Monday, April 28, 2014

A Little Mystery, a Few Hysterics and a Lot of Headaches – Not Tonight, Dear.




I saw the photograph. It was on Facebook. There I was. She had labeled me. The photograph Bob to took. Everythime I visit, I stand with my sister holding my little dog and Bob takes our photograph. She posted it on Facebook. God was I fat. Yes, I’m the fat one. You can also tell which one is me because I have a beard and she does not.  Winter has not been nice to me. What happened to your girlish figure. Hell, Fred, you never had a girlish figure. You’ve always been a dumpling. Mother’s little butterball. I need to get serious about losing some weight – about 30 pounds worth, I figure. It is that serious. Two years ago the doctor advised me to lose twenty. Frankie posted a comment – “How far north” and I answered to Michigan where my other sister’s son is getting married. I wish Facebook had a way to correct comments after they were posted. I’d also like to Photoshop that picture. Elongate it. Make be tall and skinny. I wish it were just that easy.

I began to wonder if Little People might be useful in solving mysteries. I knew that they could not be turned into detectives. I would have to be the detective. They would not chronicle our adventures either, I would also have to do that.  They were unreliable. They could not (would not) follow directions. They were never dishonest, I’ll grant you that. They knew everything or at least they knew how to know any thing that they might want to know. I think that is a very valuable talent, much more valuable than and set of limited experience.  But how to employ their talents was a whole different matter. I was determined to find a way. But the fact is that I knew nothing about being a detective but I have read a lot of detective novels. But reading romances don’t make you romantic, they make you silly. Neither Agatha Christie nor Dorothy Sayers knew anything about crime or detection themselves for that matter. Agatha proved it when she tried to do Aimee Simply MacPhearson. Where to start? Where to start? With a mystery of course. I had to find a mystery to solve. That was the first step. Then I’d find a way to use my Little People. What I had in abundance was a thirst for adventure and the Little People were my ticket. But first the mystery. I’m trying to think this thing out. I know. Then I discovered that they could read minds. I’ll tell you about it later when I have more time and how I came to find this out and how I intend to exploit this ability. I hope it doesn’t turn out to be another flop like my moonwalking was.

The first time I heard of it, I said, “that’s just plain dumb” and now it’s a billion dollar industry. If only I could make this thing with the Little People work as well. I’d come up with other schemes – like spinning straw into gold, but they hadn’t worked. With the Little People you can’t base your business plan on a character fault like greed or stupidity. That make’s it hard. But I’ll find away for the Little People to facilitate my good fortune. I’ve just got to stick with it. There has to be a way. It’s gotta be a way that benefits others more than me. And if that’s true, I can’t use it to get rich myself.  When the little people discover that their talents are being used to satisfy someone’s baser emotions they have a way of making you fall flat on your face.

Selective information is misinformation – Federal Judge Damon Keith

Male and female orgasms have completely opposite effects on brain activity – enhanced activity in the male brain and decreased activity in the female brain. The male gets excited. The female becomes sedated. That’s the way it seems to always play out.

It’s religion for
            The weak minded
The Bible is a menu
            Pick and choose
Al la carte
            It’s adjustable
One size fits all
            The word of God
There’s something for
            Everyone
Except for the queers
            And the Arabs

I was asked, are Little People individuals? I had been told (by them of course) that they were not since the same physical body could be any one of them but that no two or more bodies could be the same one of them. Under those circumstances, I have to say no, Little People are not individuals. But I can think of no way to substantiate this claim. And, of course, we already know that there can never be just one of them or so they also claim (there may be more and there may be less but there never just one). I have never seen just one, but that doesn’t prove that there can not be just one. I tried an experiment once. There were was more that one of them(if there are any of them they are always more than one) sitting across from me in the booth drinking beer. I took my coat which I had taken off and which I had lying on the seat beside me and thew it over one of them. There was  blurry motion, I think, sort of a wobbling. The one I had thrown my coat over was sitting beside me. I removed the coat that I had thrown over the one across from me and he was a different one than the one who was not sitting beside me. So which one was the one I had covered up, the one beside me or the one across from me? I’m not sure. So you see, at no time was there ever just one of them. And since no two of them can occupy the same body at the same time there must have been a period of transition when there was none of them. So there was never a time when there was just one of them and there may have been a time when there were none of them. Tyring to keep track of them individually is an impossibility.

He [The Lord] is coming back as a warrior carrying a sword. And I believe now – I’ve checked this out – I believe that sword he’ll be carrying when he comes back is an AR-15… If you don’t have one, go get one. You’re supposed to have one. It’s biblical – Jerry Boykin

There is still snow on the ground here – been here for seven days now. It’s the South and it’s mid-March already. It still hugs the lee side of gullies  and the backside of logs and where it was piled up when they plowed the road. A small babbling brook runs next to my campsite.

13,400 separate items of space junk were being tacked in the year 2000. It was then estimated that there were at least 100,000 pieces too small to track. NASA’s estimated of space debris was about 4,000,000 pounds in Low Earth Orbit. A single paint chip was able to gouge the window of the space shuttle sufficiently enough for the astronauts aboard to concerned about its integrity during re-entry.

Even one war in space would encase the entire planet in a shell of whizzing debris that would thereafter make space near the Earth highly hazardous – Joel Primack – The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, 2002

We spent a lot of money figuring out high-tech means of defeating an opponent that in the end prove more costly to use than to them – war in space for example. Now we have to figure out ways to protect ourselves from drones. But it is good for the economy – it creates jobs we are being told – and sustains the careers advising us who tell us we need to do it.  Mindless activity can be justified if it creates jobs. Job creation seems to be a very mindless activity.

Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall father to reach it – Bruce Catton – Lincoln’s Army, 1951 p17

To fail a Turing test is meaningless. To fool someone into believing that its human, a machine demonstrates that it is intelligent. By failing to do so, it proves nothing.

The human being has 347 different types of sensory neurons in his nose and only three in his eyes

There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket – a quarter of them contain corn including many non-food item

There are routinely 250-300 incidents of puppycide reported in the press per year. It is estimated that there are at least a thousand unreported cases. One dog handler claims that 250,000 dogs are killed by police per year. This seems to be high. No one knows for sure. A lot of systematic data on the illegal use of violence is gathered but very little on the legal use of violence. The Indianapolis Star reported  44 cases between 2000 and 2002 in that city alone. The police in Milwaukee killed 434 dogs over a nine year period. But these cases do not report how many of those dogs were actually vicious, how many were stray or how many of them were mercy killings. We do know that SWAT teams routinely shoot dogs.





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