions on how to wake myself up.
The Nation
The Washington Post and the New York Times, two of the most liberal organizations in America, have been leading a media assault on President Clinton over compelling audio-taped evidence that he was having his knob polished by a young White House intern. If true, Clinton is guilty of perjury and may also be guilty of obstructing justice. In his testimony, President Clinton did testify that he had an affair with Jennifer Flowers, something he emphatically denied in his 1992 presidential campaign. The Clintons are blaming the whole thing on a partisan conspiracy. Furthermore, several allied nations including France and Russia are accusing the U.S. of instigating a military crisis with Iraq to shift national attention from the president's legal problems. A movie, called Wag The Dog, just completed its run in theaters and tells the story of a fictional president that first blames partisan politics, then fabricates a military crisis to shift national attention from the compelling story of a sexual encounter with a young girl in the White House. To add to the surrealism, polls indicate that the public strongly believes the president's denials and supports him in this matter.
The Federal Government is forecasting a budget surplus for 1998, the first year since the Eisenhower Administration. An argument is raging on Capitol Hill over what to do with the extra money.
Sports
The wild card Denver Broncos beat the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl. The victory was mostly due to the strength of the Bronco's running game.
The U.S. soccer team beat Brazil 1 - 0 in an international soccer tournament, on Tuesday. Brazil is widely believed to be the best soccer team in the world. The U.S. goes undefeated into the tournament's final match on Sunday. In the 68 year history of the U.S. soccer team, the U.S. has never before beaten Brazil - in fact, they have never before even tied Brazil - in fact, they have never before scored a single goal against Brazil.
The PGA will now be forced by court order to allow professionals to use golf carts in tournament play if they have a note from their doctors.
Mike Tyson has been banned from boxing for biting off Evander Holyfield's ear. Boxing industry leaders are now worried that the sport's reputation will be tarnished by Tyson's association with an upcoming wrestling match.
Anything relating to Marv Albert.
Finance
Stock investing genius and second richest man in the world, Warren Buffett has lately been investing billions of dollars in silver futures and zero coupon treasury bonds. Throughout his career, Buffett has been an outspoken advocate of buying quality stocks when they are cheap. He has frequently advised investors that it is foolish to ever try to time the market. Silver futures are bets about the short term fluctuations of the price of Silver on the commodities exchanges. Zero coupon treasury bonds are most commonly used to speculate on short term changes in interest rates.
Movies
The next big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas include Sony's Godzilla starring Oscar and Tony award winner Matthew "Ferris Bueller" Broderick and Lost in Space starring "Friend" Matt LeBlanc.
In the past, I have had dreams where I jumped off of buildings. I always wake up just before I hit the ground. If, by chance, I am mistaken and this is not a dream, and I jump off a building after watching Lost in Space, then you’ll know what happened.
In the last year, several things have occurred in the world that would seem too ridiculous to believe if they were fiction. I have concluded that I have somehow lost all touch with reality and I am dreaming. Perhaps I am in a coma. Since I don't know how I got here, I have no idea how to get out. Here is my collection of evidence that supports this contention. I would welcome any suggestions on how to wake myself up.
The Nation
The Washington Post and the New York Times, two of the most liberal organizations in America, have been leading a media assault on President Clinton over compelling audio-taped evidence that he was having his knob polished by a young White House intern. If true, Clinton is guilty of perjury and may also be guilty of obstructing justice. In his testimony, President Clinton did testify that he had an affair with Jennifer Flowers, something he emphatically denied in his 1992 presidential campaign. The Clintons are blaming the whole thing on a partisan conspiracy. Furthermore, several allied nations including France and Russia are accusing the U.S. of instigating a military crisis with Iraq to shift national attention from the president's legal problems. A movie, called Wag The Dog, just completed its run in theaters and tells the story of a fictional president that first blames partisan politics, then fabricates a military crisis to shift national attention from the compelling story of a sexual encounter with a young girl in the White House. To add to the surrealism, polls indicate that the public strongly believes the president's denials and supports him in this matter.
