Superstition...or Rabbit Truth?
I read something last night I rather fancied, on a long-neglected blog called Predatory Awareness, and I'd like to share it: "I don't know where this morsel of superstition came from, but I grew up knowing that good luck will come to you for the whole month if you wake on the first day of the month and say "White Jack Rabbit" before anything else."
Slide Rulers
I was never smart enough to understand slide rules, much less use them. I wish I had learned, though, so I could trot out my anachronistic expertise in the presence of young people who would marvel at the ancient tools of the mystical Geezer. No! No! No, I don't want to learn now, so don't offer to teach me! The only way I would want to learn to use the slide rule now is through painless hypodermic injections of pure information, much the same way I would like to learn Spanish, calculus, Latin, how to field dress a freshly-killed javelina, and how to calculate the volume of a deepwater lake. I'm no longer interested in the messy aspects of knowledge acquisition. I want to acquire it through injection or, in a pinch, nasal inhalation of pure information. For those of you with a lust for slide rule knowledge and who are unafraid of the messiness of the process, I recommend to you a web site dedicated to slide rulery.
Unfinished Story...And You'll See Why
I started a story last night, but did not finish it, because I felt certain it would end badly, with aliens erupting from the telling of it. Here is the premise from which it started:
The streets...the actual surfaces of the byways over which automobiles pass...of a suburban neighborhood begin to change one evening while a resident, who I called Jarlan Sisco, was out for his afternoon über-walk. What had been just average mottled black asphalt with specks of white and gray and blue thrown in started looking "deeper." That is, just as the surface of a highly polished automobile seems to have depth, so too did the streets. At first, Jarlan could not figure out what was different on his walk, but as the changes in the streets became more pronounced, he gradually began to understand what was different. Jarlan slowed his walk so he could get a better look at this transition taking place in the street beneath his feet. He thought he saw vague outlines of moving figures take shape far beneath the surface, but he decided it was his imagination. Periodically as he stared at the street, he looked around to be sure no one was watching his odd behavior...leaning down close to the roadway, peering intently at the surface of the street.
The more he stared, though, the more he was convinced there was something down there. A black and green underworld was materializing before his eyes. He could vaguely see the outlines of swaying trees and bushes, flowing water, steep cliffs, and lots of pipes and wires...enormous volumes of pipes and wires. He could see the puffs of steam erupt from the pipes. As the minutes passed, he started to feel the world beneath him. As steam erupted from pipes, he began to feel almost imperceptible shudders of the ground under his feet. When branches of the trees he could see below him slammed into the sheer edge of a cliff, he felt an abrupt jolt beneath him.
The reason I stopped? Isn't it obvious? It is meaningless drivel and has no place to go but down.
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