Category: News

Today’s Theme Music

This choice for theme music, ‘Road to Hell’, has been around for a while. It’s hard to find a good recording of it online. A good recording is important; the song begins with the sounds of rain on a car and the sweep of wiper blades across the windshield.

The song’s sentiments, that we’re on a the road to hell, are reflected by various people and organizations. No matter the issues, politics or religions, who wins or who loses, someone will declare, this is the road to hell. Funny enough, every time I think of the road to hell, I think of a book by one of my favorite authors, Roger Zelazny, and ‘Damnation Alley’, which wasn’t a terrific novel. It’s appropriate to think of Zelazny and Rea together on a day like this, when surreal is the ‘word of the year’.

Back to the music, Chris Rea, ‘Road to Hell’, 1989. The song was originally listed as Parts I and II. Part I is like an essay with accompanying instruments:

Stood still on the highway

I saw a woman

by the side of the road

With a face I knew like my own

reflected

in my window.

Part II of Chris’ lyrics begins, “Well, I’m standing by a river, but the water doesn’t flow. It boils with every poison you can think of.” Too frequently, here in America, we’re encountering poisoned rivers and drinking supplies. Flint, Michigan leaps to mind, but a small city not far from my town has been enduring several months of boil and do not drink orders for their water supplies. Googling for such news turns up multiple more examples.

It does make one think, “Yeah, we’re on the road to hell.” Just in time for the holidays.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

It’s an ordinary winter Sunday in an extraordinary year.

The statement causes a reflexive gaze across history at all the extraordinary years in recorded history. The statement requires adjustment to put me more accurately upon the spectrum of what I know and have experienced. I ‘know’ a sliver of American history and a granule of western history. I need to context ‘know’ because I ‘know’ what was often taught in books as fact and knowledge. Much was later revealed to be false or misleading, part of a paean to the victors who wrote or interpreted the history.

We could take a swing at our Christmas practices, beginning with the time of year that we celebrate and the pagan rituals we practice, processes adopted to encourage people to be Christians. Or we can take a deep dive into how Jesus is often portrayed as a blue-eyed white man with brown hair compared to the image of a dark-haired brown man forensic scientists put forth early last year.

‘For those accustomed to traditional Sunday school portraits of Jesus, the sculpture of the dark and swarthy Middle Eastern man that emerges from Neave’s laboratory is a reminder of the roots of their faith. “The fact that he probably looked a great deal more like a darker-skinned Semite than westerners are used to seeing him pictured is a reminder of his universality,” says Charles D. Hackett, director of Episcopal studies at the Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. “And [it is] a reminder of our tendency to sinfully appropriate him in the service of our cultural values.”

‘Neave emphasizes that his re-creation is simply that of an adult man who lived in the same place and at the same time as Jesus. As might well be expected, not everyone agrees.’

~ Mike Fillon, ‘The Real Face of Jesus’, Popular Mechanics, January 23rd, 2015

It all leaves me a little ‘Unsteady’. The song is a repetition of many of the same words but I like it. Hold onto me and sing along with the X Ambassadors’ song from 2015.

At least it’s more recent than most of my theme music.

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Sciencing….

Yes, science is a noun and not a verb but it’s human nature to advance using words in other manners. This use came out out of a beer conversation:

Friend: “What have you been up to?”

Me: “Sciencing and writing, mostly. Socializing.”

“How’d that work out for you?”

Yes, besides writing and reading, I’ve been sciencing on the side: sciencing (verb) – to peruse and read about scientific discoveries.

I doubt it will catch on. Purists are probably already praying to grammar gods and making sacrifices to ensure it doesn’t.

First up was Ethan Siegel’s post about a super-Earth possibly missing from our solar system. He is writing from a paper being published. The authors posit that our solar system isn’t the norm and that giant rocky planets are being discovered, contrary to expectations.

A missing planet? What evil non-scientific forces might be behind this scientific discovery?