The Federal Government is forecasting a budget surplus for 1998, the first year since the Eisenhower Administration. An argument is raging on Capitol Hill over what to do with the extra money.
Sports
The wild card Denver Broncos beat the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl. The victory was mostly due to the strength of the Bronco's running game.
The U.S. soccer team beat Brazil 1 - 0 in an international soccer tournament, on Tuesday. Brazil is widely believed to be the best soccer team in the world. The U.S. goes undefeated into the tournament's final match on Sunday. In the 68 year history of the U.S. soccer team, the U.S. has never before beaten Brazil - in fact, they have never before even tied Brazil - in fact, they have never before scored a single goal against Brazil.
The PGA will now be forced by court order to allow professionals to use golf carts in tournament play if they have a note from their doctors.
Mike Tyson has been banned from boxing for biting off Evander Holyfield's ear. Boxing industry leaders are now worried that the sport's reputation will be tarnished by Tyson's association with an upcoming wrestling match.
Anything relating to Marv Albert.
Finance
Stock investing genius and second richest man in the world, Warren Buffett has lately been investing billions of dollars in silver futures and zero coupon treasury bonds. Throughout his career, Buffett has been an outspoken advocate of buying quality stocks when they are cheap. He has frequently advised investors that it is foolish to ever try to time the market. Silver futures are bets about the short term fluctuations of the price of Silver on the commodities exchanges. Zero coupon treasury bonds are most commonly used to speculate on short term changes in interest rates.
Movies
The next big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas include Sony's Godzilla starring Oscar and Tony award winner Matthew "Ferris Bueller" Broderick and Lost in Space starring "Friend" Matt LeBlanc.
In the past, I have had dreams where I jumped off of buildings. I always wake up just before I hit the ground. If, by chance, I am mistaken and this is not a dream, and I jump off a building after watching Lost in Space, then you’ll know what happened.
Colonoscopii
My good friend Dave and I recently had an email dialog on the subject of colonoscopies. Dave is a very funny guy. He teaches middle school, in case you were wondering, and you'll find a link to his blog here. Since he didn't share his thoughts on colonoscopies on his blog, I am posting them here.
"Chris,
I'm having my first ever colonoscopy today. I had some thoughts on the process thus far, and I had to write them down.
So, I share. Why? because I'm a helper. I help. It's what I do.
If hell has an official soft drink, it's GOT to be Colyte
Because of the unforeseen (and, it must be said, ferocious) efficiency of the Colyte, I ended up with a nasty little rash deal on my . . . well, you know. My wife says to me "Want me to go to the store and get some Destin? It's real good when you're hurtin' in your bobo" Now, the fact that she referred to that part of my body as my "bobo" made me laugh, hard, for 20 minutes, and made me so glad I'd married her I can't even describe it.
Destin really is good when you're hurtin' in your bobo. It's basically zinc oxide paste, but it works like a charm.
I had to take enemas this morning. Plural. I begin to suspect this has no medical purpose, but merely serves to amuse the staff at the hospital.
Either that or its some bizarre government subsidy of the enema industry
Or both
The enema instructions read, in part, "before inserting, remove green protective cap from insertion tube". Thanks for the heads up, guys. Really.
I'll probably have more thoughts after the procedure proper is over. Whether they'll be thoughts I can or should share, I'll let you know.
Yours in colo-rectal health,
Dave"
Dave,
Having had three colonoscopys (ies?), I have a few additional thoughts on the matter:
Colyte is chemically the same as Palmolive dishwashing liquid. Why do you need a prescription for colyte but not palmolive, I wonder?
To avoid future rashes on the bobo, I recommend liberal use of vaseline on the bobo before the colyte has its desired effect. Not only will this protect the bobo, you may find that it stimulates your wink wink.
I have wondered about the purpose of the enemas myself given that the colyte is so damn effective. But if you really want to amuse the staff, I would suggest inserting some innocuous item in your rectum such as a live gerbil. Having once worked at a hospital, I learned that there is simply no better way to amuse hospital staff.
