Journals of Lord Malinov

the poetry of madness

I am Hugh

~~~
"Oversimplify?  You accuse me of oversimplifying?  I NEVER oversimplify"
~~~
"I am Hugh."

"You are me?"

"I am Hugh."

"Stop saying that!  Make him stop saying that!"
~~~

After a windy comment on Jackal's blog, I sent a letter to my arch-rival, Hugh, offering sincere thanks and an apology.  No one deserves to bear the brunt of projected internal-conflicts.  Recognizing how much Hugh has helped me along my path to self-discovery leaves me substantially in his debt.  Gratis Hugh.  You played my shadow well.

Cats is feeling much better today.  Her illness, it appears, was not tequila induced but rather a reaction to some bad shrimp.  I don't imagine the tequila helped any, but it has been cleared of all charges.  The shrimp is being held for questioning.

I am nurturing guitarlust for a big hollow-body electric guitar - craving a chance to play with the big dirty sound of the Lennon-Setzer-Thurogood guitar.  My first electric guitar was of that type but I sold it when I was still a teen.  I have a cheap Stratocaster (with a whammy bar) and a beautiful Ibanez acoustic.  I don't play much, certainly not enough to warrant buying a new guitar, but if I had this particular new guitar, things would be different.  I'd play all day, all night, in stereo. 

Thank goodness I'm old enough to not believe my own bullshit.  I love the guitar, I love music and I love singing.  Somewhere back down the road, however, I accepted the sad fact that I could do everything poorly or I could do a few things well.  Time spent with my guitars is, unfortunately, time spent not writing.  I will pick up an instrument when I have the urge, but choices are required and I would usually rather write than eat.

Leonardo, they say, dabbled in everything and had trouble finishing anything.  Can you say ADD?  I knew you could.

Hopefully, we'll make it to the Cottonwood today, although the weather doesn't look inviting.  Texas weather, however, is continually unpredictable so looking outside at 9:30 is no indication of what's to come.  I hear the national weather service uses a magic 8-ball for their predictions.   Nothing but barbed wire stands between us, the north pole and the equator. 

I love Texas because the state has an attitude of independence.  Between the Baptists and the Mavericks, we certainly don't all like each other but there is a mutual respect that stands together like family.  I was born in Kansas, a place I truly love, but there is more whining than unity in the land of bread.  Farmers, in my experience, tend to compete with a "you think that's bad, I've had it worse," approach.  I spent fifteen years in DC, a sedimentary society with a great international quality and a lack of continuity that mars local cohesion.  In some ways, Dallas and DC are opposite ends of a spectrum, even though in other ways, they are almost indistinguishable.  Strange world.

I suggested to Hugh that I pay him a visit when I am in DC later this month.  He suggested that we play guitar together, a pastime we never shared in the past, with no knowledge of what I had written above.  Synchronicity happens. 

We watched a documentary on meteor impacts - a possibility that is very real, still largely unmonitored and with no plan in the works should we find the threat approaching.  A large rock could easily wipe out the human race, a fate the dinosaurs knew too well.  There are at least 200,000 asteroids with at least a half-mile diameter that cross our orbit.  We have identified only 60% of those stones.  Of the other 40%, we know absolutely nothing.  The genocidal impact that could arise from one of those rocks could come at any moment.  Unless we have at least three years warning, there isn't a damn thing we could do to save ourselves.  There are trillions of asteroids in our solar system.  There are also trillions of untracked comets, each moving at about 150,000 mph.   You are four times more likely to be struck by a meteorite than a bolt of lightning.

My father was struck by lightning last summer.   I think we need to start thinking seriously about the threat of an impact. 

Hollywood has led most of us to think the problem can be dealt with by using nuclear explosions.  That is completely untrue and any attempt to use nukes would make the situation worse.  Exploding a mountain doesn't vaporize the mountain - it makes a whole bunch of radioactive boulders.  The largest warhead ever exploded was 60 megatons.  It would take an explosion in excess of 1000 megatons to simply alter the course of a large asteroid.

So much for personal, local, national and international conflicts.  We have something real to worry about.

The we watched a show on alien abductions.  Having watched a few paranormal documentaries, I have identified the major problem I have with their experts.  "There is no other explanation, but the paranormal one,"  they invariably state.  Having a deliciously creative mind, I can say for certain that there is ALWAYS another possible explanation.  Once we recognize the full spectrum of possibilities, Occam's razor comes into play.

A scientist showed us an experiment where a magnetic field was applied to a subjects brain.  With the right frequencies and solenoid placement, they induced hallucinations in a young man that perfectly coincide with the standard alien abduction stories.  Fascinating, n'cest pas?

Being reasonably skeptical, I know the experiment can hide just as many flaws as any other explanation.  Scientists are as prone to mistakes and misrepresentations as any other class of people.  Occam's razor suggests that a phenomenon caused by an electrical field is much more probable than creating an alien race with advanced technology who mysteriously appear to perform bizarre medical experiments.  I don't pretend to know more than I do.  I tend to trust the simpler explanation, but complexity happens too.

My problem is the scientist - pseudo-scientist, perhaps - who says that the simple explanation is too far-fetched to consider and there is no possible explanation but the complex one.  We know very little about our minds - an organ so complex that we have only scratched the surface of understanding.  Furthermore, our minds control everything we think, feel, know, believe, see and do.  It isn't hard to imagine that our minds could do things we can't imagine.  It's certainly easier to believe that weirdness than to fabricate an entire super-intelligent species who manages to interact with a few individuals without leaving a trace of evidence that would prove their existence.  Occam's razor is a merciless and honest principle and more than most practical beliefs, I have great faith in its general truth.



Onward and Upward,

Malinov

posted by: Malinov at 08:45 | link | comments (2) |
tales of passing time

Comments:

#1  08 May 2005 - 21:55

 

my view of aliens was forever changed by the oft mentioned steven pinker. he said that intelligence is just a tool that a certain ape like creature evolved to keep from being eaten. it is not what all creature evolve into. it is no more likely for an animal to have intelligence than it is to have another specialized evolutionary tool, like an elephants trunk. so giant civilizations all over the universe of intelligent beings are about as likely as dumb beings with trunks. seti and star trek will never be the same for me now.

bluematrix

#2  09 May 2005 - 11:23

 

Yeah... so I didn't have enough to worry about. Now I get to walk around expecting to be pounded into the ground by a falling rock. I'm on my way out to buy a stronger umbrella.:)

Ladyinthemoon

Comments: