Half-blind Faith and Half-baked Science

Well, it all started with a miraculously convenient find, what appeared to be a finial from a cross at a site probably associated with the Christian Mission. Those of us working on the project had been softened up, conditioned to accepting the extraordinary through the previous miracle of finding identical Native-style tools wrought in stone and glass, evidence of the Contact we'd been speculating about. For the finials, as with so many alleged relics of the True Cross over the years, there was no proof, although in this case it was a plausible and interesting enough story that it tempted faith.

Upon further examination, stemming from the dogged (of not Godded) persistence of a scientist not quite comfortable with the all-too-easy retreat to calling an unknown artifact a "ritual object," the site kicked up a bunch more of these last week. Too many to be a cross, and in a place where they might be from a century after the Mission packed up and headed north.

Oh well. The story, and my confession at the altar of science, is over at ArchaeOlygy. It is not all a tale of faith undermined, but a strange cycle that may loop back to the Tenino Stone.

So on a day when many of you celebrate a miracle of resurrection, I wish you well. I cannot share ultimate faith in the un-provable, but I share my physicist Dad's awe at the universe wrought by forces we may not yet fully comprehend, but which we can investigate and (with stumbles now and then) come to know for sure.

My Sporadic Ritual of Cellphonicide

My flip-phone may be gone, but this shirt is forever.

It would be easy to blame the occasional destruction of cellphones on my work. If I just told people that it was dropped into a bottomless lava tube, or drowned in a Cascadian stream, or even dropped in some remote spot where the next person to see it will be an excited archaeologist (who happens to be a cousin of President Bush VI), they would believe it.

Other than one that was swampified on a wapato hunt (I'd held a camera over my head for hours, while the phone was in my pocket, in the mud, so it was a stupid waste), however, the culprit has generally been the washing machine, into which I'd thrown the phone, again in the pocket. Maybe if I'd had one of those phone holsters, accepted awkward accoutrements in the name of protecting the phone, but no, I liked the pocket of my fake Carhart work pants, the skinny one on the side that's so convenient for a phone. Two fingers reach in and chopstick the phone up, an instant of weightless apex, then it falls into my palm and the thumb flips it open. Tactile satisfaction that became one of those small rituals we don't even recognize as rituals.

That one will be no more, because after destroying my most recent phone, the cheapest phone they have now is the kind with the little keyboard that slides out. Not as fun, so far. I mean, it's not smart and there's no touch screen, so I can still embarrass my kids with it, but it's just not the same as flipping, which for someone my age is so layered in meta and ironicool. As a kid, Star Trek's communicator was the future. As an adult, the future arrived, and a huge percentage of first-calls on first-generation flip-phones included a Shatneresque pose and the words "Beam me up." Now, those times and tech are archaic (the actual flip-phone era, that is, the Trek ones still being acceptable on a certain level to younger hipsters). But I digress, and recognize that I am in way over my head trying to talk Trek.

No telling how long this phone will last. I don't think I'll miss it like the flipper, which is not all that much, to be honest, flip-phones being a flimsy substitute for the old Nokia brick.

The Brick, in Period-appropriate Resolution

Compared to the flip-ritual, the less frequent (and thus, more momentous) ritual of cellphonicide embodies much more. Like the drift into reminisce I got into above, a lamentation that the consumption economy leads always to new models, more features, more intrusion, a big shallow network in which nobody is worth more than a few seconds' attention and the ads will not cease. Killing the phone may have been an accident, but as with any religious act, retroactive imbuement with significance is allowed, and it can be ruled a sacrifice. The disdain for the dead phone, stripped and recycled (resurrected, perhaps, in some 3rd World place, but that's not my doing) is also a statement: I don't care about this gadget and its demise.

Of course, I do end up going out and getting another phone. I'm no John Henry (especially since I have no more Nokia, which oculd be used to hammer a jack). At the store, I subject the young staff who actually feel sorry for my backwardness to a cold luddite demand that they get me something that's cheap as shit and goes on my prepaid plan. No contract, no data plan, no upgraded phone. No small talk foreplay to the upsell, get me my archaic phone so I can get back to embarrassing my kids.

Losing the phone means losing the numbers stored up on its card, and though I could just ask the NSA to tell me, getting a new phone means I'll seek out people again. Contacting them some other way and asking for their number again, renewing the connections, and talking with some people whose voices I've not heard for a while when I do finally find them. It used to be easier, because I used to remember numbers instead of making my phone do it, or, if you can believe it, I would write them down. Also, there are the connections that don't continue. For one last time, I think about that person I don't think about anymore, or someone I do think about turns out to be out of reach, no number I can get at. That's the difference between evanescent reminisce and a fistful of wistfulness.

So, here I go again. My number's the same--in case you're reading this and know me--give me a call. I'll reconnect, and enjoy that. I'll celebrate the death of another phone (forgot to mention how this one went: it fell out while I was at the county landfill, never to be seen again), and shake my fist at the demons Verizon, 4g, and Smartphone. I'll have fuzzy nostaligia for old tech.

Then I'll wait til next time.

Happy Boy (Try Not to Be Offended)

I'm sorry to realize that there are those who will be offended at this, an image of Baby Jesus on a John Deere. I mean no offense, and anyway it wasn't me that staged this tableau. It was an innocent child, who happens to enjoy the Nativity scene (and yardsale-sourced tractor ornament) long after Christmas. I never could get the kids to play with the barn and plastic animals I had as a kid, but here they are replacing it with a creche, an ornament, and some wire.

And it sure looks like the holy child (who am I kidding? It's a piece of plastic, a mass-produced goof falling well short of even what idolators demand in an icon--my own kids are far more holy) is enjoying his ride. Good to get out of the manger, where the sheep have taken to whining and the cow continues her endless judgmental gossipy monologue. Joseph and Mary need some couple time, and what boy doesn't want to drive a tractor?

 

Grave Stones

Occupants of last post's family plot rest on a hillside the upper reaches of which cradle this grave. There is no fence, just a low stone wall. Instead of groomed grass, there's ivy bare to the ground in one spot and crambering over the slab in others. The headstone slab and footstone are not marble, and are strewn with a few random cobbles. No family evident, and the grave is dug through the residue of the previous occupants, who were slaves of yon president, themselves occupying what had been a wash house. 

If this grave is what archaeologists would call intrusive--excavated through prior layers--that's nothing compared to the stream of visitors passing inches away, looking down on it if they acknowledge it at all, but more often gazing over it at the distant horizon and ignoring the grave. But I covered desecration last time, and this time instead let's just look.

Or maybe not just look. Look like anthropologists, who assign great significance to burials. 