I am looking forward to your thoughts on the Demoral/Versed cocktail that you will soon be taking intravenously, the purpose of which is not to sedate you, but to make you forget the experience. I believe this combination of drugs was discovered as part of a technology exchange program with aliens.
--Chris
"Chris,
Really, I can't say enough good things about the Demerol/versed combo. The actual procedure was a piece of cake compared to the preparatory stuff. If they'd mix a little dem/ver in the Colyte mix, then they'd have something.
I asked them if I could have a case of that stuff in a to-go box, but no dice. The whole "mind wipe" effect would make my current job tolerable, if used on a daily basis.
The first thing that happened this morning was when the nurse hooked me up to the heart monitor, it showed a flatline. I looked up at her and said "I see a light, I see a light . . . ."
She thought that was pretty funny.
It didn't fill me with confidence to have an equipment breakdown right from the git-go, but I thought to myself "I'll take my chances, because I'm not doing that whole burnin' bobo thing again . . . bring it on"
Next thing I knew, Cid was standing next to me asking me how I felt. I got dressed and we went to Jimmy's Egg.
So, class, what have we learned from this little experience?:
Colonoscopies (colonoscopii?) are easy, but the day before is a bitch on wheels.
Colyte is evil; it's of the deb-uhl.
Demerol/versed cocktails are our friend; putting it in the water supply is an idea whose time has come.
I'd rather have a colonoscopy every day of the work-week than teach in the public schools system anymore.
I now have the perfect photo for next year's Christmas cards
Life really is like a "Kids in the Hall" sketch. Remember this one:
[We see Mark on a table, with two strange white "lights" folded down near his head. A sequined blanket is draped over him, and he lies down with his knees curled up into his chest. We see two aliens stand around him. One alien holds a strange device that looks kind of like a lightsaber, but with a solid white plastic piece where the beam would be.]
Kevin: Ready the anal probe.
[Dave switches the device on as it begins to glow. It looks like a lightsaber with a small white beam]
Dave: Anal probe is ready.
Kevin: [nods] Commence anal probing.
[Mark screams loud and long as Dave sticks it where the sun don't shine. He pulls it out, after two seconds and pulls off the white plastic part [to sterilize it?]
Dave: Quick, erase his memory!
[Kevin waves a hand over Mark as the two lighted "paddles" come up. Mark stops yelling and gets a calm look on his face]
Kevin: Memory's erased. Get him out of here.
[Two other aliens come and start to wheel Mark off]
Dave: Move it. [pauses as he moves closer to Kevin] Ah, boy.
Kevin: Something wrong?
Dave: Ah.. it's nothing really....
Kevin: I think you could use a cup of coffee.
Dave: Yeah. [sighs]
[They move to a lounge where Kevin pours two cups of coffee. They keep talking as Dave sits down]
Kevin: So what's bothering you?
Dave: Ahhhh.... Lately I just keep wondering... what's the point?
Kevin: The point?
Dave: Yeah. What's the point of what we do?
Kevin: Sorry, I don't follow you
[Kevin sits down]
Dave: Well, I mean, we travel 250,000 light years across the universe, abduct humans, probe them anally and release them.
Kevin: Yeah... AND?
Dave: Well, doesn't it seem kind of point-LESS?
Kevin: I really don't think about it.
Dave: Well don't you think you should?
Kevin: No, I don't think I should. I don't think I should question the leadership of our Great Leader
Dave: Oh, come on! I mean, we've been coming here for 50 years and performing anal probes and all that we have learned is that 1 in 10 doesn't really seem to mind.
Kevin: Well, do you have a better plan than our Great Leader?
Dave: Yes I do, I do have a better plan. My plan is that we DON'T travel 250,000 light years, we DON'T abduct any humans and, this is the best part, we DON'T do any anal probing.
Kevin: [sarcastic] Oh, great plan! Do you realize how many people Intergalactic Anal-Probing employs?
[They see that the next victim is ready. They put down the coffee and do the same motions as before, except Dave is very reluctant this time.]
Kevin: Well back to work.
