It’s As Easy As Pie.
Where are we getting our oil?
Olive-45%
Canola-18%
Corn-9%
Peanut-9%
Soybean-9%
Coconut-6%
Sesame-3%
Argan-3%
Sunflower-2%
Shea-2%
Shea stadium-1.7%
Puberty-0.3%
Cooling Down.
The one predictable thing about Nashville weather is that it’s unpredictable. Maybe that’s why I rarely bother to check the weather report even though this sometimes means getting caught in the rain without an umbrella, although there are worse things to be caught without, like my bus pass or my pants, and then there was the time I’d ridden the bus halfway home before I remembered I drove to work that day, but that’s another story.
And then there was the January when snow was in the forecast but I can’t tell you how many times the weather reports have called to snow only to have a few scattered flurries, or to have the temperature shoot up to around ninety degrees. Celsius. That’s the South for you. It had started snowing when I set out for the bus but I was bundled up warmly and it didn’t look like it was going to amount to anything. Then again it never looks like it’s going to amount to anything. It’s only when snow starts blowing across the street that it looks like we’re in for nasty weather.
Oh yeah, it was blowing across the street when I set out for the bus, but I kept going. I’m an optimist.
I got to the bus stop but there was no bus and according to the schedule it wouldn’t be along for a bit, and even though bus schedules are about as trustworthy as weather reports I set out for the next bus stop a block away. Sometimes I get antsy just standing around at bus stops so I’ll walk down to the next bus stop—in the opposite direction of the way home, but I figure if the bus is coming toward me then I’m really getting closer to it, if that makes any sense. I’ve walked a mile or more, passing by at least half a dozen bus stops before I pick one and stop, afraid the bus will be just around the corner and I’ll be caught between stops.
The snow was really coming down and was getting thick on the streets. Cars were creeping by. Still I kept trudging on. I came to a hill where I could see a long distance. There was no sign of the bus. There was even less sign of traffic even moving. I decided to stop and wait. And I waited. More than an hour had passed since I’d set out. I hadn’t seen a single bus in either direction. Wherever they were they apparently weren’t going anywhere.
I didn’t get upset. Hey, I’m an optimist. I just happened to be an extremely cold and damp optimist.
That’s when my wife called.
“Why don’t you come and meet me where I work? You’re not far from your office, are you?”
Why, no, of course not! I wasn’t going to admit that I’d wandered hither and yon, or at least hither, or maybe yon—I’m not sure which is distance—from the bus stop closest to my office. I turned around and started trudging back the way I’d came. And amazingly I moved pretty quickly. It didn’t take me that long at all to get to where she worked. This was at least partly due to the slow-moving traffic which meant I didn’t have any trouble getting across intersections. And I think I was motivated by a desire to get out of the cold.
The heat in the middle of summer is brutal but it has one major advantage. It doesn’t stop, or even slow, the traffic.
Words, Words, Words.
It always intrigues me when someone tags something with a single word–usually a noun or adjective that’s not a name, or is it? Wittgenstein and other philosophers have puzzled over language, how it shapes our thoughts, how shapes the way we see the world, how it can even be limiting. Language allows us to express thoughts but philosophers have said it can also limit our thoughts. The most pessimistic say that it can even be a mental prison, and while different languages can express different perspectives the best we can ever do is change cells. But a single word can also inspire thoughts, can, at the very least, make us look around and a single word, without context, can open up meanings.
School’s Out Forever.
