There's a church of Jehova's Witnesses nearby and they come by now and then. They come to the door in pairs, always. One to do the talking, and another to stand back and look mousey or hold pamphlets or both. They rang the bell today at noon. I was sittin' here reading this thing about an interesting region of the brain and munching the A+ sandwich I had just made. I was annoyed. I'd have ignored them, but the dog's bark volume was intolerable.

So I open the door to a plainly dressed 70-ish year old woman with two bottom teeth, a horrible makeup job, and a folder full of pamphlets. Behind her, the reluctant mousey type. She was about 32, maybe 35, and she stared at her feet most of the time. Toothless introduced herself and asked permission to read me a passage from the little red book in her hand.

Next time, I think I'll engage them more and not be so quick to shoo them away. What people believe and how they came to believe it is usually an interesting study.

Labels: at home, ponderage

At this time last year I was dwelling on the quickening of time. (Funny, it seems like I just wrote that the other day.) Today I'm not so obsessed about the whole tempus fugit thing. Today I've been distracted by daydreams about what that little person cooking in Nikki will be like. Pretty soon, B-days will have meaning again.

NASA wants to go back to the moon by 2018. We were just getting good at this 'man on the moon' thing back in the early 70s. Back when the entire bank of computers at ground control in Houston had less computing power than an iPod. This was before disco, for god's sake. And it's taken until now for them to want to go back for more science? Curious. But better late than never.

If you're eating, swallow and put down your food. You need to see the world's ugliest dog. You really do.

I don't know about you, but I think the science behind Gecko feet is absolutely astonishing. It's not hard to imagine what an understanding of this could lead to.

Unexpected good news from the environmental front that nobody is talking about anymore. Curious, that.

I'm surprised that so few people I know have seen Ali G. If you're not familiar with him, he's a comedian that meets with government officials, famous folks, private executives, etc., but they have no idea that he's a comedian. They think he really is a hiphop idiot with a British accent and his own lingo for everything. What amazes me is the patience they show with him. I don't know how they keep from laughing in his face when he says things like "Do men really believe in mahogany?"

I'd expect more people to react to Ali G the way Andy Rooney did. Gotta love it. I just hope he reveals the joke at the end of his bit. Or maybe it's better if he doesn't.

I don't know much about this Silver guy, but I've read in many places that being conservative in any way is a sure-fire way to kill your acting career. The new standard in stupidity, the Hollywood machine. As if the world was that black & white.

I used to drink a lot of tap water. I don't anymore. It tastes bleachy to me. But now they're talking about how we're not getting enough fluoride. Gimme a fuggin break.

This Rita is no lovely meter maid. Come on, Rita. Mellow out, will ya?

You know, it's true. People really do think they're alone in the universe when they're alone in their car. What else could explain the very real phenomenon of nose picking drivers (NPD)? I know you've seen it. I've known about it for years. But yesterday it really occurred to me that it merits discussion.

In one 6 mile drive to a work lunch, I witnessed five—count 'em—FIVE people diggin' hard, diggin' deep, diggin' so eagerly and forcefully that it resembled self-flagelation.

The first guy was at a stop light. He was going left, I was going straight. I casually looked to my left, and there it was: a 50-year old man, give or take a few years, with his left pinky up his nose, twisting it around, looking at the tip, back in for a few more twists, then another look at it, and finally, what appeared to be satisfaction as he twisted out a cornflake LARGE ENOUGH FOR ME TO SEE FROM TEN FEET AWAY THROUGH TWO PANES OF GLASS, and then put his hand down, out of my view, where he most certainly rolled it up and dropped it to his floor. This guy didn't bother to look left or right to make sure nobody could see him. He just picked away as if the last guy on Earth.

I see it everywhere.

The next guy was thirty-something. About my age I guess. He was passing me slowly on my right. He was driving a new BMW with tinted glass windows. But not so tinted that I couldn't see his interesting technique. I kept pace with him so that I could catch the show. He used his left thumb to excavate the outside wall of his left nostril. Over and over again he scraped at it, only to pull his hand down below the window line, the rolling zone. Like the first guy, he never once moved away from his forward-looking zone.

A few lights later, and lo and behold...a third NPD appeared. We stopped at about the same time. I was on his left. By this time, I was thinking about how many pickers I'd catch on this drive. I looked at my new specimen: an older guy, sixties maybe. But he wasn't picking his nose. That is, until I looked again a few seconds later. Now here was something I hadn't seen before. This guy was mining his right nostril, but he did so with his right index finger facing outward to get at the outside edge of his nose. This forced his right arm into a contorted-looking chicken wing pose, with his elbow high and his palm facing me. Experiment on yourself and you'll see what I mean. He also put on a grimace that helped him get at his prize, in the same way that we make faces when shaving to stretch and expose certain areas.

