Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

So, some bagger lady threw a shoe at Hillary Clinton during a campaign speech – I think I can safely say that, they are all campaign speeches now- in Las Vegas, and I must confess to some mixed emotions.

On the one hand, the next couple of years are going to be really ugly.  The baggers (I’m assuming the woman is a bagger, just because), who everybody assumed had hit bottom ages ago (maybe with the birth certificate thing, or the “women’s bodies have a way – by a combination of will power and magic, apparently – of terminating a pregnancy, so nobody ever gets pregnant from rape” thing, or maybe the shutting down the government thing), just keep going lower and lower.

Hillary Under Fire

Then again, how do we know it was a perfectly good shoe?  Was it an old sneaker?  Was it some sexy high heeled thing? Enquiring minds want to know.

But, mostly,  I’m just trying to figure out in what way this is different then the journalist who threw a shoe at Bush in Iraq.  On the one hand, Bush was a smirking war criminal delivering a gloating speech in a country he’d run roughshod over, ruining millions of lives.  Hillary Clinton is a nice lady who is running for President of the United States (of course she is – she wants that job badder than Cookie Monster wants a cookie).  Then again, she voted for that war, too.  If the lady was throwing the shoe about that, I’d be down with it.

So, I guess it’s just a question of which side you’re on.  To be fair, there are only two solutions possible.  Either we’ve got to crack down hard on shoe throwing –  maybe make everybody leave their shoes at the door and give them little booties to wear inside – or we declare open season.  Liberals are allowed to throw shoes at conservatives, conservatives are allowed to throw shoes at liberals.

Or tomatoes.  Or eggs.  Eggs would be fun.

It seems America’s schools are it’s new Post Offices.  Places where disgruntled employees students show up and go apeshit, attacking everybody in sight.  There was a bit of a twist to the one that just happened  yesterday in Pennsylvania.  The attacker didn’t have a gun.

He came into the school with two knives and stabbed about 20 people before he was subdued.  He survived, will stand trial, and be examined by psychiatrists extensively, no doubt.  More importantly, none of his victims died (fingers crossed on that one – four people are still in serious condition.)

Alex Hribal

American gun nuts are saying “See.  If crazy people want to go on a killing spree, banning guns won’t stop them.  They will use a knife, or a baseball bat, or a golf club.”  I had one young lady (well, I have no way of knowing if she’s young or not.  For all I know, she might not even be a lady) make almost exactly that argument on my facebook page.

This is beyond stupidity.  It’s exactly the opposite of what we should learn from this attack.

If Alex Hribal had indeed used a baseball bat instead of a pair of knives, he probably still would have struck out.  Unlike a knife, they require two hands to swing, thus halving the number of possible victims in a similar space of time, and he would have been relieved of his bat by the first bigger, stronger kid to come along.

Ditto the golf clubs, plus they might have attracted attention when he brought them into school.

It’s the guns that kill.  In these school shootings, it’s specifically high-powered, automatic weapons.

It takes a serious fucking imbecile not to be able to  see that.

These interactive maps from National Geographic, showing the likely change in coastline if all the ice on Earth melted due to runaway climate change caused by too many particles of industrial shit in the air, as we have been warned about a million times already, are pretty scary.  Antarctica becomes an archipelago.  Florida is gone.  There are also some places that people would miss.

London.  Venice. Holland. Denmark.

Fortunately, at least a partial solution becomes evident just by looking at the maps. There are some positive aspects to this new world configuration and we could figure out how to take advantage of them, to insure the survival of the human race and go forward into a bright new future.

For instance, the New Panama Canal (formerly known as ‘Nicaragua and Costa Rica’) would replace the outdated and narrow old one. The Caspian Sea would become an actual sea instead of just the world’s largest lake and Russia would have it’s warm water port and they could stop messing with everybody. In all probability, world caviar supplies would also increase, and that’s definitely a good thing.