School will be starting soon. This doesn’t mean a lot to me because I matriculated for the final time a few decades ago although I do enjoy the sales on various office products that happen around this time of year. And I also get a strange feeling that I can’t exactly name. It’s not regret. I’m glad I got an education, although if I hadn’t maybe I wouldn’t be knowledgeable enough to know what I was missing. Anyway I think I’ve done better with a few degrees of separation between me and the world’s autodidacts even though very little of what I learned in school has really been useful to me outside of games of Trivial Pursuit. And I’m glad I left school behind and went out into the world to join the rat race, although being around that many rats kind of creeped me out so I got a job instead. I’m really not that interested in going back to school at this point in my life. On the one hand I’m pretty sure I’d be a lot better at third grade math than I was when I was nine but on the other hand I don’t think I’d fit into one of those desks as well as I used to. The feeling isn’t exactly nostalgia either. I have some fond memories of school and some not so fond memories. There were things about school I liked and things about school I didn’t like, especially math which I was always terrible at, especially algebra. The only time I ever remember getting anything even remotely close to a right answer in algebra was when we had an equation with the answer “9W” and I scratched out the equation and wrote, “Do you spell your name with a ‘V’, Richard Wagner?” I was just a perpetual C student because I did enough work to not fail but I couldn’t really motivate myself to put in the effort to get straight A’s until my senior year of high school when it really didn’t matter anymore because I had such a lousy record behind me and by that time I was taking such easy classes the only way I could flunk would be by setting the school on fire, which I’d already done the previous year in chemistry class, but that’s another story. The problem was I really didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I still don’t, but at least I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor or lawyer, professions you really have to start studying for in preschool, especially if you want to get into Harvard’s kindergarten program. For a long time I wanted to be a marine biologist but as I got older and took more science classes I started to realize I was terrible at running experiments (see class, chemistry) because science experiments are like algebra problems where you have to figure out in advance what the answer and the question are, and I had enough trouble with the quadratic formula which at least gave me one half, although I could never remember whether it was the answer or the question. I realized from all my time watching science documentaries that what I really wanted to be was the guy feeding moray eels for the camera, although being the guy behind the camera sounded even better, and the more I learned about the dangers of scuba diving the better being the guy in the editing booth or maybe the guy doing the voiceover sounded. And that led me through a lot of things I wanted to be but ultimately gave up on: parapsychologist, archaeologist, director, waiter, scriptwriter, sculptor, wash, rinse, dry, folder, spindler, and candlestick maker, most of which required going back to school.
Anyway the feeling I always get at this time of year is that school never really did prepare us for life. If school prepared us for anything it prepared us for more school because for so many years of our life it provided structure. I thought I hated the end of summer but deep down I really kind of looked forward to it, and every year I’d think to myself, “Yes! This is the year I’ll put forth that little bit of extra effort and be a straight-A student except for that C in math!” I realize it was ridiculously optimistic to think I’d ever get a C in math but every year I’d start out with all new school materials: new pencils, new papers, and one of those cool plastic binders to hold all my folders because I was a big enough geek to think that a binder was cool. And because I was such a geek I’d carefully sort and label those folders, assigning each one to a subject based on color: green for English, because green was my favorite color and English my best subject, and orange for math because, well, you can see where this is going. The first day of school I’d be ready and enthusiastic and eager to go and the second day of school I’d say, “Screw this,” and would leave a trail of crumpled papers on my way to the bus. But no matter how it ended, or how quickly it all descended into Lord Of The Flies, the important thing is every new school year was a chance to start over. Maybe it wasn’t a clean slate exactly because I did have a permanent record but summer was a time to decompress and face the new school year with a feeling that this time would be different, this time would be better, this year I would not have such a bad case of acne you could use my face as a cheese grater or get caught writing unflattering erotic fiction about the gym teachers. Most of us went through this pattern during our formative years of school, summer break, then back to school, and then once we graduated we were spit out into the stream of life and steady jobs. And in most steady jobs we don’t have a scheduled break of a few months to decompress. The most we get is one or two weeks here and there which is hardly enough time to figure out what we want to be when we grow up.
One Less Idiot.
MAD Magazine was verboten at my house when I was growing up so the only chances I ever got to read it were when I was at friends’ houses. And while I treasured those brief chances in retrospect I realize I never got the chance to really study the incredible amount of detail that went into MAD’s parodies, especially in the art itself. MAD artist Jack Davis, part of the “usual gang of idiots”, recently passed away and it’s amazing to look at some of his work, such as this cover of It’s A World, World, World, World, MAD. As a kid I could have, and probably would have, spent hours going over pictures like this with a magnifying glass examining the details.
I feel like my childhood was deprived when it could have been depraved. Studio 360’s story on MAD Magazine’s influence highlights how the magazine created a generation of smartasses, or at least tried to. It was the preadolescent counter-culture, mocking the culture we knew—everything from TV sitcoms to Star Wars was fair game. MAD Magazine never talked down to kids. Instead it tried to raise us up—by taking everything else down a notch.
Here’s a portrait by Davis of MAD’s publisher William Gaines, fellow illustrator George Woodbridge, and writer Dick DeBartolo from the book Completely Mad by Maria Reidelbach.
Hail and farewell Jack Davis.
Interplanetary Bowling.
Every painting has a story behind it. Most just aren’t recorded. I know the story behind this one, that I’ve had for nearly thirty years now, because I was there when it was made. This wasn’t just luck. It was made for me.
I was at a science fiction and gaming convention in southern Indiana. Things like games and costumes get a lot of attention but if you’ve never been to one you might not know they also sometimes have an art room. Artists would bring various works or paint them right there at the convention. I sat and watched one artist paint a ringed planet and a distant star for half an hour and finally asked him, “Do you mind being watched?”
“If I minded being watched I wouldn’t be painting out here,” he replied.