This grave is not so monumental as some in the family plot (on the hill's west slope, the sundown direction being good ground to plant the dead in many cultures), but it does hold higher ground with a commanding view, and the markers are fine enough to be sure that this is not the resting place of a slave or even a middling farmer. The inscription tells us this is the resting place of Rachel Levy, marked by her son Uriah, Virginian naval luminary. The Levy family bought the place from the president's heirs, who were among his white progeny.

The name is probably familiar to most readers as a Jewish one, and sure enough Mrs. Levy may have been born in 1790, but she died in 5591. Around the turn of the Millenium, Southern Christians took to the Jews as partners in bringing about the end times, but decades ago "Jew" was a slur in those parts, and it probably surprises a lot of people (including Virginians) to know that Jewish people could waltz their way into hallowed gentry grounds, or be commodores, but Richmond has one of the nation's oldest Jewish cemeteries, and for that matter the Confederate Secretary of War was Jewish.

Meanwhile, back at the grave, we can look at the small stones on the grave differently now, right? Seems to me there is a Jewish tradition of putting rocks on graves. Since there are not many on this one, it makes me wonder if the grounds crew removes them periodically. Do they know what's going on? What do they do with rocks they "clean" from the grave? Could they ever be persuaded to stop removing offerings of stones, and if so would the grave become a stone mound? 

Also, what's with the gothic arched stones? A nod to Christians, or just the style of the day?

I guess I'm too shiftless to apply myself and find the answers. It's getting late, and that's enough half-assed anthropological gazing for now. So I guess it's time to say Shalom, yall.

Dr. Bigelow's Time Machine

Olympia's first church/school-house. Asahel Curtis photo, citation at the end of this post.

In 1853, Olympia was neither capital nor part of a state, not even free of Oregon territory yet. It was a ramshackle frontier town, late enough in Native history to be a shadow, and early enough in American history to be attractive primarily to scoundrels and dreamers. I guess it should not come as a surprise that the citizens (of what country? maybe we should call them denizens) were having the same arguments that they have today.

Take a look at this passage from the journal of Daniel Bigelow, a lawyer who (in a reversal of modern expectations) fit more in the dreamer than the scoundrel category, being a supporter of letting non-whites own land, providing women the vote, and other heresies:

(November 8, 1853) Am endeavoring to get funds raised for a school having been elected a director, on the 4th Inst. Find some men who profess great interest in the welfare of the country, that will not pay a school tax or contribute to support a school.  I consider the heart of all such men rotten at the core  That they are destitute of principle and have no laudible desire to advance and encourage morality, and promote the general welfare.  And I here record my determination never to vote for such men, nor trust them nor deal with them only in case of necessity, For a man who has no interest in schools, to my mind has no interest in honesty

Yup. Even before we were a state, there were precursors of the 21st Century GOP, individuals who sought unfettered commerce. And by unfettered, I mean with utterly no responsibility to the common good. Maybe they figured their kids could be shipped back east for education, or maybe they considered education an abomination (though the Origin of Species had yet to be published). Maybe they were home-schooling their kids in between felling virgin forests and stealing Salish prairies for farmland.


"But hold on a minute," you might say. "Who said that people who oppose public education were commerce-boosters?" Daniel R Bigelow, that's who:

(February 8, 1854) The first election for Washington Territory just past. Columbia Lancaster elected Delegate to Congress, Myself one of the Councelman for Thurston Co, in the Legislature.  Great efforts was made to defeat my election by the grocery influence, because I do not patronize groceries.  But I hope to live to see the sale of liquor prohibited as a beverage in this Territory, and decency and morality prevail.

Replace "groceries" with "CostCo," or for that matter, jsut keep "groceries," and you have one of the most recent election's main issues encapsulated. It makes me want to start a Bigelow Community Garden, where we can grow food free of the impure grocery influence. Not that I'm against liquor, mind you, but more the influence of a particular capitalist enterprise putting itself above the public good of, for example, having state store which employed a thousand or so people at a living wage, and which did not sell liquor late in the evening, when people are more likely to get in trouble with it, and which had no accounting tricks to keep the state revenue from flowing to other public goods. 

Some of you may have detected an anti-religious bent to my statements above, a residue of evolutionist thinking that proves bitter to the pious palate. But again, that's not the case. I know some religiously observant people from the various monotheisms and polytheisms who are genuinely good, who love their fellow humans, and treat them with kindness and respect. Religion does not (always) douse that flame of common human decency, but hypocrisy does, as the good Dr. Bigelow (himself a habitual churchgoer) noted:

(October 28, 1853) Several of the new Territorial officers are in town.    since their arrival rowdyism has greatly increased in town. There is to-night a ball which is considered a fashionable affair, because it is patronized by the officers. Professed Christians go, for the benefit of society as they allege (but really for fear they will not be ranked with the aristocracy. I am at present considered rather an odd chap, not showing respect and attention enough to the said officers etc for which they are going to ride over me rough shod (if they can)


So there we have it. Same-old same-old. I wish we'd learn, but I'm not holding my breath.



And now, for the citation I promised you:

Negative Number	A. Curtis 01401
Repository	University of Washington Libraries. Manuscripts, Special Collections, University Archives Division
Repository Collection	Asahel Curtis Photo Company Collection no. 482

Extinction of the Species

Most species were but are no more. Wiped out by vengeful gods or done in by inescapable facts. Knocked off by the competition, messed up by new world orders human and otherwise.


Most of the gone do not even live on in memory, but a few do. Dodos waddle through our lore trying to wag cautionary tails, but fail. Passenger pigeons do a little better, but their ghosts still topple out of the sky every time the enormity of their genocide occurs to them. 

We build dinosaur shrines in the world's great museums, more comfortable because we cannot be held responsible in their case. It's nice to believe that the forces that brought down these megafauna were maybe just culling the ungodly, that this kind of thing happened way before people walked the earth. Just how long before? Too many people have no clue, and I've met plenty who are unconvinced that humans and live dinosaurs don't overlap.


Such people are among those who remain unconvinced as well that there are any problems with human expansion, our appetites and wastes, and our vast creativity with chemicals and machines (unfortunately paired with a similarly vast disregard for the future of any other species). Much of the worst we apes have done has required that we burn the fossils of many species that if not extinct, have been dead for millions of years. A mass cremation of dead and buried plants and animals. A desecration? I've never heard people put it that way, but if it were my grandparents, I don't want them used for fuel.

Maybe I am not human enough, maybe I lack good old American invincibility. The kind that says we're the best breed, uniquely suited to rule the globe, unlikely to succumb like every other empire before us. When we are sure we cannot ever become extinct, that God chose us or we have a unique brain that will figure a way out of any jam, we're free do whatever we want, regardless of the cost. 

