Elected Office At Last!

CJ has run for office so long, she's finally in one. Look for her penmanship at http://www.foreclosuredefense.pro/rusty_law/.

Spooky Activity

“Spooky activity” is faster than the speed of light. It defies Einstein! It could be the end of the Recession—fast!

Spooky activity is a nuclear physics term to describe behavior of “twin” protons that orient instantly opposite each other at a distance. So if you turn one proton up, the other one turns down faster than the speed of c. Wow, gee. Here on earth where non-brilliant geniuses live, the immediate application is in secured data transfers, such as used by banks and financial institutions, encrypting and decoding.

I’m guessing a large percentage of us have bank accounts, so this applies.

Such transfers today use a combination lock of ever rotating strings of binary code, you know, ones and zeros. However, because spooky activity is not confined to the speed of light as through fiber optic cables, you could lose money out of your account faster than you even knew it was in there. A stimulus package could be distributed and used up that much more instantly.

Einstein gave us the equation: E = mc2, where the Economy = money multiplied by c (for the speed of light) squared.

However, if we replace “c” with spooky activity, then we can accelerate our financial recovery thus:

Economy = money X spooky activity squared

Or we could speed up thermo-nuclear pandemic fiscal disaster.

Boo!

China Made In Japan

My grandmother had more china than dinner courses. She had plates and cups and saucers, as far as you’d expect. She had bowls and demi-bowls, and saucers and demi-saucers and demi-demi-saucers and gravy boats stuck to platters and gravy tankers, which I guess were really tourrins. In any case, I inherited the lot.

I also inherited two tea sets, one a yellow-colored rose, the other a blushing pink, both matching gold rimmed, very old from when my family arrived from England in 1900.

Then I went and had two sons. They’d just as soon shoot the stuff with bee-bee guns.

Once I met a woman who had two sons, like myself. She also had two tea sets, which she kept prominently displayed. The beauty and delicacy of the sets were finely wrought in a well-lit cabinet which faced the inside of the front door. “I’ve promised the tea sets to the women who will marry my sons,” the woman told me. “The first bride gets to choose which set she wants.” So I figure I’ll offer the same thing.

But I really don’t know what to do with my grandmother’s china, the full twelve place-settings. It was her wedding gift to me, her youngest grandchild. I can remember seeing it on her hutch, and eating off it. She used it EVERY Sunday and only one teacup of the twelve is chipped.

Furthermore, when I got married, friends of my father heard of the china and the story of its one chipped teacup. By then, the Noritake pattern had been discontinued, but these friends found a complete, six-place tea set of the exact match at a garage sale. So now I have seventeen cups! Eighteen saucers! Eighteen cake plates! Plus double sugar and double creamer!

Perhaps I shall have to wait for a granddaughter to figure out what to do with all that. In the meantime, I enjoy my grandmother’s china, and the rose pattern reminds me of her garden.

Happy Mothers' Day.

Literacy Versus Accuracy

If knowledge is power, what are the facts?

The ability to store and retrieve knowledge becomes more valuable than the knowledge itself. In future children may not learn times tables by rote (in much the same way spelling and cursive writing skills are de-emphasized today). The cognitive growth plates earned by knowing multiplication will be bridged by infant exposure to Mozart. After all, you can type any question into Google and get an immediate answer, often more than one.

Hemingway broaches the advantage of illiterate knowledge. The character Anselmo in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS is able to listen to and retain instruction better because he has no capacity of record keeping to fall back on and therefore must remember and know what Robert Jordan tells him immediately as he tells him.

My folklore professor did not allow notes in his class. He said if you couldn’t remember it, then it’s not worth knowing, although that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be on the test.

Books have screwed up absorption along with photographs, and now that fertile information delta where text and image are more integrated than kanji: the Internet! With the Internet conveniently hand held, there’s no reason any of us should know anything! That’s what makes gossip so exciting. Knowledge is passé, but passing it is power.

The Water Is Thin

It’s 90 miles Key West to Cuba, and people make it on all manner of watercraft, albeit some more successfully than others. The English Channel is only 21 miles across at the Strait of Dover. People SWIM that. The Iberian Peninsula is 10 miles off the coast of Africa.

The Iberian Peninsula is Spain and Portugal fused together in one finger of land that tips down off the southwest corner of Europe. The southern edge of the peninsula borders the Strait of Gibraltar, which is the waterway leading from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. The Strait of Gibraltar is less than 10 miles across at its narrowest point, making Europe and Africa the two closest continental neighbors with the exception of the Asia – Europe border, scrunched over the Urals.

We’re not even supposed to have diplomatic relations with Cuba, and yet we have an undeniable geographic relationship. The same is true of Spain and Africa. To assume that Spain did not have a social link with Africa prior to Columbus is absolute folly. It’s a locational no-brainer to realize that people were crossing that narrow strait.

The first introduction of Africans to North America was not through slavery. Africans sailed aboard Spanish ships as free citizens on expeditions to the New World. They established the footprint for freedom in the United States, a footprint for us all to walk in.

The Master's

I dedicated seven years to golf. In the end, I came out with a master’s, not with the green jacket, but with a cap and gown and hood. Truly, it was no more surprising than Cabrera’s win.

No one thought I would ever graduate. One professor told me the worst thing I could do for a graduate degree was to get married, and the second worst was to have kids. I did both. A three year program stretched into an eleven year span, and a forty page thesis went to 134 pages including eleven tables and thirty-nine figures! By the time I submitted my thesis, my social security number had expired.

In the meantime, I took a job at a golf course, which led to another job at another golf course, and then another. It was a good, clean industry, with most people polite and well-dressed. I worked business hours in the offices, behind the scenes where club pros humorously fowl computer software, chefs serve dessert samples, and course maintenance folks leave flowers on one’s desk from time to time. It wasn’t always the Shangri-La of Caddy Shack, but Augusta’s recent tournament has reminded me of many good times. And the UNBELIEVABLE VICTORY OF HANGING IN THERE FOR A MASTER’S!

Despite clubhouse access during numerous professional events, I never met Angel Cabrera. Still, I’d like to share with him a poem I wrote for my graduation, appropriate for a fellow Master.


COMMENCEMENT POEM

Today they are not judging me
I am free as a birdsong in mid-flight
I can rest my hands upon my knees
And gloat into the night.

I Hate Crayons

I love felt-tip markers because you can throw them away. Come across a single marker, separated from the herd of its eight-pack, and you can assume it’s dried up—chuck it. Any marker of ambiguous age you simply toss without question. CRAYONS ARE FOREVER. I hate crayons. They never die, and they never get used up! Crayon marks are near impossible to remove from upholstery and walls, and mildly challenging on window glass and auto paint. I have enough crayons to start childcare for a small country. Anybody want to color?