Quantum What?

We will have to sharpen our writing skills in the sci/fi category to keep up with the stuff they’re coming up with. A few days ago I didn’t know we needed Woolly Mammoths to be cloned and yet we have Brainiacs working on it. Now I find out our lab coated busy bees have neared a breakthrough in not only Quantum Teleportation but also Time Teleportation Time After Time. Quantum entanglement of particles means they can be linked when separated by miles or light years, making it possible for something affecting one particle to also affect the other. Yikes! Apparently it’s just a matter of time before by using this key the Pandora’s Box of time travel may be possible. We all know nothing can possibly go wrong doing that.  :(

Going Gently

My wife, Saint Joyce, and I had a very funny black humor night Saturday. See, when you either hit 60 like me or get near it like her thoughts of living and dying suffer a drastic paradigm shift. We’ve always been fans of the ‘Grumpy Old Men’ philosophy - as when someone died peacefully in their sleep in the movie the two old grumps played by Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau would mumble ‘Lucky Bastard’ under their breath. Facing a few facts when you have way more years behind you than in front is a necessity – first fact being no one gets out of here alive. All that lame talk about ‘Do not go gently into that good night’ is crapolla when you’re facing months of agonizing pain or you’re so far out of it you wish someone would leave you off on an ice floe for the polar bears to eat.

Second fact – when you’re lucky enough to have someone hang out with you for over three decades and raise a couple kids, who laughs at your sick jokes, it’s fun to blow off conventional conversations on death and get right to the jokes. Hell, it ain’t going to matter if you make fun of it anyway. So, we’re lying in bed on Saturday night and I tell Saint Joyce about such and such dying in their sleep… adding my usual ‘Lucky Bastard’.

“You better not pull that crap on me,” Joyce tells me.

“What’re you gonna’ do, beat me up?” I immediately do my imitation of assuming room temperature on the bed for a moment before hopping up and pretending I’m her finding me the next morning. “Oh you did not just die in your sleep! Wake up… you no good rotten dog!” After which I imitate Joyce choking and slapping me trying to wake the dead me. I then reassume my place as the corpse, flopping around, tongue hanging out with one eye closed and the other open under her attack.

Joyce is howling by then and I have to halt my one man show while she catches her breath. She’s gasping and pointing at me. “I…I’m so telling the kids. You’re sick!”

“There’s a news flash. You better pray I don’t wake up next to you in any of that damn peaceful demise stuff.” I’m just warming up.

Joyce decides to parrot me in falsetto voice. “What’re you gonna’ do, beat me up?”

“Nope. I’ll abuse the body.”

“What?!”

“I’ll drag you out on the street naked.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

I just smile over at her and shrug.

“Now I hope you do die in your sleep, Sicko! Is tomorrow morning too soon?”

See, I’ve eased my wife past the pain of my passing and I’m still alive… temporarily anyway.  :)

Just What We Need

Here’s some good news Woolly Clone. The science people believe we’re only four years away from cloning our own Woolly Mammoth. I bet you didn’t know we needed new Woolly Mammoths. I know I didn’t. I guess they fit in with the new ice age. I wonder if the cloners have some way to create enough food to feed them too. Next thing will be the T-Rex. I know we’re all on the edge of our seats waiting for a herd of those too. At least they’ll have enough to eat with billions of us running around like willing happy meals on two legs.  :)

CO2 Storage Gaffe

From the unintended consequences category comes a report from Canada of animals dying and the ground fizzing like soda pop thanks to a leaking CO2 injection storage area underground Fizz. The company, Cenovus, should have done what the rest of the carbon market scammers do – use imaginary product. By injecting vast amounts of a gas Mother Nature never intended to be injected these idiot Climate saviors ended up causing more damage than anything happening in reality. I guess now they can finally claim it's a man-made disaster.

Anti-Matter Bursts

The yellow light bursts in this picture, terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, show what happens when thunderstorms in our globe’s atmosphere produce anti-matter beams captured by a space telescope pointed back at earth Gamma-Rays. Made possible by the intense electron field in a storm colliding with atoms and molecules they encounter, they beam yellowish light back out into space. Now we know how the Hulk and Zombies came into existence. :)

As a follow-up to yesterday’s schizophrenic blog here’s a quiz Blame with what the media deems hate speech, authored by some unusual suspects who go unnoticed by our otherwise ultra-sensitive journalists. It does illustrate how when fingers point in a particular direction whenever tragedy strikes, the actual facts in the blame-game miss the target completely – insanity.

Tuesday on Planet Earth

An article on a green blob the Hubble photographed giving birth to new stars shifts perspective from the decidedly bizarre stuff happening on our own 3rd Rock - The Green.

For a first class look at the recent bizarre stuff back here on earth I suggest reading this excellent piece by David Brooks in the New York Times. While I think journalistic integrity died at the NYT long ago, once in a while one of their reporters writes an article giving us a glimpse of what reporting on events might have been like without a slant back in the old days. Mr. Brooks takes a hard look at the country's newest monster with levelheaded precision and insight. Focus

Animal Apocalypse?

The media displaced everything to deal with the latest animal death oddities Sudden Demise. This article dealing with the facts and theories is about the best I’ve found. I’ve read stuff claiming everything from of course Global Warming to Alien Death Rays. Having grown up in Tornado country back in the fifties there was an old farmer saying about it raining cats and dogs. In a tornado such happenings on a small scale had occurred at some time to generate the saying. Because of actual sightings involving someone’s Toto spinning down out of the sky we know a lot of strange, unexplainable things can happen where nature is involved… that is until the media gets a slow news cycle – then it becomes the animal apocalypse and we of course are to blame.  :)