Like the others, this guy had no clue that I was looking, and he didn't appear to have a clue that anyone could see him. Here we were, stopped at an annoyingly long traffic light, almost perfectly astride each other (I was even a little ahead, giving him even more of an opportunity to notice his audience), but his booger trance crippled his periphery. I pulled away wondering if he achieved his goal. I never did see him pull that finger out.

So that's 3. I made it to the restaurant without seeing a fourth. Lunch was great. I didn't think about the NPD. As I went to pull out of the parking lot, there was a guy in front of me in an older Honda Accord, waiting on traffic so he could take his left out of the lot. There was a long line of cars we had to wait through. Then I noticed it...he was picking. I had almost forgotten about the whole thing. I didn't have a good view from behind but it looked like this guy was using the same thumb technique as NPD #2. The only difference with this guy is that he actually looked in his rear view mirror, saw me looking straight ahead, and stopped digging. Perhaps one in five NPDs is aware of themselves.

Which brings us to the fifth guy. (All guys, notice. I'm sure I've seen female NPDs, but they certainly are a minority. This is another curiosity that merits attention.) This guy was old. Old with a serious schnoz. This nose was Bogart-big. White hair, Buick, big nose, big, fleshy fingers, and great technique. I pulled up to his right, and was slightly behind him. He started with his right index finger and thumb, pulling on the median between his two nostrils. Both fingers in each nostril, and he was violent to that honker of his. This was no gentle picking, no no no. His brow was furrowed and he had a look of determination on his face as he wiggled and pulled at it. He pulled away quickly for an old guy...still molesting his nose as he went out of view.

Hey, sorry for the detail, but this is a genuine curiosity to me. Why do so many men pick their nose when they drive, and more interestingly, why do they assume that nobody's looking, or that nobody can see them? It's a trance, I tell you.

Best Ads...Ever?

I love those Southwest Air commercials that arrive every fall. You know, the "Must Be Football Season" campaign that started a few years ago. These ads have been run and re-run many times, and I never get sick of them. They still make me chuckle every time. My favorite is the one where a woman, looking at towels in a Bed Bath & Beyond sorta store, sees another woman bending over to pull a towel from a rack and towel whips her on the ass, as if controlled by an outside force. Yea! she shouts, and then retreats from the spell with a great "did I just do that?" sort of look on her face. Must be football season, indeed. If you haven't seen them, this description won't do it any justice. Just tune in for fifteen minutes to any football game this Sunday and you'll see one.

Boooo

An Ohio high school has 64 pregnant students. Politics aside, it starts with parenting. Cripes.

Al Sharpton's Victim Express stopped in Texas recently to speak poorly about something he knows no more about than anyone in your local grocery store. He met up with Charlie Sheen, who I'm sure also said many things signifying nothing. I think Cindy Sheehan's mousy crusade is ridiculous, and having Sharpton, who never appears anywhere to speak for anyone or anything, just punctuates the absurdity.

Labels: ponderage

The news, radio, and the blogosphere is chock full O' news and thoughts about the tragedy in New Orleans. I doubt I can say anything that hasn't been said...but the things that I didn't say the other day makes that post feel a little hollow as I look back on it. I've thought everything you've thought—we haven't really seen such a horrible natural disaster in this country, and its ripples will ripple on for a long time. And probably in ways we haven't imagined yet. It's so awful I'm not even sure what to say. I find myself stammering when it comes up in conversation.

Unfortunately, the main topic of conversation appears to be who to blame. There's a lot of finger-pointing going on, and I think it reveals a lot about human nature. And not the good side of it. I can only imagine what Jeanine Garafalo is screaming about right about now. Strip it all away, and it's still a natural disaster, made 10x worse by the unique geography of New Orleans. Blame inevitability.

But if there are government hearings, FEMA certainly won't look very good, but I don't think Nawlins officials will come out of it looking particuarly good, either. Every section of the levee system has its own fuggin committee. Nawlins is a case study in red tape. And FEMA's delayed response is a case study in WTF?

They're saying 10,000 people gone? I heard they're restricting picture-taking of the dead, because they're everywhere. And it's disturbing. I'm sure some a lot of it will show up on the Internet. I've seen a few pictures, and I can only take so much of that before I have to look away. It's taxing just to look at the disaster...can't imagine what it's like to live through it.