Like extinction of other species. We are now in the midst of a mass extinction so large that it will go down in geological history. People can argue, suddenly turn all scientific and demand to see solid unassailable proof, but really there's no denying that humans are partly to blame for the Holocene's (Anthropocene, if you're not orthodox) wave of extinctions. We may eat an entire species out of existence, or cut down its forest, cut off its river, fill up its swamp, take out its habitat. We may dump poop or dioxin until a place becomes unlivable, or pump the air so full of cow farts and smoke that we alter the ocean, atmosphere and climate. 

Many species become collateral damage in our campaign to cover the earth, but by and large we humans could care less. And we don't think it will ever happen to us. We humans can be cruel gods.

 

42 Day

I don't have a shot of 42 Day. Here's Hippopotamidae instead.

42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, according to a wildly popular series of books whose author says it was spur of the moment choice, that the number utterly lacks significance or meaning. 


Predictably, readers who are conspiracy theorists, inclined to religion or mysticism, or left-handed will act all sly and reply, "He's lying...He's a prophet (whether he knew it or not)...He's given us a game...42 really does mean something."


One of those afflictions is why I celebrate 42 Day, faithfully falling on the 11th day of February every year the earth keeps whirling round yon sun and the European calendar prevails. No Eastery shiftlessness, asserting its arbitrariness by refusing to be held to some solar or lunar anchor, 42 Day stays tucked safely in February before a Leap Day can throw it off. 42 is solid.


And yet shifting, un-pin-downable. A day for celebrating the joys of contradiction. For flouting devoutly. It commemorates all and nothing. However you may choose.

Maybe 7 people will read this post, and I wish you all a Happy 42 Day. May you enjoy it, and maybe again next year, but then forget it. To be too dedicated is against the spirit of the day, and procastination and lapsing are no prob. Although many people search "42" on the internet, this blog is snugly buried on results page 7 or 12 or 13 (or 42), and won't go viral. We need not fear that someone will take this seriously enough to get all religious about it. 


But just in case, I'd like to speak to zealous readers: I am neither devotee, disciple, nor prophet. 42 Day is just me messing around, and you should read nothing into it should you discover that Feb 11 was the very day I was born, or the Day We Fight Back Against Mass Surveillance. Don't invoke 42 Day to whip up fervor, to separate the world into the faithful and infidel, to ascribe martyrdom and sainthood. And for Darwin's sake, don't worship hippopotomi. Try not to lose this last paragraph. 

Omigod Man

Aside from the online POTA (Planet of the Apes) crowd, almost nobody looks to me for film criticism. Maybe because I know so little, and don't know any of the names to drop or references to make.  Also, I like to review movies way after they come out; I'm averaging nearly 4 decades after release, for I am The Procrastacritic.

In 1970 (+/-3), Heston embarked on a trio (plus the POTA sequel, if you wanna count that, which I don't) of sci-fi flicks, each set in an earthly future rendered dark and dystopian by human folly: the Hestopian Trilogy. Planet of the Apes kicked it off, and Soylent Green finished it. In my usual shiftless way I arrive last at the middle: Omega Man, a post-apocalyptic costume drama. Like the others in this triptych of hubristic humanity gone awry, OM returns to certain aspects of the species Homo hestonii: his journey from adventurous gay man to abusive heterosexual, pathological criminalism, and race relations.

We begin with the decked out in sweaty suave, epaulettes rippling in the breeze as he speeds though an abandoned city in a big red caddy (Hunter Thompson appropriated the caddy and sense of doom for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). The stylish safari look was judged just right for the character, Robert Neville, indulging in his twin passions of looting and shooting, and was so popular with audiences that studio execs green-lighted the epaulettes' re-appearance in Soylent Green.

He is alone, Colonel Neville, the reward and curse for having saved himself from a man-made plague while all around him perished (not having had the Hestonian wisdom to be germ warfare scientists themselves). Now, he must spend days hunting down and killing zombies. At night, he plays chess with a bust of Julius Caesar, and furthers the costume aspect of the movie by saying "I dress for dinner on Sundays," sporting a green velour jacket and ruffled blouses.

But let us not dwell on sartoriality, let us get to the point of the movie, which is…I'm not sure. So why not just make fun of the oddities? Three years after everyone died and presumably failed to produce more food, and Neville's got a fresh fruit platter and a string of bratwurst; there's always ice in the silver bucket. Car and flashlight batteries remain fresh forever in this miraculous world, different than the 1978 I lived through, where we had crappy batteries that lasted six months. Finally, in a world full of stores, Heston's natural looting mania seems to be focused mainly on clothes, expressing his every mood (to whom?) with a new outfit for every occasion.

Then there's The Family, a multiracial zombie-ish coven (disaster strikes a few years after the big race riots, so of course the first thing the survivors to is get together in harmony, right?). Well, almost harmony, because the black guy in The Family is dishonest and violent. So much for progess: the innovation of the movie is to have black people in white-face make-up. The strangest thing is that after three years of intensive searching, Neville has not found them, even though the first kid he meets knows exactly where they are.

He(ston) wants to root out their nest, kill them all before they kill him. Were they really trying to kill him before he took to shooting them on sight? I'm not so sure, but  as usual when encountering the Other in Hestopia, the only solution is to shoot, for god's sake, SHOOT! Oh, and drive like a fucking maniac (because when you are the last man on earth, every car is a rental). Costume-wise: he usually chooses something militaryey looking for ops like this, like when time was of the essence and he managed to slip into a form-fitting blue rayon flight suit.

Eventually, Neville trips across a group of survivor children (awww), protected by an aspiring germ warfare doctor (no, no stretching the limits of plausibility there), who he should have taught how to make the anti-zombification serum. But instead, he goes to the only other healthy adult, so that he can have The Kiss That Changed The World (sorta,...OK, not really).

For she is African American. Yeah. And Chuck Heston is as white a Moses as you'll ever see. Of course, this shocking romance occurred years after Poitier and Hepburn had made the move on the big screen; even Shatner and Uhuru had blazed the trail on TV while Heston was avoiding women altogether on POTA. So Omega Man kisses a black woman, subject to certain rules: there must be a false start, the kiss itself must not be lit well enough to see, and she must die before there is an issue with, uh, shall we say, issue. The costume for this scene is an pirate shirt with understated puffy sleeves.

If I don't understand what this movie is about, it's not for lack of trying by the authors and director, who beat me about the head and neck with symbolism. They foreshadow and then at the end indulge in crucifixion, savior Neville arms asplay, passing a vial of his own blood to the future that they might be saved zombification by the Pharisees or Pagans, or whoever those anti germ warfare freaks are.

