A Paper April's Fool Moon

While digging through some old magazines, I found a reference to Nature, which reminded me of the old Omni magazine, Insight, and others that wound up in a refuse bin and perhaps in a landfill somewhere.  Now, we have e-mags and nearly instant cross-references, where this becomes that and we spread the news to blogs and pollywogs and frogs and pigtails.  I eat my wasabi peas listening to "Celtic" music thinking about water fleas and ant colonies moving from one potted tree in our house to another and then into the cereus pot (cereus, not serious or Sirius, not serial or cereal, either).

Redbuds blooming, Cornish Rex grooming.

On this day when a group sent me a message via an April Fool's Day joke, which they wanted to imply says what the real reason an ancient library was destroyed (to hide the prehistoric evidence of prehistoric evidence, evidently), I thumb through Harry Moore's Miocene musings called "The Bone Hunters," looking for the real clue to the next adventure our species is about to take.

Beyond automatic colour tracing...

Beyond the quad cube...

How do you demonstrate strength in weakness?

How do you turn play money into real prizes?

How does a wasp make a nest?

In this country, we don't make national heroes out of self-proclaimed martyrs - instead, we honour those who die in selfless service to society in general (police, firefighters, medical workers, military, etc.). 

However, you can't just shove that kind of social status down the throats of those in a different society. 

Figure out how to honour the dead in two opposing societies and you figure out how the living can live together, finally aligning two sets of youth training toward reaching one goal of the greater good for all, allowing dissident voices to argue about spinoff goals that might help us find even better goals one day.

A praying mantis, a spider, a hummingbird and a moth - what does a hawk want with these?  How important is the lichen, moss or mosquito to them?

If you sell chemical fertilizer, you value green lawns with few insects or weeds.  If you sell fruits and vegetables, you value the honeybee.  How do both sellers compromise and agree to a goal of the greater good for all?

Subcultures.  They're everywhere.

Will you be ready when we activate your sleeper cell for the greater good?  Can you see it might be something as simple as asking you to turn on your television set and watch a popular program that your whole family will enjoy?  Can you see it might be something as complex as accepting new job training and moving to a different part of the world where you don't speak the dominant local language?  Would you give up your chemical sales job to become a beekeeper?  Would you give up your vegetable farming to become a chemical engineer?

According to another message I received yesterday (via the arrangement of catfood cans in a pet store), some of you animal breeders will set up a communications network via read/write ID chips embedded in pedigree pets, using the pet owners' own WiFi networks to spy on them and their lifestyle habits in order to strengthen future sales of high-end pets (the strength in weakness demonstration, perhaps?).  Nothing like seeing your customer from your product's (pet's) perspective!

Time to listen to the Great Mother and the Great Father for a while.  They've been bugging me to go deeper into the meaning of life on this planet so I can see the grand vision intended for those who will first communicate with life on another celestial body.  They tell me it has little to do with intelligence as we see it and more to do with chemistry and low-power wavelength alignment.  They also tell me that we will learn to put aside superiourity and respect the sovereignty of unique lifeforms or we will never learn to survive on other worlds.  More after I meditate on what they told me and what others have thought about many times before I arrived here in my temporary cellular form.

And yes, my computer programming friends - Czech, Russian, Chinese, et al - I am looking at the data you put together for me.  Of course, the virtual world is important but it's not the only situation I'm situated in.  There are some offworld issues to assess so I can decide which countries will be toppled in years to come to align the past, present and future in this instant.  Nothing is permanent, my friends, including our valuable friendships - everything transforms.