From the article:

Having small, rocky worlds in the inner solar system and large, gas giants in the outer solar system isn’t the norm, as we might have expected. Gas giants and rocky planets, it turned out, could be found anywhere, with large worlds just as likely as small ones to be close to their parent stars. The planets that we were finding showed that there’s nothing forbidding gas giants from becoming “hot Jupiters,” and in fact they turned out to be quite common. But the second surprise was even more puzzling, and came thanks to the pioneering work of NASA’s Kepler space observatory. While rocky, Earth-sized worlds — and slightly larger and slightly smaller rocky worlds — were common, as were Neptune-and-Jupiter sized worlds, there was a third class of planet that was the most common of all. In between the size of Earth and Neptune lied a possibility we had overlooked: a super-Earth (or mini-Neptune) world. As it turned out, there were more super-Earths than any other type.

Other exciting and intriguing information came out of Popular Mechanics through a Jay Bennett article about “Virtual Particles” hopping in and out of existence and neutron star.

About 400 light-years from here, in the area surrounding a neutron star, the electromagnetic field of this unbelievably dense object appears to be creating an area where matter spontaneously appears and then vanishes.

Quantum electrodynamics (QED) describes the relationships between particles of light, or photons, and electrically charged particles such as electrons and protons. The theories of QED suggest that the universe is full of “virtual particles,” which are not really particles at all. They are fluctuations in quantum fields that have most of the same properties as particles, except they appear and vanish all the time. Scientists predicted the existence of virtual particles some 80 years ago, but we have never had experimental evidence of this process until now.

New reports are always exploding out of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, and resulted in an article I read in Wired about Feynman diagrams 0n strange numbers emerging from the tests. As an old science fiction reader and a Doctor Who fan, anytime we start talking about physics and strange numbers, I start wagging my tail.

Feynman diagrams were devised by Richard Feynman in the 1940s. They feature lines representing elementary particles that converge at a vertex (which represents a collision) and then diverge from there to represent the pieces that emerge from the crash. Those lines either shoot off alone or converge again. The chain of collisions can be as long as a physicist dares to consider.

To that schematic physicists then add numbers, for the mass, momentum and direction of the particles involved. Then they begin a laborious accounting procedure—integrate these, add that, square this. The final result is a single number, called a Feynman probability, which quantifies the chance that the particle collision will play out as sketched.

Joseph Dussalt and the Christian Science Monitor published an article asking if Einstein could have been wrong about the speed of light being a constant. Their article actually covers scientific efforts being made to prove Einstein incorrect, why, and under what circumstances.

In his theory of special relativity, Einstein left a lot of wiggle room for the bending of space and time. But his calculations, and most subsequent breakthroughs in modern physics, rely on the notion that the speed of light has always been a constant 186,000 miles per second.

But what if it wasn’t always that way? In a paper published in the November issue of the journal Physical Review D, physicists from the Imperial College London and Canada’s Perimeter Institute argue that the speed of light could have been much faster in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. The theory, which could change the very foundation of modern physics, is expected to be tested empirically for the first time.

There’s a lot to read, discuss and digest out there beyond the US Presidential election, new literature, Brexit, demonstrations and protestors, holidays, sports, wars and cats.

Now get out there and science.

 

 

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But ~

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature

But I still woke up

The Chicago Cubs won the World Series

But the sky is still blue

Donald Trump is the President-Elect of the United States

But I’m still drinking quad shot mochas and writing like crazy

And the trees remained beautifully cloaked in scarlet and gold, yellow and brown, and green and orange, a lovely tableau against a blue morning sky…

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The Renewal

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “Be sure to read the fine print.”

I must have heard or read it a hundred thousand times in my lifetime. (Yes, that could be an exaggeration.) It’s often flashed up during television commercials but the five plus lines of tiny print shoot by faster than you can say, “What?” Small print has become a joke in our society. The joke is on the consumer. It certainly was on me and my wife.

We were subscribing to our local newspaper . It’s not as easy to decide as you think. We’re a small town. It’s a small paper. To fill the paper, they publish some news articles from other towns and countries. It’s not greatly valuable to us in this Internet era. Most of our friends don’t take the local daily, the ‘Ashland Daily Tidings’. They take the newspaper from our larger neighbor, Medford. Medford’s paper is ‘The Medford Mail-Tribune’. Editorially, both papers are conservative, and they share owners and publishers.

