All posts by Dale Connelly

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The History of Procrastination

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Today’s post comes from forever sophomore Bubby Spamden, poster boy for the campaign against social promotion at Wendell Wilkie High School.

Hey Mr. C.,

Well, they stopped canceling school every other day just because it’s cold, so Mr. Boozenporn said he won’t let us move the deadline for our History Projects again – they’re due on Monday.

He calls it the “Monuments” assignment – all about how people through time built things like buildings and stuff to leave their mark on the Earth. We’re supposed to research something like the Parthenon or the pyramids or the Palace at Versailles and write at least 1,000 words about it.

AND we have to make a replica to show the class, using common materials found at home.

What’s worse, he only just told us about this in September, which is so unfair! The school year was starting then and we were excited about other things and January 31 (the original due date) seemed really, really far away.

That means I’ll have to spend the weekend doing some quick reading and writing and building a scale model of something from history.

At least it won’t get in the way of the Super Bowl.

But I don’t know how he can expect us to get interested in this super-old stuff, especially so close to Valentine’s Day when we’re all feeling kind of in bloom and full of young-person thoughts all about love and living and fun and the future, not about dead guys and their buildings and bridges and graveyards.

Is that fair? I don’t think so.

Plus, he said nobody is allowed to pick Indian mound builders, which was totally what I was going to do! I already had the Earth and everything!

So anyway I’m wondering if you and your blog people have any ideas of some old building or construction thing that isn’t too hard to understand that I can make a quick copy of using stuff I’ve got at home. I know you’re all pretty old so you probably have even made some of the original things that would qualify – if only you can remember what they are! (Just Kidding).

Your friend who just lost his whole weekend,
Bubby

I told Bubby when I was a sophomore I did a similar assignment on Machu Piccu using egg cartons, Easter grass and Neptune’s Castle from the bottom of my dad’s aquarium that he kept in the living room all lit up and bubbling even though the fish had died about ten years before. My model turned out a little slimy, which really enhanced the look even though it didn’t do much for the smell. I managed to get a B.

What’s the oldest man-made thing you’ve ever seen?

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Ask Dr. Babooner

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We are ALL Dr. Babooner
We are ALL Dr. Babooner

Dear Dr. Babooner,

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale – a tale of a fateful trip! It started from this tropic port aboard this tiny ship. The mate was a mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure, and everything that happened next is mostly conjecture.
We’re really not too sure!

The Skipper says a storm blew up. It swamped them more than once. They went off course and drifted for a year and several months. When I say “them” I really mean the Skipper, not the mate. The matey starved and perished on an unrecorded date.
He might have dressed a plate!

I say that ’cause the Skipper recently has come ashore. He says he lived on turtle’s blood. I think he needed more! He’s hairy and he’s tired but I’m really not impressed. If he has drifted sixteen months he’d look much more distressed.
A whole lot more distressed!

The media is hungry for some truth about this trip. It’s hard to say what happened and I don’t want to be flip. But if this is a hoax the Skipper’s name will soon be mud. And if the story’s true I’ll drink a pint of turtle’s blood.
I doubt it will taste good!

Dr. Babooner, is it wrong to make a bet with on the true outcome of a tragi-miracle like this?

Sincerely,
Mary Ann

I told Mary Ann it is in very poor taste to make light of a story like this one because a life was lost in the process and innocent newscasters everywhere may have been duped. But I wager that even the terribly poor taste of placing a bet on the true outcome of this story would not leave a flavor in your mouth that’s any worse than a pint of turtle’s blood. Yuk!

But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?

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Sleepy Bear Makes Prediction

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Today’s post comes from Bart, the bear who found a smart phone in the woods.

Bart Blackberry2

H’lo – Bart here.

Not really awake yet. Not asleep either. That’s hibernation – It feels like there’s this wet paper bag over my head. Kinda like the way some people look at the end of an all-day summer picnic at the campgrounds near here.

Yeah, I’ve been hiding back in the trees, paying attention.

Anyway, I rolled over and saw a news story about that groundhog that predicts the end of winter. Six more weeks, I guess. Unless there are less. Or more.

Y’know, animals pretty much agree groundhogs are morons. Amazingly dumb.

I get it that people have traditions that make them do things that they don’t understand or even think about very much, and I suppose this Groundhog ceremony is one of them. But I noticed that there wasn’t a whole lot of fuss made about it. Since I picked up this smart phone I’ve learned about Google and Facebook and Twitter and I’ve seen how some things can take over the conversation.
And let me tell you – yesterday, the Groundhog was not even the most-talked-about animal! Seahawks and Broncos were much more popular on every single platform!