The last night of the convention there was always an art auction and I’d bid on a few things, never winning because I was easily outbid. An older guy who knew me was sitting behind me. Finally he leaned forward and said, “Chris, would you like a painting?”
“Sure,” I said. That was why I’d been bidding.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, and left.
The guy knew me because he knew almost everybody. He was one of the convention organizers. And yet I really didn’t give what he’d said any further thought until the next morning when I was on my way to breakfast and he grabbed me.
“Come on, they’re in the art room,” he said.
What was in the art room? Since it was the last day as far as I knew everything was being packed up, but one of the artists was in there sitting at a table painting the nebula you see in the picture. A couple of the other artists were watching him.
“Hey,” one of them said, “can I add something?”
The painting was passed on to the other artist, and then a third one decided to add something. And then they all signed it, which generated a lot of excitement and envy.
I didn’t realize it but this was the first time these three artists, who were well-known in science fiction circles and in high demand for book covers and other custom work, had ever collaborated on anything. It was also the first time anyone knew of that multiple artists had ever collaborated on a single work at a convention. This generated a lot of interest and a lot of envy. I was getting offers on the painting even before I left the room.
All these years later it’s not that valuable. The next year, and in the years that followed, it became a tradition at the convention for several artists—sometimes as many as five or six—to collaborate on a single painting that would then be auctioned off for charity. That made my little painting a lot less unique and less valuable. I still like it. It has a couple of subtle details that make me laugh.
It’s those details that made me think it needed something else. The story behind it is interesting, but it needed another story.
“Space Pin”
The TMA-114s were designed for speed and efficiency, not maneuverability, with a curved design pared down to the very basics. The base held the highly compact sulfur compound that propelled the ships at high speed, and also earned them the nickname “silent but deadly”. The bulging middle was all storage space, well-protected and reinforced, while the narrow neck held all the control systems. At the rounded top sat the single occupant’s quarters and the instrument panel, both of which the engineers had argued against. They were certain, in that special way only engineers, gods of their technical domains, could be, that there was no need. It was a straight shot from the mining fields of Ceti Alpha V to the freight yards just outside the star’s gravity well, and a computer could handle the minor adjustments needed to keep each ship on course. But delendium is unstable stuff even under ideal circumstances, and even though it cut into their bottom line the bigwigs insisted on a human presence in each ship.
Captain Walker had made so many runs she only had to look at the clock to know where the ship was. On the starboard side a few asteroid fragments of Ceti Alpha VI hung lazily against the Kraken Nebula. On the port was the planet’s former moon, now a minor planet spinning in a tight elliptical orbit. The three craters on its far side were mysterious in their depth and regularity but had never garnered any real scientific interest. Shippers had nicknamed it Sixteen Tonner, from an old Tellurian ballad. She leaned back in the seat and had started to drift off when the klaxon sounded.
“Malfunction,” she thought. The ships were aging and small things went wrong all the time, usually in the kitchen or sleeper, but on one trip the entire navigation system had fizzled. The engineers assured her this was not a problem since there was no reason she’d ever need it.
She was checking the overhead panel when she saw Sixteen Tonner pass in front of the window, moving at an impossible speed. Impossible. She checked the scanner but it only confirmed what she’d just seen. The moon was moving upward relative to her ship, and moving fast, as though being lifted by some invisible hand. She expanded the display and watched, fascinated. The only thing she could think that could cause that sort of movement was a black hole, but there was no radiation, and nothing else in the system was affected. It had already climbed high above the ecliptic plane and was moving backward. Then suddenly it dropped and changed direction. She drew a line with her finger. If it stayed on its present course it would hit the ship. And her. And enough delendium, the scientists said, to punch a hole in the fabric of space.
She opened the mic. “Shipyard, I have an emergency. Please respond stat.”
Static. She couldn’t tell if they were receiving or if she’d be able to get their reply if they did. No one ever thought to check the com array because no one ever needed it.
Sixteen Tonner was accelerating now, fixed on its collision course.
Walker flipped through the screens, looking for manual control, and trying to remember the training from more than five years ago, training that hadn’t been very thorough because of the engineers’ assurances that no one would ever need it. She tapped the screen and waited. And then heard one of the neck jets fire. She tapped again, starting a second one and pushing up the level. Slowly the course changed. She went back to the display and watched as Sixteen Tonner glided by, just kilometers away, spinning so fast those three craters looked like black stripes.
She switched back to auto and let the system self-correct the course. Periodically she’d go back and look at the display, watching how, against all laws of physics, Sixteen Tonner simply slid back into its orbit.