ADT is published Monday through Saturday, except for the big holidays. You can guess them. For Sunday, we received ‘The Medford Mail-Tribune’.

We liked receiving the paper despite its paucity of local news. So after a brief debate last December, we renewed, paying for a year’s subscription, $124. Cool. Done.

October comes. Notices arrive. Our newspaper subscription is about to expire. My wife pulls out the paperwork. No, they’re wrong: we renewed in December, 2015, for fifty-two weeks. They’re probably just trying to get us to renew early, we reasoned. Periodicals are always following that practice.

But no. Last Sunday came a notice with the delivery: “Your subscription has expired.”

Nah-uh, we answered. Pulling out the paperwork with new fury, my wife re-affirmed her earlier understanding. Then she saw the small print. Here is the actual small print, copied from their website:

“Up to $3 is charged to all subscriptions for each premium edition. Premium editions are not included in the subscription price and your expiration date will be accelerated and adjusted accordingly. There will be no more than 16 premium editions per calendar year.”

What is a ‘premium edition’? It seems to be the normal paper enlarged by extra advertising inserts. That means we’ve paid an extra $48 for our paper for the ‘year’, which, because of the ‘premium editions’, has been truncated to about ten and a half months. And it’s curious, because even if you select online only, to save paper, you still pay $3.00 for each premium edition. You pay for it regardless of your subscription term – year, month, quarter, whatever.

(Paperless, BTW, is another burgeoning joke in our society. We get more paper in our mail than ever before, usually stuff we don’t want but that we must recycle – which we pay to have done. How many ‘special offers’ are received each week by wireless service providers, ISPs, Dish and other satellite providers, followed by insurance, cleaning, and credit cards offers…and let us then begin to talk about the Explanation of Benefits and bills that accompany every doctor appointment and prescription.)

We were floored.

We were angry.

We wondered…does this apply to its sister paper?

You betcha.

We wondered: do our friends know this about this their subscriptions?

No, they didn’t. They were sure we were wrong so we printed out a website screenshot to show them.

They were floored.

But here is the kicker that prompted me to post: yesterday, a plastic bag was delivered to our house from ‘The Medford Mail-Tribune’. There wasn’t any newspaper; just the advertisement inserts. Which, to us, means that we’re subsidizing the newspaper’s advertisement revenue by paying for these circulars to be delivered to non-subscribers.

We could be wrong about that. It was our snap insight, and they’re not always right. Regardless, we’re angry, and we’re not renewing.

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A Bullshit Free Day

I’d like to declare a national day free of bullshit. We can call it National No Bullshit Day. NNBD. Although bullshit is spelled as one word, some call it as BS, or more colloquially, B.S.. So we could do NNBSD. Naturally, I like my idea better. We can have shirts and tee shirts, and raise money, or some other bullshit.

You know BS when you hear it and you call it by your expression. Mularky. Bull. Bullshit. B.S. Garbage. Crap.

We were used to it in the military. Bullshit inundated us, which, if you think about it, which I try not to do, is actually a lot of B.S. We had our bullshit meters. Hearing something that we knew as bullshit, we’d say, in a sort of laconic way, “That just pegged my bullshit meter.” That statement meant that the needle went all the way to the right. Another expression used was, “That buried the needle on my bullshit meter.” Buried the needle was an old expression referencing tachometers and opening throttles to the point where the needles entered the red zone or went as far as it could. Of course, the ultimate bullshit expression was, “My bullshit meter just broke.”

Most bullshit meters used to go to ten. Mine, of course, went to eleven. It was the Spinal Tap Special. (rim shot)

I suppose, in this precise digital age, that bullshit meters are way more accurate. They’re probably on a scale of one to a thousand, enabling the ability to assign a more accurate bullshit value to a given statement, action or news. There are probably apps that can be downloaded and installed on your smart phones, iPhones, iPads and tablets. Being sixty, I don’t need a bullshit meter, and will tell you, with a sniff, “I don’t need a meter to tell me when something’s bullshit. I’ve experienced enough bullshit to know bullshit when bullshit is around.”

