Back in Business

No way around it -- this blog has been down for quite some time. It's been down at least since the early part of December, when our laptop computer was stolen. I was at work in the afternoon when I got a call from Penny saying that there had been a breakin at our house. I immediately went to talk to Mark, my boss, and got the okay to go home.

When I got there 45 minutes of high speed driving later, Penny was on the efficiency apartment side of the house talking to a Champaign cop. She had come home from the university for lunch to let the dogs out into the back yard. We normally let them out on the efficiency side, and she noticed the window on the door was pushed in. Further examination revealed that the frame had been cracked.

She immediately looked around and found that the laptop that we had been using as our regular computer was missing from the computer hutch. Whoever had taken it didn't just yank wires out of the wall, which would be typical for a snatch-and-grab burglary. Instead, the wires had been carefully disconnected. Also missing from the hutch was a video camera and a digital camera -- this had been more upsetting to Penny than losing the laptop itself, since they contained wedding photos that she was going to upload. Laptops can be replaced, but wedding photos can't. (Fortunately, we already had quite a few that were either uploaded or from some other sources.)

At this point, the long-time movie buff realized that a burglar might still be in the house with her, so she went to the kitchen and got out a big butcher knife to carry around with her. As it turned out, there wasn't anyone else in the house other than the dogs.

We were very suspicious about the circumstances of the burglary, since the back door had been locked. When the cop dusted it for fingerprints, he came up with nothing. It was almost as if the burglar or burglars had been able to unlock the door, come inside, then crack the window frame to make it look like a random robbery instead of an inside job. In addition, we have two big black dogs who like to bark their heads off, which would deter most burglars other than the real professionals -- whoever broke in here must have known that we kept the dogs on the other side of the house while we're away with the sliding door shut so they couldn't access this side.

Our most likely guess was that the breakin was related to our cleaning service, which was coming in once a week on Wednesdays and would have had a key. The service consisted of mother and daughter team, and even if they weren't responsible themselves, cleaners have boyfriends who easily could have gotten the key. We've since changed cleaning services to an outfit made up of five or six Chinese immigrants, and they come in on Saturdays when one or both of us are home. (Several of them are more afraid of our dogs than the burglars were.)

The other possibility that occurred to me, since I am politically active, paranoid, and living in a country that is no longer free, was that it was taken by the Minions of the Pig State for whatever reason, most likely looking for incriminating stuff.

Either way, losing the laptop was a serious problem, since our previous two tax returns were on it, which in turn, gave the thieves access to our Social Security numbers. (Yet another strong argument against the Social Security ponzi scheme -- forcing everyone to have a de-factor identity number makes everyone a potential victim of the worst sorts of identity theft.

Fortunately, both of us have a good idea of what to do under the circumstances, and the next week was a flurry of contacting banks and creditors, changing account numbers and passwords, and generally inflicting on ourselves several weeks of financial inconvenience. Suffice to say that we are now secure, or at least as secure as anyone can be in George W. Bush's Amerika.

In the meantime, Penny found a special deal through the University of Illinois for a new computer. A large institution like that, especially one with a world-famous computer department (home of the HAL 9000), is always getting rid of obsolete computers, defined as anything more than three months after market release. As a result, we were able to pick up an amazing iMac with the latest Leopard operating system and an absolutely huge monitor for $600 under list price. Too good to pass up.

The hard drive in this thing is housed inside the monitor mount itself. Thus, anyone who wants to steal it would have a much hard time hiding it under his or her coat than a laptop. It's a great deal heavier, too. Nevertheless, we have it bolted into a stud in the wall with a combination lock. Again, an absolutely determined professional or pig state agent would be able to steal this, if they were willing to spend a dangerous amount of time in here doing it, but the sorts of amateurs who are more likely to break into our house probably wouldn't be able to.

So now I'm back in the blogging business with a lot of catching up to do.

Bunky Business

Today is the sixth anniversary that will go down in American history as a day of absolute infamy. I am referring, of course, to the start of the Bush administration's assault on our constitutional liberties and George W. Bush's war of genocide against everyone he hates, which is a very long list.

And that's the last I care to write about concerning 9/11 on 9/11 six years later.

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As both a Wiccan and a regular player of the state lottery, I suppose I do need to comment on the strange case of Elwood "Bunky" Bartlett.