Dave: Awww..
Kevin: Ready the anal probe.
Dave: [unenthusiastic]Anal probe is ready.
Kevin: Commence anal probing
Dave:[rolling eyes, exasperated] Couldn't we at least abduct their political or religious leaders instead of just any idiot in a pickup truck?!?!
Kevin: I'm sure the Great Leader has his reasons
Dave: [sarcastic] Well, I'm sure the Great Leader is just some sort of twisted ass freak!
Kevin: [calmly] All right. I am now officially ignoring you. Commence anal probing.
[Dave inserts the probe. This victim doesn't scream. Rather, he smiles and looks happy.]
Dave: Well, that's a relief anyway. Erase his memory.
Kevin [going through motions] Memory is erased.
Dave: Get him out of here.
Kevin: [to interns wheeling victim out.] Come on, kid. Move it. Move it!
[They move to the window and look out on the moon and the Earth]
Kevin: You know what you need? A hobby. I know it helps me.
Dave: Yeah? What do you do?
Kevin: Well, I don't like to toot my own horn, but I'm a pretty good amateur rectal photographer. Would you like to see my portfolio?
Dave: No. I would hate to.
Kevin: Fine. Screw you.
Dave: Well, Screw you.
[Kevin moves off, leaving Dave staring at the Earth]
Yours in colorectal hygiene,
Dave"
"Chris,
I'm having my first ever colonoscopy today. I had some thoughts on the process thus far, and I had to write them down.
So, I share. Why? because I'm a helper. I help. It's what I do.
If hell has an official soft drink, it's GOT to be Colyte
Because of the unforeseen (and, it must be said, ferocious) efficiency of the Colyte, I ended up with a nasty little rash deal on my . . . well, you know. My wife says to me "Want me to go to the store and get some Destin? It's real good when you're hurtin' in your bobo" Now, the fact that she referred to that part of my body as my "bobo" made me laugh, hard, for 20 minutes, and made me so glad I'd married her I can't even describe it.
Destin really is good when you're hurtin' in your bobo. It's basically zinc oxide paste, but it works like a charm.
I had to take enemas this morning. Plural. I begin to suspect this has no medical purpose, but merely serves to amuse the staff at the hospital.
Either that or its some bizarre government subsidy of the enema industry
Or both
The enema instructions read, in part, "before inserting, remove green protective cap from insertion tube". Thanks for the heads up, guys. Really.
I'll probably have more thoughts after the procedure proper is over. Whether they'll be thoughts I can or should share, I'll let you know.
Yours in colo-rectal health,
Dave"
Dave,
Having had three colonoscopys (ies?), I have a few additional thoughts on the matter:
Colyte is chemically the same as Palmolive dishwashing liquid. Why do you need a prescription for colyte but not palmolive, I wonder?
To avoid future rashes on the bobo, I recommend liberal use of vaseline on the bobo before the colyte has its desired effect. Not only will this protect the bobo, you may find that it stimulates your wink wink.
I have wondered about the purpose of the enemas myself given that the colyte is so damn effective. But if you really want to amuse the staff, I would suggest inserting some innocuous item in your rectum such as a live gerbil. Having once worked at a hospital, I learned that there is simply no better way to amuse hospital staff.
I am looking forward to your thoughts on the Demoral/Versed cocktail that you will soon be taking intravenously, the purpose of which is not to sedate you, but to make you forget the experience. I believe this combination of drugs was discovered as part of a technology exchange program with aliens.
--Chris
"Chris,
Really, I can't say enough good things about the Demerol/versed combo. The actual procedure was a piece of cake compared to the preparatory stuff. If they'd mix a little dem/ver in the Colyte mix, then they'd have something.
I asked them if I could have a case of that stuff in a to-go box, but no dice. The whole "mind wipe" effect would make my current job tolerable, if used on a daily basis.
The first thing that happened this morning was when the nurse hooked me up to the heart monitor, it showed a flatline. I looked up at her and said "I see a light, I see a light . . . ."
She thought that was pretty funny.