But many naive and gullibles do not recognize bullshit. They believe you can get something for nothing. I, of course, believe that’s bullshit. Of course, the problem with bullshit is, once it’s in your system, you can’t get it out, debilitating your immunity to bullshit. You soon can’t even detect it.

Still, there times when my bullshit meter gets broke. For example, when a car manufacturer, like Ford, declares they’ve completely re-invented a car, I think, that’s bullshit.

When they announced literally no longer means literally, I shook my head and said, “What bullshit.”

When I see the price of my quad shot mocha is five dollars, I think, that’s outrageous bullshit, even though it’s not, really. Bullshit often depends upon your frame of reference. I have some years behind me so my frame of reference has gotten pretty damn big. First, I would tell you, “Nobody sold mochas when I was a kid. We didn’t have a Starbucks or coffee house on every corner. Coffee houses were part of the beat generation. Only artists and poets went there, not people.”

And then I will tell you, “I remember when a cup of coffee cost less than a dollar.” Someone with a bigger frame of reference will naturally top that and declare, “I remember when it cost ten cents a cup,” and another will say, “I remember when it was free.” I’m not sure if coffee was ever free, so that moves my old bullshit meter needle a little bit, but that’s okay, because they’re old, and it’s honest bullshit.

The Internet doesn’t help. I mean, come on, there is so much bullshit on it that it seems possible that the bullshit will take it down. Which would be a pretty good news lead: “In today’s top story, bullshit broke the worldwide web. More coming up, after this word from your sponsors.” Which is bullshit in its own right, to need to wait to hear about this important news until you’ve heard someone try to sell you something.

I may be showing my age there.

You’d think some tech company could design an application that not only detects bullshit but blocks it, just as intrusion detection and prevention software works. Then, as you’re downloading a page, a little popup arrives on your screen and says, “Warning. Bullshit was detected and blocked.”

We could even assign the bullshit levels of threat: faint, mild, average, serious, dangerous, and OMGWTF infuriating.

I dream of a time when television commercials could contain the disclaimer, “This commercial contains no bullshit,” and you can sit back and listen and know, you’re not hearing any bullshit. Because if they were spreading bullshit when they made the commercial, some great Bullshit God would zap them with a laser and declare in a thunderous voice, “No bullshit allowed. Not on my watch.”

But, yes, that’s a fantasy. For now, I’ll dream of a bullshit free day, or even just, like an hour when I don’t read something and say to the cats, “Can you believe this bullshit?”

I don’t think it’s going to be until after November 8th.

 

2

Drinks in a Cone

Some clever folks have come out with coffee in a cone. Which, you know, immediately raises interest in, what kind of cone, and why coffee? Why not beer, or wine in a cone?

The coffee in a cone uses a waffle cone. The problem of coffee leaking through the cone quickly arose. The entrepreneur addressed the issue by adding four layers of chocolate to the cone. If you’re not a chocolate lover (I can’t believe those words can even be true), then you might think, doesn’t entice me, thanks. I don’t like chocolate. But surely other coatings can be applied to the cone. Like caramel or maple, or something. I don’t know. Don’t ask me, I just think here.

Returning to collateral ideas, I brainstormed about what kind of cone I can use to hold my beer, and what I should coat it with. Cheese?

Pardon me a moment while I address my gag reflex.

I like beer and cheese but I canna wrap my brain around drinking beer in a cheese coated cone. Hmmm, wine…maybe.

Can you imagine ordering? “Hi, I’d like a red blend wine cone.”

“Which red?”

“Three Vineyards Oregon blend.”

“What kind of cone, sir?”

“Do you have anything gluten free?”

“Yes, we have a pretty nice olive and rosemary rice cone. I have samples here. Would you like to taste it?”

“Oh, yes, thanks. Oh, that’s good. And that’s gluten free? Okay, I’ll try that.”

“Yes, sir, what size?”

“Grande.”

“And what kind of cheese would you like as your coating?”

“Hmm…I’ve having a red wine…do you have sharp cheddars?”

“Yes, we have several cheddar variations, including white. There’s the list, up here behind me.”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t see that. Hah. If it was a snake….”

“Would you like to sample any cheese?”

“Yes, let me try that Face Rock sharp white  cheddar, thanks. I always like Face Rock’s cheeses. Yes, that’s good. I’ll go with that.”