Bunky is a more professional Wiccan than I am, insofar as he makes a living at it as an employee of an occult shop in the suburbs of Baltimore. He made the news recently by winning a jackpot of more than $330 million on MegaMillions, a multistate lottery game. Actually, he shared the pot with three other winners, but even after taxes, he took home more than $30 million.

What made his case of particular note, however, is what he told the press after receiving his check. Basically, Bunky said he made a deal with the Gods. He told them that if he could win the lottery, he would use some of the money to teach Wicca.

We have another way of putting it in the Craft. He used magick to win the lottery. This raises some ethical questions, to say the least.

Now, as a gambler, I recognize some practical problems. I've never been able to magick the games when I visit the casino any more than I can magick the ball into the hole when I play golf. This is because the intense concentration required to work magick makes it impossible to simulataneously put enough concentration into hitting the golf ball accurately...or playing well at the casino table. The Gods don't just win games for you.

But this goes well beyond casino gambling. Winning the Lotto is the luck of the draw, unless you have a way of rigging the odds. Bunky claims that he did.

The ethical dilemma that needs to be solved here is whether or not Bunky deserved the Lotto money more than anyone else. In terms of need, he probably needed the money more than I would. Being a part-time employee of an occult shop certainly doesn't pay much, probably not even the rent by itself in the Baltimore area.

But then I read in a different account that Bunky actually is a free-lance accountant, and the store likely isn't his only source of income. Being an accountant means he probably won't end up like that cliche in which the lottery winner blows all the cash and ends up bankrupt in nine months. But he probably wasn't hurting all that much for money when he won.

Anyway, I hope he does follow through with his promise. A nice building to serve as sanctuary for Wiccans would certainly be a good thing, in and of itself.

Still, it's not something I would have done.

Some Reviews

It's been more than a month since I've posted, mainly because I'd misplaced my password, and trying to recover it was a kafkaesque runaround in frustration. Having my server crash at work didn't help. I'm hoping that this will finally take care of things.

A few comments on movies Penny and I saw recently.

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There's a peculiarity in Amerikan movies dating back to the early to mid 1990s, and it's one I don't particularly appreciate. It has to do with sex. People in movies still have sex in Amerikan movies, to be sure, but they almost always leave their underwear on when they do it.

I think I know what's going on here, or at least how it started, and it has a lot to do with a certain cowardice that has developed in Hollywood since the vold revolutionary days of the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.

About the time this trend started coincides pretty closely with the emergence of the unholy alliance between the radical feminist left and the fundamentalist Christian right in an effort to outlaw porn. Specifically, female nudity in movies was A.) an objectification of women for the gratification of horny men; B.) a means by which men got horny watching movies, thus contributing to rape, and C.) all of the above.

Now, I've never bought into this bullshit, and in fact, there is some evidence that in fact, the rise of Internet pornography has contributed to a decrease in the incidence of rape in recent years.

All of that aside, Hollywood still seems to insist that people fuck with their underwear on.

The latest example of this is the latest teenage horndog sex comedy, Superbad. It's from the same team of producers and actors that brought us The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. All three of these movies are wildly funny at times, but in the end, I've been bothered by all of them -- it's as if they want things both ways. The producers want to titillate you with sex (though more talking about it than seeing it), and at the same time, they want to deliver this ultra-consevative message about morality. Knocked Up was the worst of these -- it played out as if Dr. Phil wrote the script, as in "all women are goddesses and their every want and need is sacred; all men are scum, and they will remain so unless they go through the effort of changing every single detail about themselves, and maybe even if they do it anyway."

Fortunately, the subtext of Superbad wasn't nearly so obnoxious, mostly innocent stuff about the importance of sticking by your true friends.

But they still kept their underwear on to fuck.

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I really wanted to like Stardust. I really, really did. In fact, I tried like hell to like that movie. But in the end...

Stardust is a fantasy flick based on a story by Neil Gaiman. That alone gives it a lot of points in my book. Gaiman is one of the most brilliant writers to appear on the fantasy scene in decades -- never mind that his appearance came via graphic novels, particularly the long-running Sandman series.

The film was beautifully done in almost every way. The story and script were extremely engaging and emotionally affecting. The cinematography was breathtaking. The acting was uniformly excellent.

The premise in a nutshell -- Dude in a small English village during what appears to be the 18th or early 19th century is smitten with this haughty bitch and wants to do anything to get her to marry him. One night, they see a falling star land beyond a forbidden wall that separates England from the fantasy kingdom of Stormhold. She says she wants the fallen star, and he promises to fetch it for her.

It turns out, the star is actually a gorgeous woman, and a whole lot of people in Stormhold want her powers for themselves. Among them, a bunch of evil witches...

And therein is the problem. There are four separate witch characters in the film, and they are all depicted as supremely and thoroughly evil, without one shred of redeeming qualities among any of them.

Well, I'm a witch. And I object.

OK, I can understand an evil witch -- fairy tale archetype and all that. But four of them? All of them completely devoid of any good qualities whatsoever?

Sorry folks, but to this day, people still lose their jobs over the Wiccan religion. People still have their children taken away in custody battles -- in fact, divorce lawyers are still considered to be not doing their jobs if they don't bring it up as an issue. There are still fundamentalist assholes out there who do violence against witches or their property -- like the Wiccan priestess who came home in South Carolina not too long ago to find all of her pets beheaded.

I can kind of understand the depiction of the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. After all, C.S. Lewis was an evangelical Christian, and you wouldn't expect him to have any fondness toward witches. And he started writing his Narnia series in the 1930s -- no one had ever heard of Gerald Gardner back then, and he probably hadn't heard much about the Comasonry movement that helped give rise to Wicca. You could say he had an excuse.

Neil Gaiman has no such excuse. A fantasy writer living today, especially one so literate and well-educated as he is, has certainly heard about Wicca and what it is. Hell, he probably personally knows some Wiccans. And none of his work gives any evidence that he is some kind of raving fundamentalist. He just knows better than to do what he did.

So I ultimately can't say I liked Stardust or can recommend it to anybody.

But to be fair, Penny loved the movie and recommends it to everyone. And she's also a witch. Not at all like the witches you see in Stardust either.

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On to something I did like. I found the science-fiction movie Sunshine to be very refreshing. What was particularly refreshing about it was a science-fiction script that wasn't written by someone who flunked science in high school and therefore has hated science ever since.

The premise -- the earth's sun is dying at some unspecified date in the future, though not real far into the future. As the sun fades, the earth has been experiencing non-stop winter. In an attempt to "reboot" the sun, an expedition was sent seven years earlier to the sun to drop a huge atomic bomb into it and see if the flames can be rekindled, as it were. It disappeared without a trace. Now the spaceship Icarus Two is carrying "all of the earth's remaining fissile materials" in one last attempt to restart the sun before it dies completely.

Now this is not a perfect film. There are some cliches. If you're a moderately well-read science-fiction fan, you just know that they're going to find Icarus One, and some disaster will befall because of it. And I heard some complaints that the ending was ambiguous and hard to understand -- personally, I didn't have much trouble figuring it out, and it was certainly a lot less difficult than, say, a classic like 2001: A Space Oddysey. Some of the images could be attributed to psychological fantasy on the part of the characters that are still alive at this point, but you're set up for it pretty well through the course of the film. Also, viewers should be forewarned -- the tone of this film is very dark, and a lot of disturbing things happen during the course of the story.

There were a lot of things I liked about the film. The writer obviously did some homework and researched how a spaceship might be designed to make an expedition to the sun and how it might operate. The film incorporated a lot of what scientists know about the nature of space near the sun. The argument is made that the mission must be derailed -- that if God intended for mankind to become extinct, then it is blasphemous to resist that fate -- but the characters who make this argument are not portrayed sympathetically, and they are definitely not the good guys. And in the end, the solution to the problem is definitely a technological one, not an anti-technological one.

And that may be the most refreshing thing of all about Sunshine.

Heartland Travel I

I got a sense of the culture of Owensboro, KY yesterday evening when I drove up to the Holiday Inn Express. The first building next door to my hotel was a place called White Lightning Liquors.

Now I have actually seen the genuine Kentucky moonshine only once. I was at a party in Lapeer, MI back in the early 1980s with my former colleagues on the Lapeer County Press, and one former County Press journalist had come up from down south somewhere with a bottle of moonshine, a liquid clear as water in a two-liter Coke bottle. To northerners like us, it was something of a novelty, and people passed it around. When the bottle got to me, I unscrewed the cap and took a whiff. The stuff smelled so foul that I could bring myself to take a sip.