She planned to have a long talk with the engineers when she got the freight yards.
Deep in the Kraken Nebula an energy surge welled up and rippled through the background of space. Had any instrument picked it up it might have interpreted it as a voice speaking a single word.
Gutter.
The Kindness of Strangers.
“Hey, how was the movie?”
I’d just stepped into the elevator and there was a woman already in there, slightly shorter than me with streaked hair and glasses with thick black plastic frames. There was something vaguely familiar about her but I work in a building where a lot of businesses and people come and go. And I’m sorry to say I don’t make a note of who’s coming and going unless I actually work with them.
So my brain was whirring with activity. Movie? What movie? There were a million little me’s running around pulling papers from filing cabinets screaming, “Everybody, boss needs information STAT!” Except over in one corner a group was arguing that I really should upgrade to a paperless system and another group was arguing that there’s no way my brain could be that organized and this was all an elaborate metaphor anyway. Oh yeah, I’d been to see a movie the previous Saturday.
“It was great,” I said, adding that it was at the Belcourt Theater.
“No,” she said, “about a month ago. When I saw you at the mall.”
More rushing around pulling files, except now the group that had been arguing for digitizing everything picked up a snack machine and threw it through a window. And that’s when I remembered where I’d seen this woman before. Or at least the last non-work place where I’d seen her. About a month earlier at the mall. And I didn’t remember her so much as the intense sense of awkwardness I’d felt.
At the time I still didn’t have a driver’s license. I didn’t get one until I was thirty-seven but that’s another long and complicated story. If I wanted to go see a movie my options were to hitch a ride with someone else or take the bus. Mostly I took the bus, but this meant a lot of planning. Most of the time it meant a trip all the way to the downtown bus depot for at least one transfer, all of which could take up to an hour. Because it was usually Saturday, a day when bus service is cut in half, I’d have to set out early and I’d arrive early for the movie, so I’d wander the mall or the various nearby stores. Going to see a movie would involve up to four hours of either riding or standing around waiting. It was while I was waiting that I ran into this woman who, for some reason, recognized me from the building where we both worked–on different floors and for completely different places.
“Hey, how’s it going?” she’d said. And while there was a large group in my brain that wanted me to say, “Who the hell are you?” but they were shouted down by the group that instead made me say, “Great! How are you?” I’m still half-convinced she didn’t really recognize me. A lot of people tell me I look like someone they know and we just happened to work in the same building because everybody in Nashville either has or will work in my building. But we still chatted politely although I was overwhelmed by an awkward feeling. I was embarrassed that I was dependent on riding the bus to get where I wanted to go. It hit me that riding the bus limited where I could go, what I could do. It made me dependent on someone else’s schedule.
I didn’t–and still don’t–look down on anyone who rides the bus. I still ride the bus regularly, although now it’s more a matter of choice than necessity. At that time though a lot of those me’s turned out to be right. An upgrade was needed.
Also I’m sure some of them escaped and that’s why strangers think they’ve met me before.
If We Spirits Have Offended…
Back in April I shared this. It’s a former fast food restaurant that shut down a couple of months earlier and became a kind of gallery of graffiti. That’s one of the things I liked about it. It also seemed to attract some pretty good graffiti—the artists really put some thought and work into their designs rather than just scribbling tags. There was even some strong use of color against the restaurant’s black and white exterior.
This is what it looks like now.
Maybe it’s just me but it seems harsh and unnecessary to have covered up the graffiti. What harm was it doing? What damage did it cause? Well obviously somebody was bothered by it but who? Or should that be ‘whom’? I can’t remember how that applies to the dative case.
Anyway there is a fairly nice Italian restaurant on the other side of the street from it and I suppose some of the patrons might have been offended by the graffiti, but the side that faces this place is the restaurant bar and the most offensive thing there is the limited selection of craft and local beers, but that’s another story. And I can’t imagine the power lunch crowd looking up from their martinis to even notice the ramshackle burger shack across the street, let alone being offended by it.
Is there anything even offensive in the words themselves? It’s hard to say because everything is potentially offensive to someone. Some people get their knickers in a twist over the word “semprini” while others are upset by words like “knickers” or “twist” and, let’s face it, everything is potentially a euphemism. As Melanie Safka sings,
Freud’s mystic world of meaning needn’t have us mystified.
It’s really very simple what the psyche tries to hide:
A thing is a phallic symbol if it’s longer than it’s wide
As the id goes marching on.
Glory glory psychotherapy, glory glory sexuality,
Glory glory now we can be free as the id goes marching on.