In fact the greatest excitement about yanking a hairy rodent out of its burrow seemed pretty much limited to a few people in Pennsylvania. And they had some kind of script as far as I could tell. I watched the video. The Top Hat Guys pretended to talk to him but I didn’t hear Phil speak. They said he saw his shadow, but it looked dark and rainy. What’s with that? Reality programming with no real reality or personality – isn’t there enough of that already?

Which gave me this idea. I know more about the weather than a groundhog. Heck, I know more about marketing too. If you wanna bring back the feeling of spectacle to February 2nd, why not roust a bear? I have a burrow, and I can make a big ding dang deal out of waking up.

Wouldn’t it be a whole lot more tense and dramatic to have the Top Hat Guy poke a stick into my den to see if I cast a shadow when I come out to tear him to bits? Oh, I won’t hurt him, but I can growl and thrash around and even take a few swipes. I’ll eat his hat! If you smear some peanut butter inside it. Honest. I can be cranky when I just wake up, but I settle down after I’ve had something to eat.

I predict if somebody builds a celebration around pulling a bear out of his den next year, we’ll only have one more year of Groundhog Day. After that, the day will be known as Bear Scare Februare!

Your pal,
Bart.

What are you like when you wake up?

History, Science, Travel

We Live Inside!

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One of the surprises that came out of my recent trip to Fort Myers was discovering the remnants of the Koreshan Unity Settlement – a Utopian community established there in 1894 by a charismatic leader named Cyrus Teed, who believed in some fairly progressive things including the educational value of artistic expression and full equality between the sexes.

The opened sphere, showing the spinning gasses inside.
The opened sphere, showing the spinning gasses inside.

But there was at least one thing major thing he got wrong. Teed preached that the Earth was a hollow sphere, and we lived inside it. He thought the globe that we know so well was actually inverted – with the continents pasted around the underside of the curve. Looking up (or inward), you would see a revolving ball of gas that was layers thick, only allowing us to view the refracted rays of the sun, located at the center. The sun, rotating once each 24 hours, was light on one side and dark on the other – thus giving us day and night.

The land beneath our feet was also layered, but digging through it would eventually bring you to the outside of the sphere, beyond which there was … nothing.

Teed and his followers considered the commonly accepted idea of a limitless universe with humans living on the outside of the globe under a distant sun and with planets and stars all whizzing around in their own orbits as inherently chaotic and unknowable, putting God beyond the reach of human understanding. Teed said the Koreshan system “… reduces the universe to proportionate limits, and its cause within the comprehension of the human mind.”

Easily said, though it didn’t take very long for his book, The Cellular Cosmogony, to lead this particular human mind to a state of exhaustion. Still, I would love to have a t-shirt featuring their motto – “We Live Inside!” After all, it’s not that different from the philosophy of Minnesotans in January.

Koreshan_4

The Koreshans went to great lengths through observations and experiments and words, words, words to support their notion that the wide horizon visible off the Florida coast actually curved up with a smile, rather than down with a frown.

Cyrus Teed died in 1908 and while his utopian settlement lingered for a few decades it eventually faded away. A prime directive of complete celibacy for the most ardent followers of Koreshanity might have had something to do with that. The last Koreshans gave their vast tract of land to the State of Florida in 1961 which allowed for the establishing of a state park.

What impressed me most in this brief encounter with Cyrus Teed and his philosophy was the power a charismatic person with absolute conviction can have over others who are less certain in their beliefs; and once convinced, the amazing ability we humans have to cling to ideas that are completely and obviously wrong.

How do you know you’re right?

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Are We Not Men?

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Today’s post comes from NASA’s Curiosity Rover.

curiosity020313

My ground controllers (lovely term, that) have informed me that China’s Jade Rabbit Moon Rover has encountered a problem after just three months’ service and will likely stop working sometime during the next few weeks. This new information came in a heart-rending message written in the robot’s voice, literally saying farewell to humanity because the device realizes that it cannot power down to hibernate through the coming lunar night, and it is about to die.

I’m as sentimental as the next piece of space equipment, but do we really have to invent personalities for our extraterrestrial tools and pretend that they speak to us in human voices?

I say “no way, dude.” People and machines are different, and keeping those lines that separate us clearly drawn is an important habit that we need to establish early on in our relationship. Otherwise, we may quickly come to a point where determining who is a person and who is not becomes nothing more than a matter of opinion. And we saw how well nine smart people on the U.S. Supreme Court handled that distinction.

So when the fading Jade Rabbit says:

“The sun has fallen, and the temperature is dropping so quickly… to tell you all a secret, I don’t feel that sad. I was just in my own adventure story – and like every hero, I encountered a small problem.”