I later recounted this story in an APA (Amateur Press Association) I was writing for at the time. Another APA hacker, a gentleman from Alabama, replied to me saying, "Hell, Ed, you ain't sposeta smell it! You're sposeta drank it!"

So after checking into my room, I walked over to White Lightning Liquors to see if they had any. It was a pleasant night for Kentucky in July, after a very hot day. A rabbit skittered out of my way as I walked across the lawn.

As it turns out, it's White Lightning Liquors in name only -- it was a standard-issue liquor store, with no illegal stuff anywhere in sight. It did, however, have a drive-through, which tells me that Kentuckians in this part of the state take their drinking at least somewhat seriously. (I heard of a place in Wyoming that actually had a drive-through bar -- now that's really taking your drinking seriously!)

I bought some cabernet and took it back to the room, which was equipped with a refrigerator, where I deposited it. I was thinking I might need it later. I'd been to Owensboro once before on business, about 10 years ago to visit a soy processing plant alongside the Ohio River. At the time, the place struck me as dirty, smelly, poverty-stricken, and without much of anything to do except sue your neighbors recreationally -- in other words, a lot like Decatur Fukking Illinois, only smaller.

Things seemed to have improved at least a little. This time, Owensboro actually had gotten a handful of chain restaurants. I'm not generally a fan of chain restaurants, but in this case, it was a definite improvement. I wound up going for dinner two exits down the U.S. 60 Bypass to a Texas Roadkill, where I figured I could at least get a decent steak. It was, although at one point -- part of the restaurant's theme, I guess -- about six or seven of the wait staff lined up next to the booth where I was sitting and started performing a line dance to the kuntry mewzik on the loudspeaker system. I just sat there and smiled at them, the sort of smile one might reserve for an autistic sibling discovered painting on the walls with his/her own shit. I tried real hard not to let it ruin my dinner.

Then I went over to the Buffalo Wild Wings down the block and played their Buzztime TV trivia game for a while, then went back to my hotel.

Today, after my first stop of the morning at a Perdue Farms feed mill in nearby Livermore, KY, I headed back in to Owensboro to find a public library where I could go on-line and check e-mail. The library turned out to be located in a fine neighborhood of old Victorian homes, the kind you hope to find in a town in the Upper South. So all in all, my experience of Owensboro had improved over the 1990s.

The place still smells like White Lightning, though.

Yippie Yi Ki Yay Kaboom!

These days, I'm pretty conflicted about celebrating the Fourth of July.

On the one hand, I like fireworks. I mean, I really, really like fireworks. They are one of the favorite things in the whole world.

On the other hand, I don't care all that much for a lot of the other stuff that goes with Fourth of July. For example, I don't consider myself patriotic; I consider myself rational. So all the rah, rah for flag and country never did all that much for me.

It's done even less ever since the United States ceased to be a free country under the present regime in Washington. From the day the Bush regime invaded Iraq, I've ceased to consider myself a citizen of the United States or any other country, for that matter. Last time I checked, they all had governments, too. So when I go to the local fireworks display and have to hear that Toby Keith song about Kicking the Ass of Amerikaz Enemeez played over loudspeakers, it kind of sticks in my craw.

But Fourth of July is a national holiday and, therefore, a day off from work, and there is something to be said for that. Especially if your lawn needs to be mowed, and ours really, really did. So the idea was to sleep in a bit, go get some brunch, then do some work around the house the rest of the day, maybe grill something up on the big new grill we bought for the wedding open house, then light out at the last minute to catch the fireworks.

The whole plan turned out to be problematic, though. To start with, the fireworks had been moved. For as long as anyone can remember, the Champaign Freedom Festival had been held on the big grassy fields near Memorial Stadium on the university campus, which is less than a mile from our house. Weather permitting, we could even grab a couple of folding chairs and walk over there.

Unfortunately, the university has begun a major two-year project renovating the stadium. At the end of the project, the stadium will have a lot of new fancy touches, like skyboxes for the high-rollers. (They'd also better have an Illini football team that can win the occasional game or two, either that or hookers offering free blow jobs in those skyboxes, or they aren't going to be able to sell any of those seats they're paying millions to build. While they're at it, they might try to do something about the livestock smell blowing in from South Farms.)