And Her Little Doggy, Too

Newcomers to this blog, expecting gardening or backroads or nature, you are about to get a dose of the shiftlessness and dissanctity that crops up from time to time. Continue on only if you are not readily offended by death and sacrilege:

Backroads: Grain to Hops, Hot Rods and Rattlesnakes

After a few hundred miles of winding through Palus country, it was time to high-tail it outta there, quit the wending and set a course back to Olympia. It would have been easy enough to hit I-90, turn on the cruise control, and join the flow of vegetative travelers heading west at great speed on the straight and not so narrow.

Screw that. Besides the boredom factor--Hay barns labeled in Korean and even the Columbia crossing have become uncomfortably numb--that route would dump me into the Pugetopolis traffic mire and force a traverse of Fort Lewis, where vital national security interests require perpetual slowdowns. Yeah, screw that. 

Better the backroads, which in this case gave me a crowier flight home, not too far north or south of the line from Colfax to Chehalis, leaving just a jot of interstate to endure on the final run north. Plus, I love going through White Pass, topping the Cascades on two lanes, usually with little company. And in this case, a chance to cover new territory, stretches of Routes 26 and 24 I'd never rolled through.

Amber Waves are for the Slow.

If my driving had meandered as much as this post, I'd still be on the road. But I gassed up, got a good dose of caffeine, and floored it. Climbed up out of the depths of Colfax, gaining speed, positively screaming once I'd negotiated the crossroads of Dusty, Washington. The wheat was high. No amber waves; amber is frozen. Green stalks bent back in the slipstream as I sped faster and faster, pushing an ever larger air-wake to either side. 


I'm pretty sure I reached velocity sufficient to distort the time-space continuum holding my brainpan, making the rolling hills seem to flatten out. Then, geography caught up as I passed Washtucna, heading plainward on an asphalt arrow pointing at Othello. I must've passed something interesting, but at speeds so great that all points blurred.


Hanging a left, 26 became 24, zooming down to the Columbia. Maybe slowing a bit, trepidation mounting. Because I was headed toward the contaminated Hanford nuke site, where scientists once made plutonium for bombs, and now they try to find ways to clean up the waste. Currently, the plan is to make it into glass and unload it on Chihuly and all the other glass artists inhabiting the Northwest. Look for a new line of glowing bongs.

Relax. Nothing out of the ordinary at the Hanford Site.

Windows rolled up, I made it through with no adverse effects. At least nothing that will appear in the near future. As an added bonus, I was not hit with any stray rounds from the Yakima Firing Range. And the road ran straight and smooth, as they often do in areas where federal dollars augment state transportation funds. Bottom line: gauntlet successfully run.

Rattlesnake Hills, Rattlesnake Clouds

Then, off to the left, the Rattlesnake Hills. Ancient, constant. The road follows the hills, skirting north of them as it approaches Yakima, keeping a respectful distance, or maybe just following the path of least resistance. I thought I was having a vision, hallucinating rattles on the tails of clouds that hovered above, but the photo says it really happened. Still, reality and natural (even scientific) explanations cannot convince me to write it off as nothing special. Atmospheric echoes of cartographic names? I love that kind of stuff, it's sustenance for a religionless soul like mine.

Mmmm...agriculture for beer's sake.

Yakama country (I suppose "Yakima" may be more accurate, this being outside the res in lands appropriated for newcomers) is famed for hops. In June, after a slow cool start, the vines race upwards almost as fast as I flew through horizontally; sticky tendrils grab the driver who slows too much in their midst. Left alone, these vines grow like kudzu does in my own homeland, but here they populate a tame tracery of wires and posts. I've seen hop patches before, but never the miles of fields that line 24 on it's approach to Moxee, a place named for the edible roots that preceded hops, but which is now growing more tract homes than anything else as change keeps moving. Root grounds to homesteads to industrial farms to exurbs. Progress?


Past Yakima, back onto 12, settling into a well-traveled path for me. Fast climb, faster descent. Another story.

The Gospel of Thallus

Flaccid Thallus

In writing the last post, I learned the word thallus. It's the scientific term for the undifferentiated tissue comprising the bodies of kelp and other algae, fungi, and as you've probably guessed, Myxogastria, the predators of the slime mold world (for which I carry a minor obsession). Getting over my initial disappointment with the word having nothing to do with phallus (except when mushrooms look like penises), I realized that it's a pretty interesting concept.


The level at which thalloid tissue is undifferentiated is cellular. No fundamental difference occurs between one cell and another in kelp, even though the plant appears to have roots, a stipe, leaves,...all the parts that in a more complex plant have their own cell type. The kelp thallus is the entire plant, one kind of cell from where it grabs the ocean floor, sometimes stretching hundreds of feet to the tip of the leaf-which-is-not-a-leaf. It's all thallus, baby.

Roots and trunk? Nope, thalloid "holdfasts"

Organisms lacking cell differentiation are considered primitive by primates, but there is an elegance in their design. Thallus-bodied species create analogs of all the necessary organs and structures from a single type of cell. Efficient and clever, if you ask me. Why bother with complexity and all the risks that come with it if you can replicate the effect with simple building blocks? In the human world, the power to turn a lump of undifferentiated clay into a living being is considered divine, but somehow when something similar happens in the algal or fungal worlds, it's just "primitive."

Midrib and leaf? Huh-uh, just more thallus.

From ancient sects to cyber sex, humans have worshiped the phallus, but rarely the thallus, even though it has procreated for eons before the first complex erection aroused or amused or horrified a female. We've populated our mythologies and comic books with shape changers, but show no appreciation for the humble thallus, adopting the forms it needs to, changing as the slime mold does from something shapeless and amoebic to flagellic and plasmoid, even going zygotic and making fruiting bodies when it gets in the mood. We presume superiority, but will be outlasted by these simple beings.

Procession of the Species Olympia Slime Mold

The search strings people cast to hook this blog can be interesting. I am an actual big brother, and my sister, fervid researcher of late antiquity, taught me the tech to look at "stats" like that, to peek into you all's URL and country of origin and see how many people are looking. But the best thing is seeing a good search string.


Most are boring. I'll be honest, most have to do with heatilators, because at any given time there are more than zero out of all humanity who yearn for knowledge on the finest innovation of 20th Century American green design. If you are here because you want to learn more about a heatilator, heatalator, or heat-ya-later, then scroll on down to the keywords at the end of this post and find what you need, because this hear post is about to tack wildly away.


As search terms are wont to do, when viewed as a narrative that dribbles in phrase by phrase by word. Yesterday's strings were a treat, finding that some poor people yearning to know who sat behind the queen at the royal wedding followed their string here. If you are still here because of that, check out yesterday's post, or better yet: forget about it. The wedding's over, and was boring and irrelevant anyway, compared to what you're about to here.


