Hythia

Unrelated entirely to my other post from earlier, but today is Oregon’s May primary election day. Which isn’t a big deal to anyone I know until tomorrow morning when we can see the final results, everyone I’ve talked to sent in their ballot by mail over a week ago. Vote by mail can be nice like that at times, especially on days like today when it is supposed to be unseasonably warm out again and going to a voting booth would be a decidedly unfun trip in the heat.

One of the local free papers (The Portland Tribune) had a nice article about it today and it is worth reading. If your state puts up a ballot measure to switch to vote-by-mail I’d suggest supporting it. Just so nice to have it done with, especially since once your by mail ballot has been registered as accepted you are off the mailing lists for all the candidates and can stop getting election crap in your mailbox everyday.

Oh, also found this article on the Tribune website talking about how Portland inspired various bits and pieces of Matt Groening’s “The Simpsons”, which is again unrelated to the earlier bit of this post but might amuse Simpsons fans.

This seems to be a theme lately.

So while waiting for a bus downtown I had the ‘joy’ of listening to a street preacher go on and on about how the world is going to end in 21 days. His reasoning: It will be the sixth day, of the sixth month, of the sixth year of this century. That whole ’six, six, six’ or 666 thing. (Of course this was coming from someone who is, I imagine, in the same class of people who thought that 2000 was the first year of this century in which case this is actually the seventh year of this century, counting year 0…)

While normally I would have laughed this off, likely loudly and in the face of the person preaching it, it bugged me a little as coincidentally that day is my birthday.

So, God, if you are reading this… Could you do me a favor and delay ending the world until relatively late in the day? I’d like a chance to see what (if anything) I get for presents and an hour or two to read, watch or play with them if I do.

Oh, also, if by some odd chance I turn out to be the Anti-Christ (proving the opinion of me expressed on numerous occasions by teachers I had over the years) and come into the fullness of my demonic heritage this year I promise to play fair and make war and end the world by the Old Testament rules of engagement you had us kooky humans write down for you so long ago. Not as keen on the New Testament stuff, the whole Book of Revelations is actually kind of corny by todays standards. If I have to go in for the special effects and weird events as heavily as they are depicted there I might have to hire a creative team and see if I couldn’t jazz it up a little.

Annoyingly hot right now, high of 97 degrees today where I live; and while it isn’t uncommon for Oregon to have a couple days of 90 degree weather each year those days are normally in July or August.

Weather forecaster on the weather channel was just saying that today is the earliest it has ever been this hot in the ’summer season’ on record. Given that those records do go back quite a ways…

Nope. No climate change here. None at all. Everyone go about your business and please don’t notice the changes in the weather patterns. ( Meanwhile, I think I am going to go invest in stock in a company that makes sunscreen… )

I just spent way too much time reading this which should guarantee some really odd-ball dreams tonight.

Anyways, Exit Mundi is a wacky little site documenting the ways the world will end. Fun reading, good times, lots of laughs.

I accidently tabbed around and posted this when it was nothing but a title. For a moment I almost left it like that just to see what people would post as comments to a simple title of ‘plasticity’.

Anyways, back to the original subject I had in mind…

History and how plastic it is, especially American history it seems. I have a silly number of books, a fair number of which are non-fiction reference books I’ve picked up over the years. The largest number of those being random volumes of history textbooks or the occasional odd-ball encyclopedia volume that catches my eye.

It is pretty amazing how wildly they vary when depicting historical events, especially in regards to the American Civil War. Looking at history textbooks from before the 1970s and you find people like John Brown (of ‘Harpers Ferry’ fame) being depicted as insane or criminally dangerous (and that it possibly ran in his family) simply because he supported abolition (which before the civil rights movement may have been considered a sign of insanity…).

An old copy of “The American Pageant” from the early 80s talks about Columbus’s crew being mutinous and unruly because they feared they were about to sail off the edge of the world, when by 1491 even the Catholic Church had admitted the world was round. The copy I have from when I was in school had corrected that fact at least, but it goes to show how long silly notions like that stayed in print.

Not sure where this train of thought is going. It started with me being grumpy because I couldn’t remember much about ‘The Great War’ (aka. World War 1) and the sequence of events that began it. Something I had been working on which was originally contemporary suddenly fit much better in with the bits of history I could remember from that time, now the story is going oddly split-screen and multi-generational in my head.

I can also blame the cold medicine for that I think. Bit under the weather for the last two days. Being sick always really and truly fucks with my head and results in really disturbing dreams. Well, disturbing in different ways at least then the ones I have when I am not sick. More ‘Giger meets Walt Disney’ and less ‘Twilight Zone’ I suppose.

So I have to break my work schedule a little today. Have stuff to get done, contracted on probably more projects then I should be working on at once ( in my defense, I really seriously did not expect as many bids to be accepted as were ), but I need to take some time off this afternoon.

Reason is, I have to help move my grandmother from the room she is currently in at the nursing home my aunts and uncles dumped her in to a room in the Alzheimers ward in the same building. Apparently she has finally slipped into that final twilight of the mind and needs more supervision then before.

The part that gets me about it thought is that there is a specific time window this afternoon that it is being done in, during the time that she is out on a drive heading to a park or garden not far from the building. We are going in, moving her furniture from her current room to a different room and apparently she is not being told what is going on and will just casually be brought back to her new room with all of her stuff now in again as if nothing had changed.

Something about that just seems frighteningly disturbingly cruel. Plus, really freaky for her. Reminds me of that thing Stephen King wrote talking about the three levels of fear: gross out, horror and terror. Terror being when you come home and find out that everything you own, every personal possession you have, has been taken out of your home and replaced by an exact duplicate. Just have this feeling that if she wasn’t already suffering from Alzheimer’s that something like this could pretty well be the bit that pushed her over the edge.

I really hate the world some days.

I love it how every so often new bits of applied science get publicized and immediately get described in relation to ‘Star Trek’ or ‘Star Wars’ instead of talking about their merits and values in and off themself.

That said, it is kind of cool that they’ve found a mathematical principal wherein a cloaking device (ala ‘Star Trek’ Romulans) could potentially work. Leave it to bored British scientists to figure it out.

Article in the BBC News is here.

How is it that myself, who has never owned a car and has never held a driver’s license ( I had a permit once, long ago, that expired ) knows more about changing a cars oil or changing a flat tire then my friends who have owned cars and had licenses since they turned sixteen.

Gyah…

Anyone seen the “Planetes” anime?

Saw a trailer for it and it looked interesting, a lot different from the manga, but still good.

The basic setting of Planetes is near-future Earth. After decades of space exploration and orbital development and the building of facilities on the moon the orbit around the Earth is filled with tons of space debris. Which is a very bad thing since even a screw that has fallen loose moving at orbital velocity can pretty well shatter what it hits. So some astronauts get stuck with the ‘noble and valiant’ job of debris clean-up.

The manga was very character-based, very poignant at times, very well done. The anime looks a little more action oriented and more focused on the job they are doing and less on the characters themselves so I hope it still is as good but not seen any of it except some trailer bits.

So here it is the second to last week end in April, and according to the weather people, this weekend is only the fourth weekend with sunny weather so far this year in Oregon.

Go rain gods go! Up with the clouds! Block that damned too-bright glaring day-star from the sky!