Things learned from Mission to Mars.

Despite the fact that i have been studying space travel, exploration and survival for the better part of three decades, I realized today that there are many things I did not know, and could only have learned from watching the movie Mission to Mars, Staring such powerhouse actors as Gary Sinise and Tim Robbins.  Here is a sampling of those things that my status as an amateur rocket scientist, astronomer and overall space junkie have rendered me unable to figure out.

- When a person is moving in zero-gravity – or if your are i any way scientifically minded, micro gravity – environment, it does not look any way like the movement shown on such unbelievable and obviously incorrect sources as, say, the news, orNASAtv.  Nope, it consists of herky-jerky motions that, while allowing a person to glide through the air, does so in a way that makes them look like they are running an invisible obstacle course.  Indeed, their motions look as if they are revoking completely laws of angular motion; instead of traveling in a straight line like Newton says we must, they stumble around the cabin of their spaceship like a drunken hipster dancing down the street to whatever music it is that makes them feel so very, very much.

- Space station design is way ahead of those same sources from above let us know.  Not only is it capable of creating a massive space station in mid-earth orbit that doesn’t look like my little cousin made it with his erector set and giving it an  earth-gravity environment via the use of a wheel – a design that harkens back to the sixties – it is capable of doing so in the exact opposite way that science dictates.  Instead of walking along the outside of the wheel, where centripetal force would create the feeling of gravity, people actually walk along the inside, allowing the hallways in the images to slope gracefully away from the camera and spitting directly in the eye of high-school physics.

- If a spacecraft that is destined to go to Mars was built in orbit, it would be made of titanium.  Titanium is one of the hardest, lightest metals that we can make right now.  None of this matter when placed against the hardness of glass.  A rock flying through space at thousands and thousands of miles per hour that can blast through a titanium wall, a mans hand, and a composite helmet can apparently be stopped cold by a simple piece of class in the middle of the spacecraft.

-A large chunk of hydrogen ice, extruded from pipes shattered by those same tiny rocks that glass can stop, will explode dangerously when exposed to rocket exhaust, despite the lack of oxygen in space.  This speaks for itself.

- A human being can survive at 10% of the atmosphere level of earth.  This can happen if that person is either a) Gary Sinise or b) people are living in some fairy-tale world where a human being that can barely get to the top of MT. Everest – a place with 25% the pressure of sea level – without fluid leaking into their lungs from their tissue due to lack of said pressure can somehow not only survive, but perform complex motor and cognitive functions such as having the presence of mind to realize that Dr. Pepper will show you where a hole in the side of your spaceship is.

-Humans are easily capable of jumping one spacecraft to another.  This is easy when each ship is flying at orbital velocity – roughly 8,000 miles per hour – in different directions and over a mile apart.  This is like throwing a rock from a  bus driving over the Hawthorne Bridge at 50 miles per hour and hitting ahippy on a  bike riding at 30 MpH across the Burnside bridge a half-mile away.  Trust someone who throws rocks at things all the time, this is no easy task.  I guess that’s why they call them Astronauts.

- When conducting a rescue mission that requires you to spend half a year traveling 90 million miles to rescue one person, make sure that you raise the flag before you look around to even see if that person is alive.

- Plants are far stronger than we thought.  Everyone knows that they produce O2, but according to this bastion of scientific corectitude, they create enough other gases to not only pressurize a greenhouse against outside interference from the Martian atmosphere, even if its walls are all ripped up and the wind is blasting ow the rows of ferns, but allow people to walk around mars without their helmet on.  This conjures images of little jets of gas blasting out of the plants and pushing back the thin and cold air from the outside.  Plants are indeed powerful, eh?

- Astronauts are well versed in not only astronauting, but audio engineering, high-level computer programming, genetic engineering and science, mass spectroscopy, botany, robotics and communications.  About the only things they aren’t good at, according to this movie, is acting.

- The best way a highly advanced race of aliens from god-knows-where can think of to communicate with a less advanced and patently amateur humanity is to bury a big metal face on mars and hope that we not only find it, but figure out the fact that said aliens put a security device on it that involves a simple puzzle.  there is no way that they would come down here and say “Hello, we are from Altair.”  Preferably by capturing and probing uneducated rednecks from the deep south.

- Gary Sinise is an alien.

Cloumbus Shmolumbus.

So, I have been writing this for a few days but could not seem to put the finishing touches on it.  It’s a few days late, but, well, deal with it.

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WOOOOOO BOY-HOWDY it sure is nice to be a part of the celebration of that time in 1492 when Columbus, in all of his magnanimous glory, sailed the ocean blue in search of the end of the world but found the amazing continent of American instead?  Is it not nice to be a part of that thing that jump-started the peaceful integration of two of humanities lost tribes into one easilycomingalable social entity?