Someone entered the title of this post into google, and ran across my post about slime mold in Olympia, which is one of those accidental webifact discoveries that people unearth while not-quite-finding what they're looking for. Which in this case was this year's slime mold, which I think is what the photo above is. The photo in my slime mold post shows a fruiting body reminiscent of this costume, which I like a lot. My favorite slime mold costume (I've seen hundreds, of course, as most educated people have) was from the first Procession of the Species I ever saw, a guy covered in yellow balloons, lying on a skateboard, oozing his way along the entire route. I'm a sucker for slime mold costumes, and love both of these.


Or are they costumes? I assumed there were people in there, but maybe not. The northwest, evolutionary incubator for all things wet and not too demanding of photons, may have created something special. Your run of the mill slime can coalesce, move as a body, and optimize the timing of its fruiting--what about that special slime who punctures the equilibrium of eons and mutates radically?


A slime the size of a large mammal. Mold molds itself as well as any plastic, and could easily form perambulatory stuctures reminiscent of human legs. My guess is that it cannot talk (though it is surely highly intelligent), and therefore creates the intricate costume we think we see, that it may be a painfully shy creature who craves social contact but most of the time just tries to blend into the wallpaper, baseboards, tiles,...ruefully listening as the humans laugh and dogtails wag. Or maybe I'm just a chauvanist, expecting that slime mold would even want to be like a human, the slimiest of species. Maybe it loves who it is, "I'm slime, sublime, get used to it."


Regardless of why, the fact that it appears during Spring on the very day of the Procession bespeaks an awareness, a synchronicity of some kind with our kind. That it always exhibits the fruiting bodies on this day is also interesting. At the very least, it's a much better show than other states of slime being (unless you happen to have time lapse vision and it's on the move, making even the blob form interesting). I suspect there is more to it, though. I think  that it is sporing spectators, spawning on a downtown crowd unparalleled in size any other day in Olympia. 


Why? Probably as part of a long-term scheme to evolve into an organ of the mammalian brain. Fearmongers out there think this is because slime mold wants to take us over, render our bodies zombified in the service of slime, like when Keanu ran that giant battle robot thingy in the Matrix. I recognize that as the Fox-fed bignorance that it is, and believe that the idea is just to extend it's unicell self beyond the limitations of the body, to evolve some cognitive complexity on its part, and push the host's brain toward a greater awareness and love of slime mold. 


Yeah, of cours, I dunno why I ever thought of it before: the spores are part of slime mold's strategy toward evolutionary transcendence, bringing all us other creatures into it's essential one-ness. All these years of religious dead ends, and it turns out that what we were looking for all along was to be absorbed by an evolutionary paradox, melding complexity and unicellarity, feeling the slime love. I think it's working already.

Once and Future Islands

Early March found me in the Skagit lowlands, field after field of flat. Not much growing now, just puddles of rain and snowmelt. And maybe the water table coming up. Meanwhile, on NPR, the US Navy's chief meteorologist was being interviewed. The military is not exactly a bastion of liberalness (the policy for left of center personnel is Don't Ask, Don't Tell, with no end in sight), but when it gets down to brass tacks (or shell casings) they don't have a lot of patience for cockamamie right wing theories that fly in the face of science. A lot of math was developed with trajectories in mind; physics, chemistry, and materials science are at the heart of many a weapons system. Communications, surveillance, keeping copters and jets in the air,..the list of military needs that won't work on the basis of Creationism or Faith goes on and on.


This extends to long term planning, which is where the admiral came in. A scary proportion of Republican congressmen may deny the existence of global warming, but the US Navy sure as hell doesn't. They know that the sea is rising, and that the rate could suddenly increase if and when the Greenland ice reaches a tipping point and starts flowing into the sea at more than the accustomed glacial speed. They know that this will bring them headaches ranging from submerged and storm-battered bases to increased geopolitical stress and strife as populations migrate inland and fresh water tables are salinated. I'm sure the admiral would love to believe that it won't happen, but he knows better.


The low fields of western Skagit county have tasted the ocean before, and will again. The hills that poke up through the coastal sediments, long seen by farmers as intrusions into an otherwise nice field, will once more become islands. The dikes that have held back the Salish Sea will be gobbled by it, deltas will erase levees and fan out. 


All this in a blink of a celestial eye, a tic of geological time. The far-flung flats are no older than the last glaciation, anyway. The waters of the straits and sounds, seemingly so protected from the ocean and buffered by islands, rise and fall with wild abandon in just the short time that humans have been here. Not entirely because of water being frozen and then released, either. The land itself rises and falls as glacial weights pile on and flow away, as the oceanic plate plows beneath the continent, as faults give way. Some of the San Juan islands bob up rather gently on the rebound after glaciers leave, while others were thrust up suddenly from deep in the earth during subduction zone quakes that dwarf anything humans can recall. 


The Japanese quake and tsunami remind us that cities can be erased suddenly, landscapes altered in a day. (The geologists' office where I work displays a quote from Will Durant, "Civilization exists by geologic consent, revocable without notice.") The climate's change promises us a less obvious, but far more widespread, alteration of our earth. We humans, clinging to the coast, are in for some hard lessons, especially if we insist on denying what is demonstrably true because it does not comport with short term political goals or a particular religious outlook. Reality won't wait for the slow-witted, and even if they manage to make an ark, their drifting voyage will find whatever shores it may reach already occupied by people who operated not on faith, but on knowledge.

Opening Day

Dawn hesitates east of here, the Big Dipper hangs lower in the clearing summerward sky. 

This is the first weekend in April, which means the opening of the Olympia Farmers Market. At 10 AM, some esteemed or lucky individual will flick the cord to ring the bell, ending three months of shutdown. Since Christmas Eve, no more. Holiday cheer runs on fumes only so long, then the grim grey stretch of days goes out past where you can see. No vegetables, none of that pastured pig. No more nothing, as Hawaiians say.

Maybe be you know someone into baseball. Opening Day is a big deal to them, some are fanatical. If you think of the fan you know who's religious about it, who thinks baseball is a metafor everything, and imagine him on opening day, then you begin to see my feelings toward the first Market day. Only, I get much better food and my team cannot lose.

Soylent Greenbacks

Somehow in the last post, which you should be reading first, I got off track. Watching the movie, knowing the secret ahead of time, the characters' anguish and shock seemed overdone. But then, I've forgotten what life was like before Reagan (our most Hestonian president, I'd say, with that veneer of smiling good nature and great hair over a dickish soul and addled mind), and worse yet Mr. New World Order. As Saul says, we had a world once,...schmuck.