And yet it’s not like someone painted cod and cabbages,
And there’s considerable construction on the block where the hash slingers used to abide. It seems unlikely that it’ll be long before the former patty pantry will be knocked down in favor of something else, possibly residential since the area is saturated with vendors of victuals.
Maybe the person who decided to cancel the composition wasn’t really upset, but if they did take offense could they give it back?
Source: gocomics.com
Seen any graffiti? Send your pictures to freethinkers@nerosoft.com. Or don’t. Either way I won’t be offended.
Ring Around The Planet.
Source: SkyView App
The other night I looked to the south where the moon was rising. To its right I could see a bright dot I knew was Mars even though it was yellow and not its usual red, owing, maybe, to the fact that it hadn’t rained lately and there was a lot of dust in the atmosphere, or maybe Mars has jaundice right now. Between them was another dot that I could tell was a planet and there was only one planet it could be. Even though Saturn is about 95 times more massive than the Earth it’s about 746 million miles from us. Mars is smaller but it also only averages 140 million miles from us. This makes it appear brighter although that’s still a pretty long way to drive even on a holiday weekend.
Anyway the picture above is a bit misleading. It was really more like this:
Source: Weather Underground
Saturn is famous for its rings but there’s so much more to the seventh planet so I’ve put together a list of lesser-known facts about it.
The first known astronomer to record Saturn’s rings was Galileo. At first he didn’t realize Saturn had rings and thought he was seeing three separate planets. Later he realized he’d been looking at Mars while drunk.
Saturn’s moon Titan is the largest moon in the solar system and the only one known to have its own atmosphere.
Titan was discovered by the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens in 1655.
The Cassini-Huygens spaceprobe launched in 1997 arrived at Saturn in 2004. It was named after Huygens and Giovanni Cassini, who discovered four other moons of Saturn. Cassini’s name was placed first because not even the Dutch know how to pronounce “Huygens”.
The Huygens probe separated from the main spacecraft and landed on the surface of Titan on January 15, 2005, becoming the first human-made object to land on another planet’s moon.
It takes Saturn almost thirty Earth years to orbit the sun but rotates less than every eleven hours.
Saturn’s rings are believed to be the result of one or more moons or asteroids that broke up over creative differences.
The rings are held in place by a series of shepherd moons and the Los Angeles Rams.
Astronomers and others have noticed that gaps and distortions in the rings resemble the grooves of a vinyl record and in fact are the earliest recording of “Louie, Louie”.
The orbits of the small rocks and clusters of ice that comprise the rings will eventually decay. The rings will be absorbed into Saturn or be bought up by the same people who still have pieces of the Berlin Wall.
Saturn is the least dense planet in the solar system and yet still dropped out of medical school.
As one of the four gas giants Saturn has no real surface, but if it had a surface you could stand on you would suffocate immediately.
Painters and sculptors have historically been said to have been born under the influence of Saturn even though most come from Jupiter.
In astrology Saturn is associated with binge watching ’80’s sitcoms.
Saturn’s moon Iapetus is actually a discarded bowling ball.
Lunch is served all day Thursdays on Saturn.
Saturn’s interior is exactly the same as the filling inside a Twinkie.
Everybody Wave!
In my younger days I would sometimes stick my tongue out at people in passing cars. And my wife would say, “Stop that!” She had a point. It had been cute when I was four, not so much at the age of forty. Actually it may not have been that cute even when I was four although I do have an early childhood memory of my father was stopped at a red light and I stuck my tongue out at a couple of teenage guys in the car next to us. They laughed and stuck their tongues out at me which just encouraged me.
Anyway the other day I was walking along and one of Nashville’s many tour buses went by. This has become a booming industry even though most of the tours, as far as I can tell, are free–they say, “Hop on or hop off anytime you like,” and I will take one of these tours one of these days but that will be another story.
As the bus went by I waved to the passengers. Sticking my tongue out at them would be rude and juvenile and I think being rude and juvenile should be reserved for the locals. Visitors to Music City deserve to be treated kindly, especially since they might be someone I know. The brain behind the blog Rubber Shoes In Hell was in Nashville recently, along with her body and her husband who I assume also brought both his brain and body, although a couple of disembodied brains floating around the streets of Nashville would be quite a sight.
I was a little disappointed that of the tourists on the bus only one waved back–an older guy sitting at the very back who gave me a dull, tight-lipped look and a perfunctory wave–saying, I think, “Yeah, we see you.” And I wanted to say, hey, lighten up. You’re touring the city, taking in the sights, having a good time. The very least you could do is smile.
I was seriously tempted to stick my tongue out at him, but I think it’ll be a few years before I can get away with that again.
I really do think it’ll be cute when I’m eighty.
Source: Wikipedia