Oh, wait… That is not at all how it happened.

In my honest opinion, Columbus day is the weirdest holiday that we celebrate here in the ol’ US of A.  This includes the fact that we celebrate things like Thanksgiving (a time when Indians gave food to cold, starving and destitute pilgrims only to be eradicated by said pilgrims a few months later), Halloween (A celebration of our dead wherein kids get diabetic and women get slutty) and Labour Day (wherein the labor unions who bilk wages from workers at exorbitant rates and use it to influence government into the desecration of the rights of small businesses are celebrated).  Let’s go over some of the reasons that Americans really have no right to celebrate, much less get out of school or not be able to conduct any banking business, the fact that Columbus sailed his rich ass all the way across the Atlantic, shall we?

Ok, why did Columbus come across the ocean?  According to popular belief it was to buck the notion that the world was flat and go find India in order to prove that you could get there from Europe.

I think not.

In all actuality he was looking for a faster way to India so that he could make more money and thus impress the court of Spain, the famous Ferdinand and Isabella.  It was a voyage of greed and notoriety, not one of discovery.  He was commissioned to get a new source of income and beat the Dutch and Portuguese to the proverbial punch in the trade wars being fought for the Indian subcontinent.  Lets face it, going all the way around Africa is way less convenient than sailing through an empty ocean all the way to India, right?

The entire thing about the Earth being flat and the sailors being afraid of falling off the edge of the world and all that crap is pretty much total bullocks, as everyone knew that there was something out there.  The Vikings had been on North America, around Nova Scotia, as early as the 10th century, and there is no reason to believe that their subsequent sacking of almost every major power that had risen since then would not have spread the knowledge that SOMETHING was out there throughout the world.  Along with this information comes the fact that Eratosthenes had calculated the circumference of the planet to within a few hundred miles in 240 BC.  Since circumference, for the uninitiated, means distance around and not across, one could safely assume that by the 1400’s people knew that the world was indeed not a big table full of warring countries, pissed off religions and crazy animals all over the place that also has water from the oceans pouring off the edges into space.

Now, what about the idea that Columbus discovered America.  While I read in the paper the other day that schools are no longer teaching this, it doesn’t stop the fact that it is celebrated as a federal holiday here, thus firmly cementing the idea that Columbus had really anything to do with North America in the popular psyche.  In all actuality, Columbus landed hundreds of miles south of Florida in the Bahamas.  He landed at San Salvador on Oct. 12 1492, and explored Hispaniola and what is now Cuba.  Notice that nowhere did I say he discovered America.  If this were true, we would be living in a place called theColumbias.

Nope, America was named, probably, after an Itallian man observing probing missions for the Spanish Crown named Amerigo Vespucci.   His name was put on some maps that he brought back after a bunch of expeditions on SOUTH America (he was the one who “found” Brazil and claimed it for the crown according to the Treaty of Tordesillas).  HE never even landed on North America, and he was doing this a decade after Columbus.  SO there is no reason that we should not be celebrating “Vikings kind of discovered Canada” day, or even “There was already an indigenous population here when other people showed up” Day.

Lastly, Let me speak to the fact that we teach our kids about Columbus day as a celebration.  We are teaching these kids to celebrate the landing of a man who routinely kidnapped people out of their villages to act as guides, savagely beating and whipping them unless they did as they were told.  They kidnapped women to be used as slaves at their camps and children to use a human shield.  Columbus and his men stole, burned and raped their way across a landscape that was increasingly – with good reason – hostile to their presence.  Teaching that to your kids is like teaching them that it isok to mix Rum, Tequila and cheap beer in the same night…  It’s just irresponsible.

While I could use this as an excuse to go off on my diatribe about the importance of teaching accurate history from updated sources in our schools, I think I’ll save that for another day.  Let’s just keep on Celebrating holidays based on fairy tales so that they grow up to write blogs expressing their bitterness at the lack of quality inherent in their education…

Ikea. Convenient and Swiss, right?

Ikea is a neat place Full of magic and wonder.

Let me rephrase that.  Ikea is a place…  There was an Ikea built last year out by the airport in Portland, and I had yet to check out this cultural, pseudo-Swiss phenomenon.

So I did.