But even in those kinder, gentler days before the Bush Dynasty ascended, people should have understood that in a movie where the premise is that the world is way overpopulated and food is hard to come by, there's gonna be some cannibalism. It's happened with boats and plains and wagon trains full of hungry people, and for that matter probably happens in New York city from time to time anyway.

Maybe I'm jaded by years of living under unbridled and bloodthirsty capitalism, but it also makes sense that a large corporation would pounce on the obvious profit potential in this movie world. A steady supply of willing flesh, a vast pool of consumers hungry for protein, yearning for a new product. As businessmen are so fond of saying, it's a no-brainer.

Soylent Green saw this future coming. Like all tales of the future, it is doomed to looking stupid on some levels: the lame-ass video game would have fallen prey to this in less than a decade, there are no Latinos, and the guns are pitiful little toys. On the other hand, we're well on the way to being a plutocracy, run by a few ruthless people who live in a level of wealth unimaginable to the unwashed masses. Officials who use their position to enrich themselves and appropriate other people's stuff? Yep. Corporations using public resources to enhance profitability (where do you think the Riot Patrol scoopers dump their haul?) and shaping public policy to their liking? Yep. High-powered politicians drawn from the ranks of the wealthy? Yep. Public sector workers not paid a decent wage? Yep. Corruption, dehumanization, women treated as furniture? Yep, yep, and yep.

I heard about a scientific study recently in which burgers from 6 corporate chains were tested, and it was found that they contained between 2 and 15% meat. Slightly more if you count guts and parasites, but basically a Soylent Gray disk. I haven't eaten that crap in years, but in large urban centers, it accounts for a large portion of the menu for those who cannot afford to have luxuries like fresh vegetables. I don't think it has yet become profitable to include human meat, but don't expect Archer Daniels Midland to tell you when that happens. They and the other food-stuff mega corporations may well have nicely bound feasibility studies already on the shelves, just like in the movie.

Which brings to mind a flaw. I can understand the guy from state security hiring a patsy to murder a conspirator who might not be reliable, but to think that they'd leave the investigation to a detective who is not also part of the operation boggles the mind. The bodyguard did not sweep out the books and any other incriminating evidence or kill the priest moments after he heard confession form the Man Who Knew Too Much. Amateurs. Bush I or Cheney would have disappeared the killer, bodyguard, priest and furniture immediately, would have put their own guy on the case; nobody, least of all some rabble rouser, would have ever known about the murder or the greater crime of mass cannibalism.

If word ever did get out, they'd put the media to work explaining that Soylent Green is as American as apple pie (or at least mock apple pie made with pancreas instead of those horrible ritz crackers). They'd have paraded out McCain, who would explain that he took up cannibalism out of necessity in Hanoi, but kept up with it for the pure gustatory pleasure. There would be a new ad campaign on the theme "Soylent Green is People," showing the smiling faces of the diverse Soylent workforce, appropriating and deflating the critique. Anti-cannibals would be branded as socialists and homos, marginalized, and if that didn't work, scooped up by the riot patrol and delivered to the Gitmo Processing Plant.

The voluntary suicide center would be different, too. None of this druidic robe stuff, a final film dwelling on nature. There'd be a big cross. You'd be strapped to the gurney so that you could not escape when you figured out they were lying about giving you the full 20 minutes of nice movie. Fawning Dick Van Patten manning the gates, allowing himself to be pushed around by a half-fed local cop? Hell no: a Blackwater crew, tossing the bullet-riddled bodies of interlocutors into the hopper.

The process, the conveyors and trucks and machines that transport and transform bodies into Soylent Green, appears a little silly now. Bodies given the dignity of a clean white sheet through the whole process? Maybe in the first week of operation, but soon enough some manager would get himself a promotion by figuring out that eliminating the sheets would increase the profit margin, another would move up after devising a streamlined process for gold tooth extraction. Likewise, once the suicider has signed on the dotted line, amenities are unnecessary and a waste. No self-respecting corporation in 2011, much less 2022, would want to justify the expense to shareholders anxious about meeting quarterly projections.

In 1963, Heston marched  with Dr. King and advocated for civil rights. In 1973, he seemed outraged by what the Soylent Corp was doing. In 1983, he'd changed his tune, and by '93 was excoriating the pinkos who would dare badmouth the poor maligned white male. As Heston went, so too did the leadership of our country. Less and less concerned with any right but the right to bear arms, more and more demented. Unwilling to let anything stand in the way of the march toward complete corporate domination of the economy and society. Growing Mosaic in his devotion to the one true god (with his three faces: father, son, and holy cash flow), and disgusted by the humanists.

Soylent Greenbacks are made of people.

Acts of Deranged Individuals

I like to make up words. The latest: tearrorist. A right-wing zealot willing to bring about political goals by means intended to arouse terror into opponents. At some point, the Tea partiers will become organized and orthodox enough to also use fear as a means of keeping their own in line, but for now it is enough to attack the enemy.

I must be an enemy, being loud-mouthed and left, secular and human, and I vote every time (sometimes for people like Ralph Nader and Jesse Jackson). But I'm just a prole, and don't merit an actual Target. Wealthless and blueless in the blood department, I am no threat to the mega-wealthy few who pull Teapuppet strings. Sure, they wanna maintain a certain level of rage at guys like me, but the general warfare has not started (and woe to us if it does), and it's enough to aim at people like Congresswoman Giffords, who was shot along with a bunch of other people, many of whom died, including a girl who was born on 9/11.

Open fire in a public place, gunning for a politician but happy to spray the crowd with hot lead? Terrorism.

Of course, the spin is already underway, the right claiming that even though they literally placed crosshairs on the woman, that the violence is the work of a lone, misguided and probably insane, individual. So we have this on Reuters:


"This was the act of a deranged individual," conservative Republican Senator Rand Paul told "Fox News Sunday."
House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner ordered flags at the U.S. Capitol in Washington lowered to half staff in memory of the victims. He said the incident was a reminder that public service comes with a risk.
"This inhuman act should not and will not deter us from our calling to represent our constituents and fulfill our oaths of office. No act, no matter how heinous, must be allowed to stop us from our duty," Boehner said.
In Tucson, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said the suspect "has kind of a troubled past and we're not convinced that he acted alone." He said he believed Giffords was the intended target of the shooting.

See? Choosing Rand Paul, deranged scion of a libertarian political dynasty, to deliver this message is classic irony-impairment. Foxnews of course is renowned for its derangement, if lying counts as deranged behavior, if believing that the media is liberal and war is peace and that Democrats are fascists signals derangement. Fox spends it's 'news' time mongering fear at a great discount, telling its dumbstruck viewers that someone (liberals, brown people, foreigners) is trying to get them. It whips up indignance, resentment, ire, and bile. Inchoate rage will do and frequently does. Constant martial language, puffed up tough talk with but one message "Those people want to attack you, help Americo get them first." Terrorism coming and going.