It didn't fill me with confidence to have an equipment breakdown right from the git-go, but I thought to myself "I'll take my chances, because I'm not doing that whole burnin' bobo thing again . . . bring it on"
Next thing I knew, Cid was standing next to me asking me how I felt. I got dressed and we went to Jimmy's Egg.
So, class, what have we learned from this little experience?:
Colonoscopies (colonoscopii?) are easy, but the day before is a bitch on wheels.
Colyte is evil; it's of the deb-uhl.
Demerol/versed cocktails are our friend; putting it in the water supply is an idea whose time has come.
I'd rather have a colonoscopy every day of the work-week than teach in the public schools system anymore.
I now have the perfect photo for next year's Christmas cards
Life really is like a "Kids in the Hall" sketch. Remember this one:
[We see Mark on a table, with two strange white "lights" folded down near his head. A sequined blanket is draped over him, and he lies down with his knees curled up into his chest. We see two aliens stand around him. One alien holds a strange device that looks kind of like a lightsaber, but with a solid white plastic piece where the beam would be.]
Kevin: Ready the anal probe.
[Dave switches the device on as it begins to glow. It looks like a lightsaber with a small white beam]
Dave: Anal probe is ready.
Kevin: [nods] Commence anal probing.
[Mark screams loud and long as Dave sticks it where the sun don't shine. He pulls it out, after two seconds and pulls off the white plastic part [to sterilize it?]
Dave: Quick, erase his memory!
[Kevin waves a hand over Mark as the two lighted "paddles" come up. Mark stops yelling and gets a calm look on his face]
Kevin: Memory's erased. Get him out of here.
[Two other aliens come and start to wheel Mark off]
Dave: Move it. [pauses as he moves closer to Kevin] Ah, boy.
Kevin: Something wrong?
Dave: Ah.. it's nothing really....
Kevin: I think you could use a cup of coffee.
Dave: Yeah. [sighs]
[They move to a lounge where Kevin pours two cups of coffee. They keep talking as Dave sits down]
Kevin: So what's bothering you?
Dave: Ahhhh.... Lately I just keep wondering... what's the point?
Kevin: The point?
Dave: Yeah. What's the point of what we do?
Kevin: Sorry, I don't follow you
[Kevin sits down]
Dave: Well, I mean, we travel 250,000 light years across the universe, abduct humans, probe them anally and release them.
Kevin: Yeah... AND?
Dave: Well, doesn't it seem kind of point-LESS?
Kevin: I really don't think about it.
Dave: Well don't you think you should?
Kevin: No, I don't think I should. I don't think I should question the leadership of our Great Leader
Dave: Oh, come on! I mean, we've been coming here for 50 years and performing anal probes and all that we have learned is that 1 in 10 doesn't really seem to mind.
Kevin: Well, do you have a better plan than our Great Leader?
Dave: Yes I do, I do have a better plan. My plan is that we DON'T travel 250,000 light years, we DON'T abduct any humans and, this is the best part, we DON'T do any anal probing.
Kevin: [sarcastic] Oh, great plan! Do you realize how many people Intergalactic Anal-Probing employs?
[They see that the next victim is ready. They put down the coffee and do the same motions as before, except Dave is very reluctant this time.]
Kevin: Well back to work.
Dave: Awww..
Kevin: Ready the anal probe.
Dave: [unenthusiastic]Anal probe is ready.
Kevin: Commence anal probing
Dave:[rolling eyes, exasperated] Couldn't we at least abduct their political or religious leaders instead of just any idiot in a pickup truck?!?!
Kevin: I'm sure the Great Leader has his reasons
Dave: [sarcastic] Well, I'm sure the Great Leader is just some sort of twisted ass freak!
Kevin: [calmly] All right. I am now officially ignoring you. Commence anal probing.
[Dave inserts the probe. This victim doesn't scream. Rather, he smiles and looks happy.]
Dave: Well, that's a relief anyway. Erase his memory.
Kevin [going through motions] Memory is erased.
Dave: Get him out of here.