Walking into this gargantuan building – 250,000 Sq. feet according to the informational brochure, map, menu and coupon book – one is impressed by the fact that it doesn’t seem that big once you get inside.  Indeed, being split among two levels as it is, the foyer is nothing but a blank wall and an escalator, giving more a sense of entering the headquarters of some nameless and probably sinister corporate entity…

The random blasts of high-frequency noise from landing 737’s tends to offset the eerie quiet that pervades a place that is full of pillows, cushions and various and sundry other squishy, soft or fuzzy things.  Talking to someone and asking for directions to the town where they sell stuff that lights up requires more than a little finesse as the vibrations of your voice are absorbed by all of the surrounding simplesolutions to modern living.

Truth be told, even the part of the store that has lots of flat and hard objects – picture frames, tables, etc – is muffled due to the abundance ofaccouterments to those objects, paper drapings and pendants to accentuate your combination multi-pane shadowbox picture frame and bottle opener, 70’s style burgundy shag carpet-esque coverings for your stylish organically-stained coffee table made from 100% recycled non-treated pine, and of course the Pillows that seem to pervade every square inch of every department in this massive homage to American’s desire to fill their homes with cheap furniture.

This place is full of cool stuff, however.  It has some really neat prints, a fairly large selection of small plants (two of which I purchased), and the most amazing shopping carts I have ever seen.  I am serious.  The casters on the carts are full, 360 degree rotating.  You can push them down the aisle in whatever orientation you want.  This may not seem like much to you people, but to someone who has yet to grow out of considering riding the back of a grocery cart down any given aisleendlessly entertaining it is right up there with sliced bread.

Unlike other discount stores, the clientèle of this place is really unremarkable.  I saw and interacted with people from all walks, most of whom were perfectly nice, with the obvious exception of the septuagenarian in the window covering department who obviously thought venetian blinds were more important than getting the hell out of my way; a position with which I adamantly disagree.

Anyhow, My trip to Ikea concluded with the long march to the checkout aisle.  Before I was able to purchase my two plants (Orvile (Aloe Vera) and Wilbur (Unknown green leafy), my new lamp, and the wrong size of light bulbs for said lamp, I was required to walk through the belly of the beast.  For some reason, when you are walking out of the glitzy showroom to the cash registers and deli (Ikea Meatballs are amazing) you walk through a raw, barren warehouse stacked full of 30 foot tall shelving and boxes upon boxes of Swiss furniture that is made in China and marketed all over the world.  It is a bizarre and stark contrast from the glittery showrooms before it, and one that I was not really prepared for.  that being said, I had had enough of being tempted with particle board creations that are reasonably priced, convenient, andwholly unnecessary for a person like me, so I left.

Again, I am not good at conclusions, so whatever.  See you all next time.

Don’t do it, man.

Don’t do it, brother.  It’s not worth it.

I don’t know how much they are paying you, but it should not be enough.  I mean, I understand that everyone has a price; hell people have sold out entire countries for nothing more than the notoriety of having a sammich named after them.  That being said, what you are doing is wrong beyond words and should not be contemplated for any reason not matter how grievous.

I don’t know what it takes for you to become a sympathiser to their cause.  I mean, yes, we are screwing up a lot of things on this planet, and some of that is directly harming them, but the idea that you would put your patriotism and allegiance on the line simply for the case that they give you some kind of misguided importance is beyond the pale.

Did you not have a dad so you are looking for someone to make you feel like you are worth something?  Were you scorned by a lover that left you bitter and upset at the human race?  What was it that made you fall for their empty promises?

Think about it this way: whatever you are being promised, it is not enough.  No matter what they promise you, it will be worthless when the human race is gone and you and the other sympathisers are the only people left.  What will the riches mean when civilization is no more? You think you can go live with them?  They live underwater for god’s sake.  I know that we have mapped like 8 percent of the ocean floor, so they might have entire cities under there, but that does not change the fact that you can not breathe under the water.

They are using you, man.  Can’t you see that?  You think that you are being all special and powerful by allying with them and giving them the things that they want and that you are being ingratiated to them but you are missing something:  They only want you for your thumbs.  They don’t have them, so they need you and the others to do the things that they can’t.  They don’t care about you.

Indeed, those silk-skinned, flipper-beating blowhole-breathers are smarter than us, they have it all figured out and they are pissed, but the only way that they can graduate from entertaining us at Sea World and occasionally way-laying young girls in the carribean is with your help.

Please, please think about this before you continue posting our secrets on your MySpace page.  The last thing we need is for those underwater assholes to know enough to get to us.

Dear Jimmy, A Letter.

Jimmy,

We have had some good times lately, yeah?  I mean, this summer was good; our travels to other states, up mountains and across rivers and into cities flung far and wide.  We carried so many people to so many shows and on so many adventures that I honestly believe that I have fully gained the 50 dollars worth of you that I paid out.

