I’m thinking of starting my official bio with “I’m an agéd straight white male with no pronouns and no real respect for humanity.”
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I don’t believe in UFO’s because …
1) of the asinine assumption that anything humanity has accomplished, but for which we don’t yet have a detailed origin, was left here by a higher alien intelligence. This outlook is similar to the idea (see last rumen.) that Planet Earth is too incompetent to have produced its own water or oxygen.
2) on the opposite hand, UFO adherents paint intergalactic aliens as having the collective smarts of roadkill: After crossing hundreds of parsecs of space, they mostly diddle around our back highways spooking people, make silly circles in farmers’ crops, and can’t manage to land without crashing in New Mexico.
3) we now have had fly-by examination of all the planets in the solar system, and not one shows the slightest evidence of intelligent life (in fact, everybody got so pissed at Pluto for its pointlessness that it got demoted to dwarf planet (or was it midget asteroid?).
4) intra-galactic travel contravenes all scientific and common-sense limitations. No, you and your communication back home cannot exceed the speed of light, that’s just a neat SF handoff to make galactic colonization sound neighborly. And even if someone is just sending unpiloted drones here to peek at us, they’d have to wait for said drones to reach their destination, then broadcast their observations back home, a round-trip of propulsion followed by broadcasting that would require hundreds to thousand years for the round trip — not a sensible or economic proposition.
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My latest invention:
SWD (Some Wheel Drive): Each of your vehicle’s wheels is activated independently and totally at random, thus equalizing wear on each tire.
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An illustration of how, even in this world of instant information, you can discover absolutely nothing.
I bought a pair of insulated-grip work gloves at the local hardware store. I had never heard of the company that made them, Showa, so I carefully perused the extensive cardboard tag attached.
Showa has offices in Georgia, Quebec and New South Wales (Australia). The manufacturer is listed as being in Japan. But the gloves are “Made in Malaysia.”
The back of the tag has three small graphics (one looking in outline like an open book, two like a knight’s shield), each surrounded by two letters and up to ten numbers. There is no indication what any of these symbols or numbers mean. There is also a short list of “Examination Certificates,” again with no mention of what they refer to. Between the two is the usual list of ridiculous warnings, which boil down to “Don’t hurt yourself.”
The other side of the tag features three circles enclosing: 1) what might be a snowflake, 2) a hand holding a… pipe?, and 3) a small wrench next to two meshing gears. These circles lie below a photo of a worker’s hands wearing a pair of the gloves and holding a large building block – which they are about to place onto a poorly prepared line of mortar.
What I find most peculiar is that someone, somewhere, deliberately designed this tag. It did not fall from a passing pigeon.
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There was a young man of Gdansk,
Who in public would lower his pants.
To make matters worse,
Near his grandmother’s hearse,
He exposed himself to his aunts.
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I don’t understand drag queen story hours. I mean, I don’t care about them one way or the other (people who are scared of drag queens may be the saddest folks on earth), but how did the idea take hold of drag queens having a particular connection to kids’ story-telling?
There used to be (and I’m sure still are) clown and witch story-tellers and those who dress up as mythical or folk figures to give bounce to a tale. But none of those became either ubiquitous or controversial. The meeting of drag queens and kids’ stories just seems to me an unlikely development. Anybody know the history?
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Memphis Slim has a great song about losing his girlfriend Kay. It’s called “If You See Kay,” but as sung, the initial “I” is silent. You can pick any tune you choose and sing it to yourself.
lickhaven 