As a result, the large open area where people gathered to see the fireworks display now is a staging area for heavy construction equipment and building materials.

So the city moved the fireworks display to Dodds Park outside of Parkland Community College up in the far northwest corner of Champaign. That's a good five miles from home, and there are limited entrances and exits to that campus, so traffic was guaranteed to be a big problem.

Secondly, the weather was a big if. The forecast called for scattered thunderstorms throughout the area. "Scattered thunderstorms" in east central Illinois means that not a single drop of rain will fall on our garden plot, but if we try to go anywhere, we'll get drenched and maybe electrocuted. I don't care to sit in a downpour waiting for fireworks that might get canceled, and Penny isn't too keen on the idea, either.

Around the middle of the afternoon, I went online to accuweather.com and checked out the doppler radar map. The eastern two-thirds of the United States looked like it had teenage-grade acne. Indeed, big black clouds were rolling by to the north and south of us, rumbling with thunder and sending Murphy, who is terrified of thunderstorms, hiding under the couch. (Our other dog, Buddy, isn't bothered by thunderstorms in the least, so he kept on sleeping on top of the couch, letting out an occasional doggy snore.) Naturally, not a drop of rain was falling on our garden.

So I suggested to Penny that we take in a movie, then bring back some carryout food for dinner. We checked the listings in the newspaper, and since the patriotic thing to do on the Fourth of July is to watch something explode, we decided to go see Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth and latest in the series of action flicks starring Bruce Willis.

The plot for Die Hard IV is one of those "ripped from the headline" things. The credits stated that it was based on one of those "what if" magazine articles, apparently about how terrorists might attack the United States via computer. In the movie, a former government analyst tries to alert his superiors about how vulnerable the country is to a computer attack. As a result, his embarrassed superiors fire him and slander his good name. In retaliation, the ex-analyst puts together his own terrorist team and launch a computer attack that shuts down the transportation infrastructure, communications, and utilities. (The movie is a little sketchy on how the guy got the money for all that advanced computer equipment, not to mention semi trucks, helicopters, etc.) Just as the country is about to be plunged into chaos, in comes NYPD cop John McClane...

The modern Amerikan action movie generally contains any number of "Nawww!" moments. A Nawww! moment is when the action hero does something that is so obviously impossible that it goes beyond your ability to suspend disbelief, and you go "Nawww!" The first Die Hard movie, which I watched earlier in the week on DVD, has relatively few of these, but in fine Hollywood tradition, as the series has continued, the movies become more and more over the top. Live Free or Die Hard has about one Nawww! moment every 90 seconds.

My favorite Nawww! moment comes toward the end of the film when McClane leaps from a largely destroyed semi-truck going over the edge of an elevated expressway, lands on the wing of a spinning, out-of-control U.S. Air Force fighter jet that is about to crash, leaps from the wing of the jet onto a collapsing section of freeway pavement (which is collapsing because the jet shot a missile at it while trying to get McClane), slides down the pavement, and rolls off onto the ground just as the freeway section crashes into the earth. Then, he gets up and walks away, basically unscratched. That's about four or five Nawww! moments rolled into one.

It's easy for someone of my tastes and politics to despise these action movies, but I don't really. What I like about them is that most of them, when you look past the right-wing surface politics usually espoused by the hero, are actually profoundly anti-authoritarian and anti-government movies. In virtually every case, the criminals or the street gang or the terrorists or whatever bad guy have you are threatening all civilization as we know it, and the official government authorities are always absolutely helpless to stop the bad guys. In some cases, the government is shown to be so incompetent that it makes everything even worse. Along comes the Action Hero, who is always some lone maverick -- maybe a government employee like a cop or a CIA operative or maybe not, like some private eye or an out-and-out vigilante. This character is always a radically individualistic loner at odds with the powers-that-be. They hate him but have no other choice but to accept his help, or sometimes they try to kill him, too. In the end, it is the individual loner hero who always saves the day, leaving the authorities to pick up the pieces of the entire city he's wrecked over the course of his battle with the bad guys.

Of course, that doesn't mean every action movie is worth watching from a libertarian standpoint. I particularly dislike stuff like the TV show 24 where the hero is constantly saving the day by torturing people. I don't worry so much about the influence of such shows on children as I do its influence on adults. Particularly adults who work for the government.