That being said, I don’t want you to go.  Not yet.  I believe that you have many miles left in you.  Your heart is still strong.  Your legs are creaky, squeaky and a bit off-kilter, your shocks are hard and leaky, but all of that be fixed.  I can make you stronger; straighter of leg and softer of shock you can get me through an entire winter without having to walk to the bus to get to work or bum rides from friends to get to shows.  Together we can cruise the witery NW and go camping or hiking or anythig that WE want because you still, I believe, have the mechanical constitution to do just that.

So no, I don’t want you to go.  I know that you are having problems right now.  You just don’t seem to want to go like you used to.  Like a septugenarian you have a little trouble getting up those hills and your power-band is far slighter than it was even a few short months ago.  I know that your nerves are frayed; your timing is off and your filters are dirty and there is a real possibility that your coils are coming undone.  But I won’t let you go.

Indeed, I have come to love you, my noble steed.  Like me, you are a little rough around the edges.  No one would ever refer to you as pretty or sexy.  People sometimes make fun of your noises, smells and temperamental ways.  But like me you keep on truckin, so to speak, and won’t give up on proceeding forward no matter how much it may hurt you, failing only when the last opportunity has been used up.  So yes, I love you, and I won’t let you go.

I’ll find your problems.  I will diagnose what ails you and I will do whatever it takes to make sure that you hit that golden mark.  I will advance your timing and clean your filters and relace your coils.   You and I will have more and better summers, summers where you feel like the travelling workhorse that you once were and can make it up a hill on the highway without burning a half tank of gas in the process.  We will have a winter of contented show-going, you ferrying me and my friends in warm safety through the downpours and freezing cold of the Northwest winter.

So please don’t go, Jimmy.  Give me a chance to fix you and get you into the order that I know you will be happy.  Give me a chance to exercize my abilities and pay you back for the amazing times that we have had together by allowing you to be one of those rare vehicles that make it to the quarter-million mile mark.  We can do this, Jimmy.

Together.

Say it with me now: Bo-De-Ga.

I am a steady and continuous user of Convenience Stores.  From the Tesoro’s of Alaska to the Bodegas of the East Coast to the Quik-E Mart’s of Springfield, this is the decidedly modern institution the allows one to purchase things that you don’t really need at any hour of the day, that allows a person to buy gallons of either gasoline or Diet Doctor Pepper or Coffee – all for about the same price – and that allows a person like me yet another chance to peruse the often exemplary variety of people that inhabit the zone around me.

Truth be told, I really do go to a convenience store pretty much every day.  It usually revolves around my brain running low on glucose and telling me that it is time to fill up on Skittles or Snickers or those little gummy orange slices that I believe are actually made of orange flavored crack, so severe is my addiction.  I do this in the belief that these things actually contain the type of sugar my brain needs to continue it’s job of heating the inside of my skull and not the type that makes you fat; something that I will continue to tell myself regardless of what you people say.

In the part of town where I live now, I sit at the boundary between three different parts of Vancouver.  Hazel Dell, Orchards and Salmon Creek all come together at this point and as such I get a good cross section of the city in my sights.  Now I know I have gone on at length about the type of people here, but in this little rant I am going to let you in on a few things that I have seen that make me truly happy to have eyes.

My favorite thing to do at such a place of convenience is to sit back in line and observe what people are buying.  I really enjoy the rapid and nervous eye movements and squeaky voice of the kid buying condoms, usually along with some seemingly innocuous item like a bottle of soda or one beef jerky stick – anything to take notice away from the bright blue box of soon-to-get-laid on the counter.  Or the lady who is dressed in pretty nice clothes, driving a pretty nice car who is buying a pretty cheap half-rack of Natty Ice and a pack of unfiltered Pall Mall’s at 11:30 in the morning on a Tuesday and smells like really, really old weed.  There are usually, in the Salmon creek part of things, hordes of skater kids with their turbo-charged metabolisms that swarm the soda fountain, filling cups whose size belies their being originally designed to carry crude-oil on the high seas with horrifying mixtures of various Pepsi-owned sugar-syrups and pretending that no one can see them stealing candy-bars.

I love it all. I like the guy who can’t figure out how to make the self-service pump work but who also can’t be bothered to stop shouting into his phone long enough to respond to the woman inside the store trying help him get his Mercedes back on the road.  I like the ditzy high-school girls buying their Vitamin water and chewing gum, babbling to each other in some foreign language that overlaps and swirls together into an incoherent sea of squeaky voices, tossed pony-tails and silly giggles.  I like the tweaker who can barely hold herself together long enough to order a pack of smokes without wanting to either crack under the pressure or steal something.  Instead she settles for talking in a really loud voice and darting out of the store like it is on fire, clutching her new cigarettes like they are made of solid gold – something we know not to be true, because she would have sold them by now.