New Orleans, 2054

What interests me the most, though, is the Australian inland sea. They should get cracking on that now, open up a channel. It’s in the middle of absolutely worthless land, and they could finance the project by selling luxury lakefront lots, at affordable middle class prices. Several million of them. One thing that surprised me about the map were a few desert areas which were left relatively untouched, but which might definitely benefit from an inland sea or two. The largest of these, by far, is the Sahara desert – flood that sucker, and save London. More than a fair trade. Also, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the American Southwest. The water is going to rise. But, we can decide where it goes. We have the technology.

Well, we have been having a disagreement with our son, over his grades.  We think he should be getting only ones, of course, and he keeps coming home with threes and fours.  He’s smart enough, but less than a diligent student is putting it mildly.

Physics is one of his bad subjects.  We didn’t have physics at all when I was a kid.  I suppose it may have just been covered under ‘science.’  In fact, there’s a lot of stuff they learn today that we didn’t learn.  That’s the point of this story.

Anyway, the question he had to write about tonight was “Why is the ocean salty?”  He thought he was going to get away with “Because it has a lot of salt in it.”  He did point out that it’s 3.5%, which was a new factoid for me, you learn something new every day.

So, why is the ocean salty.  I started to explain to Sam that it must be something in the ocean because the water running into it is fresh, but I soon realized I didn’t know what I was talking about, I do tend to natter on a bit before I really research a matter, I write comments when I’ve only read the headline, stuff like that.  But, when I went to ASK.com, some of the answers were not much better.  Some went on a bit about the actual mineral content of seawater, but essentially that was it: the ocean is salty  because it has salt in it.

But, quite a few of the entries were more informative.  Apparently, it is from the rivers.  Obviously, rainwater is fresh, but as it seeps through the soil and washes over the rocks, it picks up salts and other minerals.  It’s still fresh water (or sweet water, as they say in most languages) because the amount of minerals is so small, but they reach the sea and they stay.  H2O evaporates, salt doesn’t, and the oceans are getting it from all the rivers in the world, all the time.  It builds up.

There were a couple of different theories, and some dispute  about by how much less the ocean was saline millions of years ago, and whether it’s remaining constant or becoming saltier, and something about ions, but I didn’t get that.

It was an interesting, educational experience.

Anyway, Sam read through a few of the answers, and then I asked him why the oceans were salty and he said “Nobody knows.”  I made him change that answer on the paper.

Just got home from my monthly poetry reading and I was quite pleased.  My stuff was well received, I really enjoyed a poem by our featured performer, Tom Draper (Hi, Tom!) about how people were gathered, much like we were gathered, for poetry readings and whatnot in London, Berlin, San Francisco and it’s like we’re all connected on some level.  Then I caught the same bus as a guy who hadn’t performed, as it was his first time there,  but anyway, he talked about the book store where he works and how he organizes a reader’s group, like a book club, read and discuss, and then he told me they have a philosopher’s club, too.  Now, that sounds a bit too educated and fancy  for my tastes, but dang, you’ve got to love a city that’s got that going on.

all kinds of terror and weird commotion, wait for us in an alien ocean

But none of that is what tonight’s blog is about.  It’s about this.  I believe I touched on the subject a week or so ago,   but I’d like to talk about it in more depth.  When we send a probe to an ice covered world which we suspect had a liquid ocean within, how do we go about exploring and finding out if there are life forms down there, without  dooming those poor, little, harmless, alien watercreatures to extinction?

Also, I wonder how scientists can be certain that this moon, Encephalitis I believe it’s called, has unfrozen water beneath the surface.  Maybe it’s ice right down to the core.

I suppose they have their ways.  After all, they seem to be able to look at bones that are over a thousand years old, and tell you what they had for lunch before they died.

Then, moving toward the right had side of the Drake Equation, finding life in an alien ocean before we’re even out of this Solar System makes us realize we are not alone in the universe, and that could have major effects. Even if it’s life more-or – less, it most definitely  points out the ability of life to adapt to other worlds.

But, there will be no undersea civilization, with golden palaces and stuff.  No metallurgy without fire.    No civilization without metallurgy.

In fact, they would be seriously surprised to see a periscope suddenly poking its goddamned glass eye into their world.  They live under a shell of ice.  They have never seen the stars.