Nevertheless, I hear that the next Die Hard movie is already in pre-production, and I can't wait for Die Hard With a Stiffy.

After the movie, Penny and I went out to Flattop Grill, a sort of Mongolian barbecue place, to get some food for carryout, and then she had an idea. It was just dark enough for the Champaign fireworks to be getting underway, so why not drive out west toward the edge of town to see if we could find some vantage point where we could see the display from the comfort of our car.

So we headed wet out Springfield Avenue, and when we got out to the shopping areas near the west end of town, near where Penny used to live before we bought our house, we found a spot in a parking lot between Za's Italian Fast Foods and the Big Lots retail outlet that gave us a clear view of the fireworks. All that without any patriotic kuntry mewzik over loudspeakers. And maybe best of all, the Goddess threw in Her own natural fireworks with a large thunderhead rolling past well to the north of town, flashes of sheet lightning brightening the sky momentarily as a backdrop to the more conventional city firework display.

Bruce Willis and Astarte. That's what a Fourth of July ought to be.

Big Flood Revisited

I've never cared much for the story of Noah's Ark. Maybe it has something to do with the image of an angry vengeful God so angry with his creation that He would destroy everyone and everything -- although He really loves us, which we would do well to remember lest he Smite Us Into Oblivion out of His Love For Us.

But I suspect a lot more of it the enthusiasm with which religious fundamentalists take to the story. After all, most Christian fundamentalists, at least, really take to the image of an angry vengeful God, so the Noah's Ark story would appeal to them out of the same impulse that produced the horrible Left Behindseries of End Time novels.

Perhaps what appeals to them even more, however, is the way in which this story, in particular, requires a complete suspension of belief in science and reason, which is mandatory, since to a fundamentalist, every last chapter and verse of Scripture must be accepted in the literality of the language of King James I of England. Which means that not only was the world created in seven literal days. but God destroyed the world in a Literal Flood that resulted from 40 days and 40 nights of non-stop rain, producing a flood so deep that it submerged all land, presumably right to the top of Mount Everest.

Now, if you have the slightest respect for science and reason, there are a lot of problems with this story. Like how, once the waters reached a depth of 25,000 feet plus, they somehow didn't freeze in the extremely thin air of the stratosphere, and how was Noah and his family and his zoo able to breathe? The Bible doesn't say anything about life support systems.

To me, an even bigger question was where exactly did all the water come from, anyway? After all, we've known at least since the 1960s -- when I read about it in one of those grade school science books that fundamentalists so detest -- exactly how deep a flood is possible on this planet. Specifically, this biggest story of water available for a flood is frozen in the polar ice caps. If something should happen to cause the polar ice caps to melt all at once, the oceans would rise by about 200 feet.

Now that's a pretty significant flood, and for sure, you'd have to take a gondola to the Empire State Building. But 200 feet does not put an Ark 10,000 feet up Mount Ararat, no way, no how. It just doesn't.

Now, if we were ancient Hebrews, we would have no problem figuring out where all the water came from. To the Hebrews of 1000 BC, the earth was a flat disk floating in a vast Universal ocean. What kept the water of this universal ocean off the surface of the earth was a great big inverted bowl overhead, which we call the sky and the King James fundies called the "firmament."

Now this firmament bowl kept the earth very dry -- and in the world of the ancient Hebrews, most places were dry-as-a-bone desert. When God wanted the plants to grow, he would open these floodgates mounted in the firmament just a little tiny bit, letting in just enough water to make it rain for a bit.

At the time of the Great Flood, as described in a certain amount of detail in the Book of Genesis, God opened up the floodgates all the way and left them open for 40 days. The earth filled up with water like one of those crystal ball toys in Citizen Kane.

Of course, no one believes that today... or maybe some do. After all, a widely reported survey from a number of years ago revealed that something like 25% or 30% of Americans did not believe the moon landings ever happened. They believe they were faked on a Hollywood sound stage somewhere. If was a significant enough finding that Hollywood actually produced a movie based on that premise.

The Noah's Ark story did, however, teach me a valuable lesson about the nature of religious fundamentalists and the length to which some of them will go to defend their peculiar take on reality.