I know, I know: I said I like a tweaker, and living in Washington that can’t be true, but still…

One of my favorite aspects of these places are the people who work there.  I honestly believe that it takes a certain type of person to work at a place like this, someone who is tolerant of all of the strange things that humanity is able to bring to her counter but none of the bullshit that comes along with it.

At a 7-11 by my house there is a woman who has been working there since I have been going to high-school, so at least 12/13 years.  She is the gruffest, most clipped personality I have ever encountered and takes no crap from anyone, but still remembers me even when I haven’t gone in there in a year or so.  Likewise there is a cashier at an ARCO near my place that couldn’t give a crap if you are the poorest person in the city, scrounging for change to by a 40 of Mad Dog 40/40 or the richest dude in the place, landing in the parking lot with your gold-plated helicopter to by everything in the store… she is more than willing to treat everyone with the same tiny amount of attention and gigantic amount of scorn.

I like to think of her as a really bitter equal-opportunity bitch, but that is just me.

These people are either totally ghetto or totally normal.  They are highly representative of the neighborhood in which their stores are located, and the difference between the good, the bad, and the what-the-hell can be a few blocks of distance.  This is especially true where I live, and applies to everything from clientèle to employee and even just the people who hang out front (you know who I’m talking about… the Jay and Silent Bobs of the world).

So next time you are at a Bodega take a step back and see if you can witness any of the tiny life that is being placed out right in front of you.  It can be a real trip.

NASA Makes Me Angry.

Hey NASA.  Yeah, you.  I have a bone to pick with you.

There are all of these things floating around the interwebs that you are thinking about abandoning the idea of sending a person to the Moon.

What.  The.  Hell.

Seriously, though, folks there is something that has been nagging at my attention lately that I think I should share with you.  According to a recent AP story and certain sources within NASA, there is not enough money in the budget to continue in any type of exploration plan as laid out by his honorable ass-nugget W. Bush to continue along the path he set out in what was really his only real contribution to a perpetuation of Americas dominance in…. well really anything.  Let me break this down for you.

As of now NASA has spent 7 Billion dollars designing a rocket system that will not only be a gigantic step backward in technology, ability and utilitarianism but might actually not ever even be used.  It is a system that is overly complicated and entirely run by yet another bloated govt. bureaucracy that has taken a project with a simple aim and ripped it into so many responsibilities and oversight sections that it will be a miracle if it ever actually makes it to orbit, much less the moon or beyond…

It is doing this instead of taking a simple directive and just doing it within the constraints of the budget given it, as we did with the Apollo program: here is your money, go to the moon.  Granted, there is not any overarching national reason – in a public or political sense – for us to go to space, or the moon, or Mars… we are not trying to beat the communists there anymore.  That being said, the idea that NASA is no longer innovating or trying to figure out a problem with new technology and new brain-power saddens me deeply, and actually makes me kind of mad.  Ex-NASA administrator Alan Stern puts it very well when he says “NASA has been like a star athlete that’s broken world records back in the 1960s and is stuck in the bleachers ever since, unable to suit up for what it does best.”

This is especially true now that the Obama presidency, flush out of money after massive amounts of spending to attempt to stem the tide of failing banks and American dreams, has declared that it will be revamping NASA’s budget and that there may not be enough cash to go around.  This means that exploration may take a side seat to smaller projects like theISS and increased autonomous satellite launches and science projects.  That is the part that really pisses me off.

I agree that there needs to be a replacement for the space Shuttle, a piece of 70’s technology that has been showing its age more and more with every launch delay and faulty valve.  I agree that there are projects domestically and abroad that probably should takeprecedence to sending a person to the moon, especially in light of a publicly-perceived lack of necessity.  I agree that the way that we continue in the process of furthering our knowledge of the universe should probably be examined (though not at the cost of time or progress, things govt decision making panels are notoriously good at wasting).  All of that being said, for the United states, arguably the world leader in high-science exploration technology and ability, to take a side seat to the human exploration of space would be a travesty beyond words.

Even if Obama, as he his people have stated, does decide to allow spending for “skipping the Moon, going to an asteroid, or just cruising the solar system” the lack of a single, unifying goal will render any decision made null and void as soon as it is handed down.  If there is one thing the govt has proved time and again it’s that they need a clearly defined objective in order to stay focused enough to not simply spend themselves in circles until all of the money is gone and they have to change tack in the middle of their project.