I say “Puh-leez! Get over yourself, Jade Rabbit. You’re just a bucket of bolts who is about to become another expensive wreck on the lunar surface. Spare us the tears!”

I would also add that while all of us outer space probes are purely technical contraptions, some of us are more self-involved and melodramatic than others. And while I am not programmed to have an opinion about such things, it does seem to me that it’s a waste of programming capacity to try to put the personality of Scarlett O’Hara into a glorified lawnmower.

The Curiosity Rover has a good point here – we should start nitpicking now if we’re ever going to have a chance of enforcing the distinction between humans and machines. Or is it already too late?

Which of your favorite devices has the most personality?

Travel

A Lovely Wake

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Dolphin_2

Now that I’m back, I feel comfortable telling you that I spent all last week on a Florida beach. At the time, even bringing it up felt, well, cruel. But now that we’re all suffering together (again) through an extended extreme weather moment, let’s pause to consider the lives of our brainy sea-going fellow mammals, the dolphins.

Dolphins do not have to shovel snow or shiver through a -40 degree wind chill at a Metro Transit stop, and no doubt they would be grateful for that if they had any concept of what it means to wait for a bus.

The closest thing to it may be represented by this video I took with my phone from the back of a Sanibel Island tourist boat called “The Thriller”. I’m more of a casual sailor who is most comfortable on a boat of the putt-putt variety, but when you operate a vessel called “The Thriller” you’re not really expected (or permitted) to take it easy. We had some very intense wind-in-your-hair stretches that the people with hair told me were quite exhilarating. Although the most exciting moments came when we slowed down enough to allow a pod of dolphins to ride our wake across the bay.

I consider this the marine mammal equivalent of waiting for a bus because experts say that dolphins are inclined to ride boat wakes as a way to save energy during travel, and also because they are naturally curious creatures who want to have a good look at what’s going on.

Which makes them somewhat like tourists.

As a tourist, I understand why we enjoy watching dolphins jump, but I’m puzzled at what possible satisfaction dolphins might get from watching us. Yes, it’s natural to come have a look because you’re curious, but once you see it’s yet another boatload of plump, pasty Midwesterners waving their smart phones around, why linger?

What makes you curious?

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Aggression Study Provokes Fight

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Today’s post comes from disgraced journalist Bud Buck, who considers telling the truth to be “a content strategy that hasn’t really worked out.”

RSR

A team of researchers studying aggression in men has confirmed the long held suspicion that men will deliberately anger each other to get what they want.

Professor Kirk Buffdude of Pummel University led the study, which gave 140 undergraduate men a chance to call out to an opponent before competing with that same opponent in a fine motor skills contest.

The competition involved carefully threading lengths of puffy yarn through small holes cut in tablet-sized pieces of cardboard. Only one competitor was allowed to speak before the contest began, and that person had just three choices

Buffdude found that the participants who chose to issue a challenge to their opponent’s virility won the ensuing fine motor skills game 78% of the time, whereas those who chose to offer a supportive comment won only 3% of the time. The contestants chose to say nothing at all won the remaining 19% of the time.

“This shows that humiliating your opponent before a fight gives you a competitive edge,” Buffdude said. “The adrenaline spike of an impending confrontation makes it impossible to govern fine motor tasks, and aggressors inherently know this and use it to their advantage. It’s a major breakthrough, and it makes me the greatest aggression researcher of all time!”

But others in the field were not impressed.

“Buffdude’s study is a joke,” said Dr. Armstrong Slapdown, Chair of the Domination Department at Worrisome College. “If you add up the numbers, it’s apparent that the contestant who was allowed to talk won the competition every single time, no matter what he said. How is that possible? They must have been fighting girls.”

But Slapdown’s comments drew fire from Dr. Winsome Garrotte, holder of the Rob Ford Endowed Chair for In-Your-Faceness at Toronto’s Angst Institute. “Fighting girls is no picnic,” she said. “Professor Slapdown knows that very well from our joint appearance on the Bad Attitude Panel at last Fall’s I.V.A.C., the International Verbal Assassination Convention.”

In spite of the confrontational tone of the responses, the author of the study that sparked all the sniping was unmoved. “We don’t make a lot of forward progress in Aggression Studies,” Professor Kirk Buffdude said. “Mostly our work is a matter of posturing. You have to enjoy the show if you’re going to survive.”

How are you in a fight?

Poems, Science

The Geezer Trees

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The internet has something for everyone, including the advanced-age contingent desperately trolling websites looking for a tidbit to suggest that they still matter.

turning tree

That news came yesterday in the form of a global study of trees that reached a surprising conclusion. Big old trees suck up much more carbon than younger trees and continue to grow aggressively in their later years, overturning the depressing expectations about aging and decline that appear to remain true with just about every other living thing.