To see Hannity jutting a jaw Mussolini style and barking some easily debunked crap, or to hear one of Limbough's drug-addled rants is to laugh. Silliness. Besides which, most of the figureheads and pundits probably don't believe half of what they say anyway, they're just giving people what they want, selling advertising space.

Yet...there's danger. Years of fear of terror allowed the unfettered expansion of Cheney's ambition at the expense of Americans' civil rights. Masses complained not; individuals who did were shouted down. Organizations that feared not, that stood up, either failed to get attention from the media or were denounced therein as aides de terror, targeted for investigation, break-ins, and monitoring. Since 9/11, we've been introduced to long lost Big Brothers, watching what we say, hauling us to Gitmo when we get out of line, and just generally bullying and intimidating.

The fearful, the unduly fortunate who live in terror of a black man helping the less fortunate, have mostly been along for the ride, doing little more than casting votes and calling in to rant and espouse baffling political theories. But now we start to see some of them taking it to the next level. Ratcheting up the terror.

We need to answer, cannot afford to roll over. And not by making up further protections for the elected elite (who to be honest, are just there to represent the monied interests that put them there), in fact one of the saddest bits of fallout from this kind of violence will be to further isolate the ruling class from the people. Boehner's bit about congress needing to be brave and undeterred from its "calling" smacks of a guy who does not want the corporate agenda slowed down because of a few dead people. To act like the risk is evenly distributed is completely bogus: liberals do not arm themselves and pose threateningly outside GOP events, and they're despised by the right precisely because they seek controls on weapons.

The answer must be non-violent, but delivered face to face, more aggressively than the left is used to acting. No more silent head-shaking when the buffoon at the office spouts some teaparty crap. Educate your old and fearful relatives, switch their channel from Fox. Respond and debunk every propaganda email you get. Participate in citizen actions that let the leadership know that we cherish the Bill of Rights. Insisting on freedom.

The deranged individuals are not the lone gunmen, the fanatics shooting what they fear. The deranged individuals are Rupert Murdoch, who would flush democracy for a few more bucks. Ms. Palin is so deluded as to believe that she is genuinely able to lead, and not just a petroleum puppet. Deranged is the commentator who equates a little bit of help for the poor with Hitler and Stalin. The pastor who deranges his flocks to the battlefields of Iraq (and for that matter, of our own culture).

These are dangerous people, but they are not unstoppable, and we don't have to sink to their level of dumb hatred to beat them. We will prevail not by force (they have a hell of a lot more weaponry and are itching to use it), but because we refuse to give in to terror. We will laugh them to death, outvote the dwindling ranks of elderly fools, keep blinding them with the light of reason.

The Paranoia of the Hyperfortunate

Assume, as radiochronologists do, that 1950 is the present, and that all dates before that are so many years BP. By 1950, enough by-products of atomic weapons experimentation had gotten into the air and water to make radiometric dates unreliable (and to spawn Godzilla--Libby and his inner circle are rumored to have chosen 1950 mostly for this very reason, though none ever admitted to it in public). You could argue for 1945, when the US nuked two cities, but nobody funding science in the West wanted to highlight that. Scientists like data that can speak across national and cultural divides, and besides, in a world brought together by two world wars, it was getting embarrassing to express dates in terms of a leader in the Judean nonviolent resistence to Roman occupation. Especially when it sunk in that we had become Rome.

Now the difficulty is with dates after 1950. Following the logic of BP, it should be AP, but that name is taken by a news organization associated with press, which seems so archaic and ill-fitting on the infinite future implied. I won't offer another universal solution, and instead will choose reference points fleeting and provincial, fickle and idiosyncratic.

With that out of the way, now I can gress:

After the dust had settled and the corpses changed from stinking to feeding lush new growth, Americans settled in back at home where most of the few causalties had occurred in factories. They boomed forth offspring, we had a pretty easy time for a generation. People say the 1960s were a time of upheaval, but the fact is that the huge majority kept doing the same boring things they'd been doing.

So they kept going to work and having families and staking out their little claim of American dreamscape. And for a generation or so, a young man entering the workforce could look forward to a lifetime job. A lot of these have become obsolete: corps of clerks fit in a single hard drive now, a salesmen between me and the thing I want to buy is an impediment and cost that will turn me elsewhere, and ultimately (to the dismay of the managers who let all those underlings go) you don't need so many managers for so few workers.

But from 0-25 BJC (Before Jimmy Carter), a lot of these jobs were easy to come by...to the right people. Like people who were white and had a penis. And didn't have an accent, or worship someone besides Jesus, or you-know, act different. Put on your tie and collect your paycheck. Easy as pie.

Fortunately for these guys, European industry was in ruins and unable to compete, the US had inherited the Pacific, and the rest of the world had yet to show much capacity for global business. Our steel and everything made from it shipped world-wide, plastics and electronics metastesized, and some smart socialism (like the Marshall Plan and interstate highway construction) developed ever wider markets intrernationally and at home. The guy selling products that sold themselves (but needed a human to fill out forms in triplicate) could get fat off of commissions and bonuses.

I grew up among these guys' kids, a lot of whom managed to pull off a similar trick, although most have moved from one employer to another, partly because increased efficiencies wrung from automation, outsourcing, mergers and other sources of working class unempoloyment have alchemized into benefits for the bosses. These are the hyperfortunate, those who had good things fall into their laps by virtue of being born.

Like most of the blessed throughout history, these people dwell on the down-side. They have so much to lose, and there are so many people out there who might want to take it. Or, they know they have something, but not as much as their bosses, their alleged betters.

So the riots and anti-war protests and drugiastic mayhem of the years 10-6 BJC may not have ever harkened a fair, peaceful and open-minded social order. But they did manage to scare some people, if only because they were frowned at anymore for saying 'nigger' and nursed nagging fears that their daughter might marry one, or their son might take drugs and not wanna work. At the office, having to hire women and Negroes upset the indelicate balance of the boys' club; plurality and compliance with laws and rules meant to engineer equality finally rendered management real work.

Simultaneously faced with social pressure to talk nice and legal sanction for discriminating (and later, for poisoning the environment), the hyperfortunate felt their fears a-fruiting, saw opportunities for their children begin to be harvested by the melanin-rich, the exotically-accented, the others. And so they blamed hyphenated Americans and insinuated that women who worked were child-haters or dykes. And despite continued interventions by the government on behalf of Business, they took to blaming the government as well.