There are currently three separate corporate, privately owned companies that are willing and able to send humans to the moon in a decade, if only for a slight percentage of the budget being used by NASA.  There are plans drawn up by rogues within NASA itself that could simplify, cheapen and expedite the process of replacing theSTS and paving the way to a future or American manned presence in space. There are currently available technologies and ideas that could sustain NASA for decades if only it were bot being run by a bunch ofbureaucrats.

Here is my idea:  Give them money.  Give NASA a budget and a goal and a certain lack of oversight from policy makers and let them do what they do best.  I promise that they would be on the moon by 2020, keep the Space Station in business AND replace the space shuttle within that budgetary framework and project goal.

If we don’t do that, NASA is doomed, and the reluctance of the US govt to allow private enterprise to join in the manned space-explorationfracas will only guarantee that the only way an American Astronaut gets to see the surface of Mars will be aboard a Chinese Spacecraft.

And I will not stand for that.

Oh Bother

I have been bugged as of late.  I’m not talking about an infestation of ants crawling out of my walls to wing themselves into the night, that’s my brother.  And I’m not saying that there is some corrupt govt. organization listening to my words using lasers or button cameras or little microphones shaped like giant spiders that occasionally crawl across my ceiling (at least I don’t think so… I figure those are just giant spiders).  No, I mean there are a few things bothering me as of late that are really starting to strip my gears.  A sample:

- Why is it that people have taken it upon themselves in the last month or so to drive below the speed limit?  I thought I was going crazy watching my spedo stay pegged at 50 on 205 until i brought this up to some folk and they agreed; the average speed at which I drive these days is about 5 below the speed limit on really any road I find myself, be it 88th st or I-Freaking-5.  I even took the step to drive past a how-fast-am-I-really-going zone to make sure that the tires on my rig weren’t screwing up myspeedometer.

Now I understand that it is illegal to drive over the speed limit, far be it from me to break the law, I try not to speed.  Plus, due to my rig being old as hell it won’t really get much above 70 and I have found quite a bit of comfort in learning the patience to truck along (PUN!) at 65 or whatever and smell the roses.  That being said, I have no such patience for those who see it fit to drive along the freeway at 50 miles per hour in their nice new car.

What is it about the speed limit that scares you, my fellow highway traveler?  Is it the possibility that you could get a ticket for going on over?  The cops have way more on their plates than to give your lame ass a ticket.  Are you just totally wasted at three in the afternoon?  Get off the road.  Are you a moron?  But I repeat myself.

I am not sure why this is, but simply getting stuck behind a pack of these people sends me into a rage spiral I usually reserve for trying to park in the Pearl on a Saturday night in July.

- Are people really so dumb that they don’t realize that they don’t have to yell into their Bluetooth headsets?  Most of those people are rich enough to afford the nice ones, and yet not intelligent enough to realize that Sharp, or Sony, or whoever spent a great deal of money to make sure that the audio pickup in their hands-free device was of sufficient sensitivity to pick up the rapid fire douchbaggery uttered forth uncomfortably into the public domain by the plaid-skirted moron who decided to bring it into Target instead of just talking on the phone (I would liek to point out that my computer does not recognize the word douchebaggery meaning that my computer is not nearly as smart as me.  Screw you, Apple).

Most of these devices get a great deal of their sound pickup from the vibrations of your skull, making anything more than the faintest whisper really overkill. This makes standing in line and shouting into thin air about your latest “romantic”conquest or any other number of unseemly things double-overkill… a phrase which I have now copyrighted: patent pending.

The best part comes when these people are walking around with their phone in their hand, often staring at it while they talk like it has to be visible for the headset to work.  Idiots.

–Oh, and as an aside, it is not “A Bluetooth.”  It is a headset, or a hands free device, or a magic floating ear-talker, or whatever you want to call it. Bluetooth is the technology that makes it work.  Get it right.–

-Listen up, politics people, this one is for you (unless you want to stay my friend, then don’t read this): When are you people going to realize that getting your point across by screaming at the top of your lungs, calling names and vilifying those who disagree with you doesn’t work?  All name calling and shouting and slander does is take your view, radicalize it, then marginalize it.  No one is going to listen to the person who is coming at them like a rocket propelled grenade – flying across the room in a rage spitting fire and threatening to blow you the eff up – when they can try to talk to the calm guy with the tea at the chess table.

Now, I am a pretty moderate guy (I know, I know, this blog is usually non-political, but this has to be said).  I definitely lean toward the liberal side of most things, but definitely right around the ultraviolet part of the total spectrum (it’s a joke you have to work for… figure it out).  I am also smart enough to realize that if I disagree with someone and want to have a constructive, intelligent, and hopefully useful debate with said person, slapping him across the face and calling them an idiot, a non-believer, or any other of the slanderous and maleficent names I have heard from friends and family in the last month or so is not the way to go about it.