Back in the mid-1970s, when I was a student at Michigan State University, I started dating a young woman from Westminster College, a Presbyterian school in New Wilmington, PA. I traveled there to visit her several times, and found that she and her circle of friends were fundamentalist Christians. (That puts them a couple orders of magnitude in faith beyond the college's United Presbyterian Church, which officially does not require its members to believe that the universe popped into being 8,000 years ago or that evolution is some kind of myth perpetuated by godless atheistic scientists.)

On one visit to New Wilmington, I got into quite a discussion with one of her friends over my lack of belief in the literality of the Book of Genesis. Specifically, I brought up the "where did all the water come from" question. He said he had no problem believing in the Great Flood. What convinced him, he said, was the existence of a thin layer of sedimentary rock found at the exact same depth everywhere in the world -- across all types of terrain, under the mountaintops, below the bottom of the ocean, everywhere -- and that this rock layer could only be explained by some sort of Universal Flood in recent history.

Now I was no geologist, ans so I had no direct knowledge to affirm or refute this assertion. So all I could say was that I had never heard of such a thing but would be willing to check it out.

And that's exactly what I did. Shortly after arriving back in East Lansing, I went to see a professor in the MSU Department of Geology and asked him about this alleged layer of sedimentary rock.

The professor looked at me for a moment, then started laughing and laughing. I thought he was going to piss his pants, he laughed so hard. When he finally caught his breath, the professor said that I'd been hoodwinked, and I was far from the first student he'd ever seen who'd been fooled in this way. There was no such layer of rock. The Fundies had just made it up. There were questions they couldn't answer, so they just made something up in hopes that people would be fooled into believing the account in the Book of Genesis.

And so I learned a very valuable lesson. If someone -- for reasons religious, political, or whatever -- is trying to convince me of something that appears to defy all reason or logic, that thing probasbly does defy all reason and logic, and this person is not to be trusted. About anything.

Emergency Broadcast

I was driving over to Decatur early this morning to work and listening to some blaring music by Prokofiev on the Champaign NPR station when the loud buzzing signal of the Emergency Broadcast System sounded. Since there hadn't been any warning beforehand, I wondered what the emergency might be. I don't think anyone had launched an attack on the United States, unless George W. Bush had decided it was time for Jeezus to make His Second Coming and launched the missiles, which I suppose is always possible for his sort.

I had heard the System used in an actual emergency once. It was in the early 1980s, and I was living in southwest Michigan. This was the era of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell, so that was a very scary sound to here. The announcer came on, however, and announced that a waterspout had been sighted on Lake Michigan and was heading toward the vicinity of New Buffalo. Waterspouts rarely turn into major tornadoes, and in any case, I was 25 miles north of there at the time, so I didn't think anything else of it. (The waterspout dissipated before it reached the shore.)

In this case, however, there was no announcement, just silence and static. Perhaps this might happen if Washington, DC were vaporized (one could only hope), but I was more annoyed than scared, so I switched over to my favorite hard rock station out of Springfield. WQLZ was off the air, too.

Next I switched over to WUIS, the NPR station in Springfield. This station was broadcasting its usual Morning Edition news program. After a couple of minutes, the Emergency Broadcasting System alarm went off on this station, as well. When the signal finally ended, the regular broadcast came back on as if nothing were wrong. This happened a second time, and again, the station returned to its regular broadcast.

I thought the entire thing was pretty weird, and by this time, I had arrived at my usual spot to pick up a breakfast pastry and a newspaper. The world apparently wasn't coming to an end, and if someone had dropped a nuclear bomb on Decatur, IL, you probably couldn't tell to look at the place, anyway.

I went into the office and didn't mention it to anyone, but I did bring it up this evening over dinner with Penny. She commented that the same thing happened on the oldies station she likes to listen to -- she was in the shower at the time, and the station was off the air for a few minutes. She kept the radio on and eventually got an explanation from the DJs. Apparently, there was some severe weather in the Washington, DC area this morning, and a lightning strike took out the transformer that powers the Emergency Broadcasting System. The system does have a backup generator, and the server decided that Washington, DC had been destroyed (as I said, one could only hope) and triggered the Emergency Broadcasting System alert nationwide.

If something so common and mundane as a thunderstorm could set off the Emergency Broadcasting System, though, I have to wonder what might set off, say, the Strategic Air Command systems that launch the missiles. Note to myself: Don't eat beans before my next business trip to Washington. We don't want anything to trigger some oversensitive defense system programmed by incompetent public servants.