When Old News Is Good News

How long can you sit or stand and look up at trees?  The simple, guilty pleasures of living a suburban life where food grows in grocer's markets and security is provided by unseen forces.  Ahh ...

A dry spring so far on this part of the world.

Flat pencils.

A, are you ready to replace Andie in a fully-scripted, better-paced version of a Cornwell novel?  Or is it time to turn Patricia's writing into roleplaying video games?

Valerie Bertinelli - you sure make me want to spend money getting slimmer (Jason Alexander, not so much).  How long ago did we have crushes on your TV character?

So who came up with the theory about blackmailed pilots, artificial fog and electronic jamming equipment to make it look like the final approach confused IFR-rated flight crews?  When you don't know, go with the simpler explanation.  Ri-i-ght!

Same for black holes and wormholes.  Look at historical comments:

• Carl Sagan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
• Marcello Truzi: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."
• Pierre-Simon Laplace: "The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness."

We may live in a Vedic world, a First Nations world, or a skeptical scientist's posit that worlds don't really exist but we can make sense of enough of this experience called life to establish simple rules for living.

Twenty amino acids, for instance.  Run your permutations and combinations to figure out if a two-dimensional x-y acre or hectare with an infinite z converging to Earth's core and diverging into space contains organisms with only 20 amino acids.

Diversity, not sameness.  Varying densities, not one thickness.

Time to get down to business and show where tea/coffee party piñatas can be purchased.  We're not here to threaten your sense of place.  We want to strengthen your belief in selfhood while broadening your belief in new experiences.

Save that thought for the next blog entry.  This middle-aged fool wants to take a moment to light a candle in memory of all the organisms that have died this week - famous, infamous, notorious, heroic and unknown - a simple act to honour the memories of those who no longer create their own memories and depend on us to remember them for the simple fact that they lived, no matter what they did.