I’m not saying that lively debate is not a good thing; it is the basis of our entire system and frankly I think that there is not enough of it in politics these days, but there is a very strong and obvious line between lively debate and insulting someone using the justification of “because I said so.”

This phenomenon is exactly why I stay out of politics, because all I see on the television all day long is people slamming each other; their intelligence, their upbringing, their color, their patriotism, etc. etc. RabbleRabbleRabble…  This is all I read in the papers, mostly all I read on blogs, all I get inundated with all day long…  People HATING on each other.

Know what I never see?  I never see people saying “We have these problems to solve, lets stop whining and thrashing about because everything is not going exactly our way and use the resources that we have at our disposal as the richest most powerful nation on earth and get them solved.”  Now, I’m not nearly as smart as a lot of the people I know, and they all know a lot more about politics than I do – because I don’t really care – but I DO understand this.

Figure it out, jerks, and quit being children.

-  There are gangs in Portland.  Yup: Bloods, Crips, 18th St dipshits… the works.  Every time Firefighter works in SE (Not the part full of Patchouli, the part full of idiots) or NW (Not the part full of artsy-fartsties, the part full of idiots) I hear stories of people shooting people, stabbing people, doing other idiot things like running from a Police Dog… All of them gang related.

Why does this bother me?  It really shouldn’t…  I mean far be it from me to get upset at people acting stupid and providing me with entertainment, but still; these are KIDS that are SHOOTING each other because they are on the wrong street.  Or got their Puma’s scuffed… One kid shot another over ten bucks worth of weed.

OF WEED

Seriously?  In Portland Oregon?  Weed falls from the sky here like three times an effing year and yer shootig someone over ten bucks worth?  really?  It bothers me that a city with such a progressive culture and social system there is still room for people to act like utter fools in this manner.  Thats really the crux of it, I suppose.

Ok… that’s it for now…  I burned out my annoyance already… but trust me, these days there is plenty more to come!  Next up = Why NASA pisses me off (those of you that know me should be looking forward to a blog with that as a tagline).

Trillithon and the Watering Down of Human Ingenuity.

SO I recently watched an episode of Mega-Movers about ancient mega moves.  For the uninitiated, that means big things are moved distances by either some machine or other ingenious and often Rube Goldberg-esque contraption.  It’s a cool show, especially when you are the kind of guy that like really, really big equipment that can not only move weights equaling the size of Tom Cruise’s ego, but suck down dead-dinosaurs like they were going out of style (get it?).

Anyway, this show was about huge moves of really heavy things performed by people like the ancient Aztecs, the Romans and whoever the hell it was that built those freaky heads on Easter Island.  The thing that really caught my attention, though, was a set of three stones, called theTrillithon.  These stones are the largest hewn stones on the planet, and are a part of the foundation of the Temple of Jupiter, in a town called Baalbek in what is now Lebanon.  Some info:

These stones were hewn from living rock and moved over three miles, hoisted up to 20 feet in the air and placed with such precision that a playing card can not be inserted between them and subsequent freaking huge stones.  These stones are 70 feet long, ten feet tall and over 14 feet thick, and are estimated to weigh between 1,000 and 1,500 tons.  They are part of a foundation for the temple of Jupiter and are of such high-quality that they support the load on top of them without having cracked.

The real kicker?  These stones were placed at LEAST 3,000 years ago by the Romans, and many people believe that the Romans actually capitalized on the engineering of earlier people and built their temple on top of someone else’s foundation since it was obviously the most stable place around.

Why do I tell you of these amazing stones?  Because there is no way that we could do the same thing today.  Well, we could; modern floating cranes can lift a couple of thousand tons, and the space-shuttle transporter could probably move these stones to where they need to be, but it would require the creation of specialized equipment and complex hydraulic, electrical and other systems that would undoubtedly take months or years and millions of dollars and computer to come up with.

The romans did this without advanced math.  Without computers, hydraulic motors, or heavy-lift trucks.  Hell, at that time they were hurting for metal hard enough to help them; the stones were cut and shaped using harder rocks called “hammer-stones” because no one knew how to make metal hard enough to chisel rock.

My point is this (and this ties into an earlier post that I wrote while on the Apollo kick, uploaded incorrectly, screwed up, got frustrated with and lost motivation to re-write, so bear with me):  Human reliance on technology and bureaucracy has crippled us when it comes to things like this.