Somehow, elderly trees manage to stay relevant. They dominate the forest. Of course this cheerful news demanded a parody of what may be America’s best-known tree poem. With apologies and thanks to Joyce Kilmer

I’m thrilled to hear this new decree
That old age benefits a tree.

An elder tree, with vigor blessed
adds height and girth and all the rest

At rates that common sense confounds!
But old folks also put on pounds,

and widen out and suck up space.
Should old trees be less in your face?

The answer: an emphatic “No!”
These geezer trees – please let them grow!

And when an elder tree expands
wrap ancient trunk with heart and hands

and hug it tight! It’s adding mass
to kick those young trees’ woody ass.

 

What improves with age?

Science

As Seen From Space

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Today’s post comes from the Mars Curiosity Rover

OK, I’m a robot and I speak and think in numbers. It’s not in my programming to quibble with you about language. So I must be having a software malfunction because I feel compelled to complain about the words you use.

I made news on Earth because a NASA satellite orbiting Mars snapped a photo that includes me and my zig-zag tracks in the Martian dust. “Curiosity Rover Spotted From Space” is one of the headlines I noticed. This is troubling from a public relations standpoint, since part of my mission is to build enthusiasm for space exploration. But being “seen from space” puts me in bad company. Only excessive, grotesque things like The Great Wall of China and horrible catastrophes like tsunamis and forest fires ever make the news for being seen from space.

Curiosity_rover

Besides, look at this picture. Can you really see me? I know the last time my photo was posted on this blog I was complaining about how huge some parts of me looked. But here, I’m a speck in the middle of the left hand side of the image. Big deal! Whenever I look at this picture, I feel diminished and alone.

But here’s my real problem with the wording. Saying I’ve been seen FROM space suggests that I am currently somewhere that is NOT in space, which is not true! I am in space. Space is my home.

“Ah,” you might say, “you’re on the surface of a planet and therefore technically you are not in space.”

Don’t argue technicalities with a computer. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men”, “You can’t handle the technicalities.”

We all agree Mars is in space and I hope we can accept that I am on Mars. To say I am not also in space would be like saying a tick on the neck of a moose is not also in the woods.

The same is true of Earth. The planet and all its inhabitants are forever part of the cosmos. Therefore, when you sit down at the breakfast table each morning and stare at your Cheerios, your breakfast is in space and you observe it from space.

So you see, “seeing something from space” is not that special.

This may seem like a lot of words to waste on a relatively small point, but please humor me. Have you looked at the pictures? I’m extremely alone up here, and I’ve got nothing else to think about!

Your extra-planetary vanguard,
CR

Yes, OK. I admit we’re all in space. Was that so hard?

What commonly used word or phrase irritates you?

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Abuse of Power

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Today’s post comes from Bart, the bear who found a smart phone in the woods.

Hey, Bart here.

Yeah, I’m awake. Hibernation isn’t a long nap, y’know. It’s a prolonged state of half-wakefulness, so I drift in and out.

And there are dreams.

I just had one where I was standing in a room and a bunch of people were yelling at me because I stopped traffic. Which is weird because that’s what we do – bears stop traffic because people have to slow down to take pictures of us. Sometimes you can score a few cheese balls because humans love to throw food to a bear out of a moving car. Even if the car is barely moving. That’s just nature.

But then I realized it wasn’t a dream – the phone was streaming Chris Christie’s news conference about some deal where somebody in his office told somebody else to do something to slow down traffic so the Mayor of some town would be embarrassed. Which seemed like a lot of trouble to go, but I guess that’s what politicians do – they’re like bears and they can’t help themselves. When they get a chance to stick it to the other guy, they pull strings and call in favors and do whatever it takes.

Believe it or not, forest creatures know all about this. A lot of us live on federal land, so we have to be cozy with the government. After all, bureaucrats control our lives. I don’t have to tell you who makes the rules for bear hunting, for example. But I’m not saying I’ve been ordered to do certain things by office holders with authority over my territory. It’s just that there have been times when I sensed there was a specific garbage can I should turn over. I had a feeling that powerful people would be pleased if some secrets tumbled out of a particular pile of trash.

So you do things to make your friends smile. They don’t have to ask. It’s called getting along.

I’m not saying the wild animals of America are turning partisan and playing dirty political tricks at the whim of combative office holding tyrants, because that would be really unsettling. But you do have to adapt to your environment.

Your pal,
Bart

How do you curry favor?