Fifteen dollars and a few minutes later, you have your grande cheese wine cone. Of course, even with the coating, the coffee dissolves its cone cup in about three minutes. I believe we’d have a about the same amount of time for the wine cheese cone. Chug, chug.

Going back to the beer cone, we can probably have an entire sandwich in a cone, you know, like turkey with Swiss cheese. Using a rye flour cone, we’ll wrap the innards with the turkey and layer it with hot melted Swiss cheese. Then we’ll deep fry that sucker, fill it with beer (“What beer do you want, sir?”) and sell it at state fairs. And then, someday in the future (which, I know, is a bit redundant, but I’m selling an idea here), we can have National Drinks in a Cone Day.

Next: Pizza in a cone. And then stir-fry in a cone, and burritos in a cone….

Isn’t progress amazing?

Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

 

 

2

Mail Call

  • I want to know what mailing list I’m on that I received personalized advertising for cremation services. Have I just reached ‘a certain age’. I think that’s preferable to believing they have inside information, like foretelling people’s demise.
  • Speaking of being a certain age…I’m sixty now, and I receive a lot less junk mail, other than cremation services. It’s nice, as a ‘younger baby-boomer’ (52-61, according to a recent survey) to finally have the credit card, personal loan et al quite circling like waiting buzzards. Or maybe they have access to the same information, that I’m due to die soon, so they’re taken me off their mailing lists.
  • Isn’t it better to have cremation services junk mail rather than dead skunks and raccoons? A coaching candidate didn’t get the job. He mailed dead skunks and raccoons to the rival that won the job to be a fourth grade teacher and basketball coach. I’m making a snap judgement but if he’s such a sore loser, perhaps it’s better that he’s not coaching fourth graders.
  • Fan mail is always fun, especially when they ooze praise for your writing, how a novel ended, or for general creativity. I don’t get much of this stuff and to receive three in one day, from different people, and they didn’t know me, nor were related, is an astronomical high.
  • One of the weirdest recent developments is using FB to send personal messages. People have email addresses but prefer to go to FB and just click and send via that app, rather than using the more tedious method of typing in names or email addresses. I know, because that’s what I do, given the option. It is easier.
  • Speaking of FB, you can always friend me on Facebook. I admittedly tend to FB much less in recent months. It just became too much of the same thing, whether it’s because of the groups I subscribe to, or FB’s tailoring or privacy and security settings. Either way, I’m tired of dealing with their changing settings. So Friend me! Please. Hah.
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What I’m Following

I try to follow the news and escape the echo chambers. Demoralizing as so many American newspapers essentially offer the same take on every story. So vanilla. Meanwhile, columnists along the political spectrum are generally predictable about what they’ll claim, reducing their value. I like jumping out of the US and checking the news on BBC America, and British, Canadian and Australian newspapers for coverage of American events. I still dance through WaPo, SFGate, NYTimes, Boston.com, Forbes and a few others on a regular daily/weekly basis.

I’m following theSkimm because a friend recommended it. They read so I can skim. I wanted to see how they read and interpret.

Longreads take me into places I wouldn’t otherwise know. Longreads offer compelling, vivid stories. They take a lot of time to read. Yes, I read the Nation, the Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, which also have long articles. Oi.

Haven’t seen anything on theSkimm or Longreads about Lionel Shriver’s opening address at the Brisbane Writers Festival regarding cultural appropriation, but there’s an eruption of blog posts, newspaper columns and editorials about the complex, challenging situation. Wow.

Trying to drift into a different direction, I’ve been checking out Merry Jane’s website. Marijuana is morphing into a large and legitimate business in Oregon, with signs like ‘Exit here for the BEST marijuana’ emerging alongside Interstate 5, right beside signs claiming to have the world’s BEST pie.

I delve into Pinterest, FB and Instagram to see what’s bouncing around those places. I still check Flipboard and BillMoyers daily, and read an overabundance of writing blogs and newsletters, along with Wired, Popular Mechanics, the Smithsonian, Union of Concerned Scientists, Delancey Place and EPI when their newsletters arrive.

What are you reading out there? You have any sites that you recommend?

 

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