Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

There is an awful lot of twaddle on Facebook, and of course on social media in general. That’s because, of course, they depend on the general public to contribute content and generally the general public likes to talk a lot of twaddle. Most people are far more willing to venture an opinion and debate the various merits of which Hogwarts house they belong in than, say, a flat tax, UBI, or modern monetary theory.
I would love to see a site where a piece of twaddle, once introduced, could not be introduced again, because it starts to feel like spam after a while. But, that is just a dream.
There were two particular twaddlish items this morning that I was, indeed, guilty of responding to. One was an article from LGBTQnation.com, and the headline said “California was Named After A Black Lesbian Queen” which sounded interesting, until you got about 3/4ths of the way through the article and came across “While Calafia isn’t explicitly lesbian in Montalvo’s novel, modern historians like gay historian Bill Lipsky…” and you knew right there the whole thing was rubbish.
The other was something I’ve seen many times already, about how the whole universe could be a simulation. Well, sure. The whole universe could be a piece of marshmallow, floating in the bowl of some massive super being 7 year old’s Lucky Charms, the universe could be one of 17 trillion multiverses, the universe could be a hallucination in the mind of somebody IN SOME OTHER universe, and anything could be anything, really. That’s kind of what the word could means.

I just watched a video titled ‘How we re-established communication with Voyager II after 7 months’ and I am none the wiser, with regard to that specific question at least. I did learn a few things, such as interstellar space isn’t completely empty because Voyager II (I tried abbreviating that as V-2 but, when I wrote the two in Roman numerals, it just looked like 7, and when I thought it out loud inside my head – as I do – I realized that it could sound like the rockets that hit London in the early 1940s, and the connection between them and the American space program is already too close for comfortable conversation, so Voyager II it is and will remain) is sending back data on solar winds, charged particles, interstellar dust, and plasma.
It’s still pretty darned close to empty, because this object has been hurtling through it for several years now on a straight line and hasn’t actually collided with anything. On Star Trek, it seems they can’t move in any direction without encountering some kind of sub-space anomaly that sends them back in time, or affects their DNA in some way that allows them a chance at cosplay. But, we’re still at sub-light speeds, so what do we know?
It is all pretty amazing, but the two things that weren’t made clear in the video were how we lost contact in the first place (although it was made clear that most scientists thought we’d have lost contact way before now, like by the 1990s. The probe was launched in the ’70s), and how it was regained.
It’s not as if we don’t know where it is.

We are now entering my favorite time of year, which lasts from maybe a couple days from now until about the middle of next November – in other words, that ever shrinking portion of the year which is not Christmas.
Not to bitch and moan too much – most people in my family like Christmas just fine, and they are entitled to a month, I suppose, but I’m always glad when it’s over and we can get back to normal.
My wife and I went for a nice long walk down country roads this afternoon. Her fit bit said 5 kilometers, but I’d swear it was closer to twenty. We wandered through silent villages and I was daydreaming about what it would be like if there had actually been an apocalyptic event and all the other people were gone.
It’s generally a very pleasant daydream, and I enjoy books and movies with that theme, but the reality, of course, would be different. First of all, if almost all of the people in the world were to suddenly cease to exist, chances are that I, or you, or whoever is contemplating this, would be among the dead rather than the living. You can’t win.
One very nice thing about it was being outdoors and not wearing a mask. It was an off and on drizzly afternoon, almost snowing at one point, and you could see for miles and miles across the winter fields. It just felt good to breathe.

Tomorrow morning we’re heading off to the cottage, Sam and I. Helena and Isabel are already there, so we’ll be taking the train, which I enjoy much more than the bus.
We will eat carp, and potato salad, and those curly, pale sausages that I don’t really like very much, and the mushroom cake which I find to be a very dry way to consume mushrooms, but there will be the Christmas cookies, as well, which I like a lot. I hope I’ll have a few chances for long walks in the countryside or hikes through the woods, and maybe if the skies are clear we’ll be able to sight the Saturn Jupiter conjunction, we’ll certainly be well away from city lights but it’s probably just as overcast and rainy there as it has been here for the past several days.
In fact, that was about what I expected from this astronomical phenomenon. It’s the way it’s always been. Pretty much every major astrological phenomenon in my life, including Halley’s Comet, I’ve failed to see. Not really too bothered by it. Space is something I know is out there, I love reading about it, and knowing that scientists are examining it in great detail and discovering more and more.
I don’t actually have to see the evidence in the sky with my naked eye. That’s why we have telescopes. And television. And documentaries about space.
Anyway, I’ll have my computer with me so I’ll continue to blog from there. If I get too preoccupied and don’t, well, Merry Christmas.

About 3 or 4 years ago, we took a mini-vacation to a friend’s cottage in a small village in the extreme southwestern corner of Ukraine, in the Carpathian mountains. It was stunningly beautiful, and a photo from that vacation is still my profile pic on Facebook.
On the way back, we were in a long line, several hours long, waiting to cross the border into Slovakia, and I said to the kids “Kids, this is what it was like at every border before the E.U.” and they found that rather shocking.
Today, I was looking at a photo from Kent with trucks (or Lorries, if you must) backed up for miles and miles. When you can’t see the border checkpoint from the back of the line, you know your day is pretty much ruined.
There may be some good things come out of Brexit. Maybe British people will learn to enjoy local produce, of which there is plenty. It is not called a ‘green and pleasant land’ for nothing. Maybe what’s left of the EU will find it a bit easier to make decisions and move forward without the Brits always putting a wheel in the spokes and thinking they should be the dominant member.
But, mostly, it’s going to be a damned inconvenience for anybody traveling to or from there, a terrible expense for importers and exporters, and not good for either the U.K. or the European economies. We really should be working to make it easier to travel and trade throughout the world, instead of the other way around, just on basic principle.
It’s one world. We all live here together.