My mother has been volunteering nearly every day at the Red Cross, and nearly every day she calls me, crying, telling me the stories of the people she's seeing. The belated mass exodus out of the affected areas has reached just about every city in the U.S. People that made it into Rochester and to my mom's volunteer desk were fortunate enough to have either friends or family here willing to provide them refuge.

Everyone she has helped has said the same thing: "I've seen some terrible, terrible things...my children have seen terrible, terrible things..." It puts ice in your veins. And one man, a New Orleans cook, said to her, "I've seen some horrible things...and I've seen some wonderful things." I hope we hear more of that on the news in the coming days, weeks, and months.

And my earlier comment about how some people should have heeded the dire warnings and evacuated...I also know that the story of The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf applies here. Most of the people of New Orleans have heard "big storm" so many times they'd come to believe that it couldn't disrupt their lives. Yea, I'm sure simple stubbornness came into play for a few, but that would have to represent a tiny minority, and I regret having made that my only thought about the whole thing. I just wasn't able to believe what I was hearing at the time.

You'd think that the levee system would have been built to sustain the worst case scenario. Nah. Not every city would need such protection, but if there's ONE city that does (did), it's New Orleans.

And I've been thinking about all the historic architecture that has been lost. Beautifully ornate historic gems by the hundreds will have to be razed. You know they won't even bother to duplicate them—some of that type of construction is a lost art, which is another sad subject. So the city, when rebuilt, might consist of pre-fabbers and a few weak attempts to duplicate the historic gems, which will make Nawlins look like a segment of Epcot center.

Then you have the lost art. The seat of jazz, tipped over. How many brilliant musicians are floating along with the barrels and planks and rats and feces? I shudder to think of what will be revealed when all this dries up.

Labels: commentary

When I made those comments about intelligent design the other day, I was doing so within the context of the golden ratio. Over too many of Todd's martinis, I learned something new: "Intelligent Design" is a political movement, so to speak. I know, I know. I should have known that. There have probably been hundreds of articles on it, and surely I'd seen a few, right? Well I didn't, and don't call me Shirley.

To me, "intelligent design" is, or was, precisely what you'd think: the notion that something greater than ourselves designed This Whole Thing. Nothing more. Nothing dogmatic, just open to the Grand Idea. I'm comfortable with that notion provided people don't draw lines in the sand and claim that their knowledge of this creator is deeper and more personal and more accurate than yours or mine.

I'm fine with "intelligent design" unless it seeks to disqualify the decades of excellent science supporting evolution. "Intelligent design" and evolution should not necessarily be mutually exclusive. Evolution could simply be a process by which the intelligence works. Like a baking cake, perhaps. I'm fine with the idea unless it seeks to close the book on our most important questions. If there's a giant worldwide scientific revelation next spring, for example, our views should evolve with the information. Many people will think such information, whatever it would be, is merely a test of faith by the Temptor Himself. Arguing with this type of thought is futile.

What we know, by virtue of what what we can measure and duplicate should be taught. I don't think beliefs have any business in public schools, from a teaching perspective. But I also don't think we should be telling students that they can't pray to whatever god they choose, even if it's smack dab in the middle of homeroom. In 6th grade, I once prayed to the goddess that was Rachel Walsh. She never answered the call, which might explain my agnosticism as an adult.

Anyway, that's just my $0.02

Sack Him

Listening to the interviews and reading about his response, it's obvious that FEMA Under Secretary Mike Brown should resign immediately. How clueless and ineffective can a director be?

I'm Going to Say It

There are a lotta fingers being pointed in and around Nawlins. Some probably deserved, some probably not deserved. But let's be real here. SOME of the blame has to go to the victims themselves—those who COULD get out. They were warned days in advance. Then they were warned again and again and again: GET OUT. I forget the timeline, but I heard that public transportation was available. But some people were stubborn. You can't get to everybody when "everybody" is in the thousands, scattered all about in their attics.

Oy, when this water recedes, it's going to be a horror show.

I'm Going to Say This, Too

The media has been asking leading questions that imply that the "current administration" doesn't care about poor people and that's why there are dead bodies floating in the Nawlins floodwaters. Come ON...it's really pathetic how low some people will go to politicize a tragedy. Race issues have been brought up. It's BULLSHIT.

But I don't like the fact that the U.S. appears to be ignoring the offers of many countries. At its most basic, it's rude. If countries are offering to help, TAKE IT! WTF?!

Labels: ponderage