Kevin: [to interns wheeling victim out.] Come on, kid. Move it. Move it!
[They move to the window and look out on the moon and the Earth]
Kevin: You know what you need? A hobby. I know it helps me.
Dave: Yeah? What do you do?
Kevin: Well, I don't like to toot my own horn, but I'm a pretty good amateur rectal photographer. Would you like to see my portfolio?
Dave: No. I would hate to.
Kevin: Fine. Screw you.
Dave: Well, Screw you.
[Kevin moves off, leaving Dave staring at the Earth]
Yours in colorectal hygiene,
Dave"
Friday, April 14, 2006
Science News
From my email box: A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest chemical yet known to science. This new element has been tentatively named "Governmentium".
Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would normally take less than a second.
Governmentium has a normal half-life of four years; it does not decay but instead, it undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypocritical quantity is referred to as "Critical Morass." You will know it when you see it.
When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element which radiates just as much energy since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.
Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would normally take less than a second.
Governmentium has a normal half-life of four years; it does not decay but instead, it undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypocritical quantity is referred to as "Critical Morass." You will know it when you see it.
When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element which radiates just as much energy since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Dinosaur
I wrote this 5 years ago.
Driving from Salt Lake City to Denver took me down one of the loneliest roads I have ever seen. In one stretch, it must have been over 20 minutes without seeing another car.
By the time I got to the town of Dinosaur, Colorado, I was ready for a break. I had plenty of gas and I wasn’t hungry or thirsty, but I needed to stretch my legs. It was then that I saw a wooden shack by the side of the road with a large sign that read “FOSSILS”. I thought it would be great to bring home a fossil as a present for my 10-year-old daughter. So I pulled into the empty gravel parking lot, parked my rented Ford Taurus, and went inside.
The shop was very dirty and cluttered and filled with an amazing variety of fossils of every kind I could imagine. Some were polished and quite beautiful. Many were several hundred dollars. Some were well over a thousand.
I was enthralled. I had to look at every one of them and there were so many. I must have been browsing for over ten minutes when I heard, “Can I help you find something?”
The old man behind the counter bore a striking resemblance to the actor Wilfred Brimley. He wore a pair of overalls and was even more covered with dirt than his store. He looked like he had come from an excavation he had going just outside the back door.
“Yes, thank you. I am looking for a fossil for my daughter’s rock collection.”
“How much are you looking to spend?” He asked.
“I just want to spend around $5.”
A brief look of disappointment flashed across the old man’s face. Then he smiled and said, “Trilobites! Kids love trilobites.”
He handed me a small black trilobite. It was exactly $5. It was very cool.
“Thank you. This is perfect. My daughter will love it.” I said.
“Have you been up to see the monument?” The old man inquired.
I knew he was referring to Dinosaur National Monument. I had seen the signs on the highway. The entrance was about 6 miles east of town. I really had no desire.
“No. I wasn’t planning to see it. I am just on my way from Salt Lake City to Oklahoma. I’m staying in Denver tonight.”
The old man sighed.
“So, let me get this straight. You are in too much of a hurry to drive twenty miles out of your way to see something that people come all the way from Jay-PAN to see.”
I laughed. “Well, since you put it that way, I guess I’ll go see the monument. Is it really that impressive?”
“You’ll have to decide for yourself. There sure are a lot of dinosaurs up there.”
I thanked the man again and left. Twenty minutes later, I was parking at the Dinosaur Quarry Visitors Center at Dinosaur National Monument.
In 1909, Earl Douglass, a paleontologist who worked for the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, discovered this place. He was looking for a few dinosaur bones to ship to his museum. What he found instead were thousands of them. By 1915, president Woodrow Wilson had heard about the great dinosaur quarry that Douglass had started and he declared it Dinosaur National Monument.
As I walked out of the bright sunlight and into the glass building that protects the quarry from the elements, my eyes had to adjust for a moment before I could see anything. Slowly the exhibit came into view, and as it did I was overcome with awe. I stood on a walkway about three stories above the ground facing a huge rock wall. Clearly imbedded all over this rock wall were the fossilized bones of hundreds of dinosaurs.