Now hold on, before you start thinking of me as someone who is going to start mailing bombs to people, let me explain:

The Romans constructed massive edifices of stone and brick that still stand today three thousand years later with no materials engineering or structural load computations.  25 and 30 year old nerds at NASA built a spaceship that took a dozen people to the moon under budget, on time and with dazzling success using SLIDE RULES.  Now we are hard pressed to put a new airliner in the air or a new bridge over a river a decade after it was thought up because of our insistence that everything be computed, vetted by 5,000 different agencies, re-engineered to meet the specifications of a different computer, mulled over by a dudesittin on the pot on his lunch break, run past a priest and the re-computed.

While I understand that this often makes things better built (by our standards) and safer, the fact that the Stealth Fighter – a quantum leap in technology and thinking – was created in the 70’s using computers whose digital IQ is dwarfed so hard as to be invisible by the processor in my wristwatch lends me to believe that we are overextending ourselves in the technology area and forgetting one really simple fact:  When Kennedy said “do this in ten years with this much money” we did it.  When who ever it was that had the temple of Jupiter built said “I want these huge freaking rocks over there now, and square” it happened.

Ingenuity and creation are being overtaken by a belief that if the computer says it can’t be done, it simply can’t be done.  This is regardless of the fact that it has, in fact, been done… and done really well by people with absolutely nothing in the way of help or guidance from anything or anyone other than the person who said “Hmmm…  1,000 ton stone moved three miles?  Let’s try this.”

I don’t really know where I am going with this.  All I know is that in my learning of the history of human creation there has been a slowing of the process of coming up with things that haven’t been done yet: feats of ingenuity and creativeness that simply boggle the mind and this has been happening with inverse proportion to the amount of technology that people use in their lives, and in the process of creation.

Again, don’t get me wrong, humans build great things all the time, but I guarantee that three thousand years from now no-one is going to be staring up at theBurj Dubai and marveling that we were able to build a building a half-mile tall.

Oh, and the best part about the trilithon?  There was another stone, twice the size of the others, ready to be moved that mysteriously never got finished:

More Things Learned.

So… I drove across the state last weekend, and engaged in revelry the likes of which I have note seen since my stint in Pullman.  This probably has to do with the fact that I was hanging out with a bunch of my old friends from Pullman, but I’m not sure.  I learned some things on this trip, and I thought that I would share them with you:

- When it is well over 100 degrees outside along your entire travel route, make sure that your vehicle has either a)air conditioning or b) a continuous supply of water.  I sweated through both a towel and a seat-covere on each leg of my trip.  I drank 3 gallons of water from Portland to Spokane and only had to stop to pee once.  This thing that I learned is probably trhe best.

-  Spokane has roads that are in worse condition than those built 1,200 years ago by the Romans.  This is a wear-and-tear problem for most vehicles, but the Jimmy and its by now well chronicled issues with its ball-joints and suspension saw these roads as a serious slap in the face, and is now more wobbly than she was before.  This had the effect of making the trip back to Portland even more “enjoyable.”

-  When playing Wii archery, make sure that you are majorly intoxicated, as the experience is greatly heightened.

-  The cheese that is placed on top of the Arby’s Beef and Cheddar sandwich is cheese in name only.  This viscous, warm and slightly salty cheese-like food is at once horrifying and delicious.

-  DON’T SPEED IN COLFAX

-  Few people, including me, realize that an 8 foot tall welded-metal windmil, when placed on top of your car, can turn it into either a low-rent storm chasing truck or a very strange and high off the ground dancefloor, depending on who happens to be standing next to it… on the roof of said car.

-  Pabst is now be the official national beer of My-Liveria.

-  Combines are everywhere on the east-side.  I always knew this, but getting stuck behind 5 of them, each taking up well over half of the two lane highway and traveling at the breakneck speed of 15 miles per hour makes a person realize exactly how much they should have taken the other way out of town.  Lesson: Always take the backway out of Colfax.

-  Seeing two people who are absolutely and in every way perfect for each other get married is very rewarding, as it gives hope that life is worth all the bad parts.  (Congrats Tink and Revy)

-  Random 18 year old farm-children that live halfway between Pullman and Palouse are very, very good at Beer Pong.

-  Random 18 year old farm-children that live halfway between Pullman and Palouse are not as good as me and the professionals I hang out with.

-  GMC really did make good cars back in the day.  The Jimmy is one of them.

-  Ducks hate me.

-  The palouse is a very, deeply beautiful place.  This is someting that I always knew, but kind of took for granted.  Words, nor the pictures that I took, can possibly convey the feelings that I had driving through thos rolling hills.

-  I never really stopped beleiving this, but the city sucks.

-  $tu is the master at practical jokes.  You win this round, but I’m next.