As that oxymoron "political correctness" took root and blaming minorities and women became taboo (on paper), the hyperfortunate took the gummint route more and more often. From its diesel-rainbowed rutwater the Tea Party emerged. Not evolved, because they don't believe in that, and the movement is patently inhuman and unnatural. The Kochs and Fox and a rash of richers who do not rhyme but have bast amounts of cash at their disposal, concocted its molecular structure from petrochemicals and bile, conjured up a soul from Greed and Gluttony and Covetousness, blessed by voodoo economic priests (yet continued to be labeled "Christian"), and turned it loose in the electorate.

They are greatly aided by the fact that the government's apparent head is a black man with a foreign-sounding name one letter removed from that of our most famous terrorist enemy. Nobody has to say the N-word to get the biggot masses riled up, "Obama" is the perfect stand-in. And so the anti-government rhetoric has ratcheted up from Reagan's folksy assphorisms to fear of black helicopters and love for the Rapture to the widespread belief that the liberals want totalitarian government run by a president who is some sort of foreign agent.

Which is preposterous. The last time our president was a foreign agent, a group of Saudis attacked our financial center, we committed to a costly war in a country that had nothing to do with it, and the remaining parties of the Axis of Evil came away with more power than ever.

One facet of hyperfortunate paranoia is that blaming the truly culpable is not an option. Don't bite the hand that feeds you, or you will be fired. Or maybe next time instead of feeding you that baloney (steaks are but a memory for the old, a legend to the young), it will hand you actual crap. Our woes cannot be the fault of corporations galloping toward next year's bankruptcy to maximize this quarter's profits. Do not blame Exxon or the healthcare industry or Cheney, because you want to be as rich as them one day, and won't want anyone attacking you then. Fight to protect what you aspire to tooth and nail, and someday you may be rewarded.

The fine print confirms that loyal commoners will not be rewarded, but never mind. All that matters is that the tripe pie that remains for the 99% of people who do most of the work and get least of the rewards is not only not infinite, it is shrinking, and even the dumbass who got his job due to his frat or church or other born-white connection can see that. He sure as hell does not want to see someone else bellying up to the table.

Vanity

As I suspected, the post in this blog that got the most hits so far has been "Shallow Space Travel," which was about Planet of the Apes. A POTA (devotees cannot be asked to type 'Planet of the Apes' repeatedly, can they?) website found that September entry and posted a link a few days later under "Humorous Review."

My entry was about Heston-baiting and homeschooling my child in sarcasm, but forget that. The thrill of internet fame (more than 70 hits, baby!) is enough for me to throw that all aside and bask in the glory of things like this, which can appear in the first few pages of googling my blog now (thanks to Jeff and Jess, who I will refer to as Jeffus and Jessus once my blog becomes the basis for a new religion, and prophets are needed):

Re: funny POTA review That was pretty damn funny--he nailed it. --- In PotaDG@yahoogroups.com, jessica rotich wrote: > > I really enjoyed that, Jeff. Haw! > > Jess. > > On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Jeff K. wrote: > > > > > > > Haw! Haw! > > > > http://mojourner.blogspot.com/2010/09/shallow-space-travel.html > > > > > > >

Two Words

Lately I made up a couple of words.

The first flew back in the face of homegrown fundamentalists greeting the globalizing world with inquisitional hatred. A day or so after I thought uip this word, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention came out so strongly against yoga. Yeah, even the stretching kind, devoid of devotion.

The  first word: Talibaptist.

The second bubbled up to the surface as I read a blog about a guy whose ethnicity, or race, or heritage, or linguistic affiliation, or whatever...that something was unclear to the author. It stopped ay short of the slurry "What are you?" and part of the author's goal was to be funny, but the entry seemed to be a case of

The second word: Ambiguotry.

As in, an obsessive need to assign an individual life form to a single class, socio-economic, racial, ethnic,....again, whatever. Not to be confused with "ambiguot," (wait, is that a third word?) an individual whose inability to utter a definitive statement renders them idiotic. As a government employee, I encounter ambiguouts, but not nearly as much as if I had a TV to watch the news, especially the new talk shows and public access coverage of certain municipal meetings.

No, the nounization of ambiguotry is "ambigot." I know, it's inconsistent, but that's English for you.

Somewhere sometime someone will read this and say, "No way, I heard 'talibaptist' back in 2009, you didn't invent it, you lying muther.." Or they might comment "In point of fact, the term your referrring to was coined by..." Or some such quibblement. There are those who think that ideas, words, and things are invented and then diffused. Like every culture who ever built a puramid was visited by Egyptians, and probably aliens as well. I cannot swear that I heard one or both of these words before, but I sure don't remember it. I think I invented them.

Holy Water! (said like Robin in the Batman TV show)

It's half past noon on Sunday, and the vast parking lot of the church at the end of our road is empty. The lot filled up for an hour, shuttle buses brought people from satellite lots, then everyone left. Some come back on Saturday for something or other, but for the most part people seem convinced that popping in for an hour is all they need to attain salvation. Oh, that and tithing to the church.

This particular place is called Church of the Living Water, but Church of the Killing Irony would be better, since they paved over a spring to build the place. More than an acre of impervious roof and asphalt, and so of course there's a big bulldozed basin intended to mitigate the damage to the wetland, or at least catch some of the storm runoff they create. By way of landscaping, there are parking lot islands of grass and some trees, and a genteel kill zone of pure grass on the street wide. Pure, luxurient grass and nary a weed in sight, which of course means hefty doses of chemicals. These run off into 18th street and eventually down to Indian Creek, a waterway as abused by the American experience as the people it's named after.

And this outfit has the gall to proclaim itself Church of the Living Water.

Of course, truth be told, the Lutherans, as old a Christian church as you can get without sticking to the original Catholic brand, have recently expanded their church (a block away) and also had to dig a big stormwater 'pond' (yay government!). There's is nicer looking, having some shrubs instead of just weeds.

Meanwhile, a block or so in the other direction, the Jehovah's Witnesses just started on a new Kingdom Hall. Ripped out some trees and of course all the blackberries a few weeks before they would have ripened. For two solid months now the construction crew has showed up, pushed dirt around, and left for random lengths of time. Basically all they've done is make their wetland pit. Last week they put down straw and hydro-seeded it. Which, in case you are not privy to landscaping terms means they pulled up with a tank truck full of water, chemicals, grass seed, and green dye, and sprayed it over the ground. The least natural and most ungodly way imaginable to make something grow.

It will work, establishing a hideous alien monocrop that will, chemical warfare aside, turn host to whatever other weeds drift in. I'm hoping for blackberries, personally, as a sign that even if god doesn't mind having flocks out trashing all Creation, at least evolution can achieve balance, or at least a bit o irony.

Maybe, maybe not. Better odds than hoping for a vengeful lord to smite the Church of the Living Parking Lot, though.