I had seen dinosaur skeletons made to look fearsome in a museum gallery, but this was entirely different. The bones of these animals were in their natural state; arranged exactly as they were when their bodies were buried in a riverbed, 150 million years ago. The image did not even remotely inspire fear. A large pile of dead animals inspires sadness.
As I looked at the quarry wall, I was reminded of a scene from years before. When I was 16, my father took me fishing in Alaska. It was in the month of August, and the King Salmon had already finished spawning, and they were dying. I was walking along a river and I saw the bloated carcasses of King Salmon everywhere. I remembered how their bodies would collect in pockets of still water.
The rock wall of the quarry looked just like that, only instead of King Salmon bodies, I was mostly looking at the remains of brontosaurs - sauropods of the late Jurassic period. These animals were 75 feet long. When they were alive, they each weighed 13 tons.
Just what killed all of these animals? Did they die at different times and at different places along the river, but water currents kept depositing bodies at this one spot? Or did they all die on the same day, perhaps all drowning in a flash flood? For some reason I think that these animals all died together. As I looked at the wall of rock at Dinosaur Quarry, I felt almost like I was witnessing a mass drowning death in a river so very long ago.
And then I thought about the time span that separates me from that day. 150 million years. One hundred fifty-years seems like a long time to me, but 150 MILLION years? That is beyond comprehension.
Or is it? My memory goes back 38 years. With that memory, I can maybe comprehend a century. Maybe. On the other hand, the briefest time interval I am familiar with is one second. What if I had a time machine that would go back in time at the rate of one century for every second? Think about it. My entire life would pass by in the time it takes for my heart to beat one beat, during a jog. In 20 seconds, I would be back to the time of Christ. After a minute, I would be well beyond recorded history. How long then, at this pace, would it take for me to get back to the day where the bodies of these giant animals came to their final resting place at the bottom of a nameless river? I did the math. The answer is 17 days, 8 hours, and 40 minutes. Unlike H.G. Well’s famous time machine, mine better have plenty of provisions and a bathroom.
The Earth was a very different place when these animals died. It spun faster on its axis; the days were only 23 hours long. The moon was even closer. It appeared much larger in the sky, and months were a week shorter than they are now. If I were to step out of my time machine after my 17-day journey, the plants, the animals, everything would seem alien to me. I might not recognize the Earth of the late Jurassic period to be my home planet at all.
And yet, I was there. I was a part of that world. Virtually every atom in my body was here on Earth 150 million years ago. The water that makes up most of me was in the sea, or in the air, or in a lake, or in the river that claimed the bodies of these noble brontosaurs. Some of me may have actually been part of one of the brontosaurs now entombed on the side of that mountain in Utah.
I had the strange sense of awakening a long forgotten memory. I could see the Sun hanging low over the misty forest, and I saw its light reflecting in the water of a vast winding river. I could see the brontosaurs grazing on the trees near the river banks. Then suddenly the water came crashing down on them. Blocked by the dense forest, there was no way to escape the flood. I could hear their cries of anguish. The brontosaurs struggled to regain their footing, but the water was too strong. They were pulled down into the blackness.
Their bodies lay buried for so long that thousands of feet of rock and dirt was eventually deposited above. The crushing weight and heat forced all the water from the soft riverbed and hardened it into solid rock. Then, the continent buckled. The land shattered at the very place where the riverbed once was. The tomb of these dinosaurs was lifted into the sky. Their fossilized bones eventually saw sunlight again. The stone that was the riverbed in which they were buried was now the very top of a mountain peak in the Rockies.
For the last two thousand years many Christians have been expecting the world to come to an end fairly soon. As I stood looking at the dinosaurs of Dinosaur National Monument, I knew that the world will be here for a very long time. It will be here 150 million years from now. The sun will still be shining. The moon will be smaller in the sky. And I will still be here, the same way I was here the day those dinosaurs drowned.
I got back in my car and headed home. I was no longer in a hurry.
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