The Stupid Inheriting the Earth

Here's some scary thoughts for you...

There was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, and geneticist named Ronald Fisher. He's sometimes called Darwin's greatest successor, and with the publication of his book Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, in 1930, he laid the groundwork for later generations and a fundamental shift to genetics and numbers as a means of describing natural selection as the process by which evolution occurs. While in the sciences evolution may not be up for debate, whether or not it's done by natural selection (survival of the fittest) or by a different process (cooperation is necessary) has quietly become an area for discussion.

In any case, Ronald Fisher had some doubts about the fate of Homo sapiens. In a world where medical science will strive to find cures for disease, murders have been turned into capital offenses, and no natural predators, the less-fit humans will not be dying off in numbers as great as they should be, evolutionarily speaking. Natural selection favors the strongest or smartest or most ingenious of any particular specie, so what happens if we as Homo sapiens decide to alter that?

Wouldn't it be interesting is someone made a dystopian movie in which the future was run by idiots, running along the lines of thinking of our geneticist Ronald Fisher?

Must be our luck, because somebody has, and not just anybody, but that old lovable rascal Mike Judge. Yup, that Mike Judge, father of Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, and the supremely satisfying film Office Space.

Mike Judge's film is called Idiocracy, and if you'd like to laugh and be scared at the same time, I suggest you find it as soon as possible. It's smart, crass, and extremely quick. Starring Luke Wilson (the Wilson brother that's likable) and Maya Rudolph, it takes place in 2005, and quickly moves to 2505, where both Luke Wilson's and Maya Rudolph's characters are thawed accidently in an Army experiment gone bad.

The film was treated like a radioactive carrion; wasn't given any marketing funds, wasn't given any commercials or previews, and only played--briefly--on 130 screens.

I don't want to give away too much, like the hottest television shows and movies in 2505, but, as one example, viewers see the decline through a voice-over and montage, with the constant being the restaurant FuddRuckers. Of course, FuddRuckers starts out as the name, but as time goes on, and people become more and more stupid, it devolves into FuttRuckers, then to ButtRuckers, then, as you might've guessed, all the way to ButtFuckers. Now, I know this is crass and low-brow, but the shock value is greater in this blog form than in the film, because the idea is taken seriously.

Will the world depicted in the film Idiocracy ever come about? With clean fresh-water problems, global climate change, insistence on fossil fuel-burning industry, and nuclear proliferation already entrenched problems, that the world should devolve into a dystopian place where an average schlemiel becomes The World's Smartest Person seems like a novel worry.

But Mike Judge and fans of the film weren't the first to be worried about it.

Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge

The entire reason we visited Broad Channel was because we went to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.

One of the native peoples who were here when the Dutch, and then the British, arrived called themselves Jamacoe, or, probably like many tribesmen, the name they were eventually given had more to do with what their word for "people" turned out to be (or "enemy", when naming another set of tribesmen). Their original main community is now called Jamaica, Queens, and while there are many Caribbean islanders living there now, the fact that Jamaica (NY) is spelled and pronounced like the sovereign Caribbean island-nation is just a coincidence.

How the bay got the moniker Jamaica Bay, since it's not very close to the community, is still a mystery to me.

In any case, getting off the train at Broad Channel, and about a mile walk away, you enter the Jamaica Bay estuary and Wildlife Refuge. There is an information building, and the entrance to the free West Pond Trail. On the main island in Jamaica Bay, the main salt-marsh which has the community of Broad Channel upon it, there are two large ponds, two large bodies of water basically enclosed by the millennia of salt- and sandy-buildup. They flank the bridge that takes the subway into Broad Channel, while the cars cruise in along a different route.

The West Pond is the smaller of the two, and the trail around takes far less time. Also, the trail has been graveled into the ground, and cut wide, while the trail around the East Pond is more for the more-than-casual-hiker. We consider ourselves more than casual, but the tick problem out here is unbelievable, and Lyme's disease is a real threat that afflicts half the people we know, so we wussed out and went with the more conventional path.

The West Pond, as is the entire estuary, is home to a wide variety of birds. Here are some of them...a wren walks about on the right of the frame, a swan flaps their wings, the ducks float around.

There are osprey, owls and swallows as well, and off a beaten path we found a roped off area of beach head during feeding time, and I was able to get this shot.

This side of the island is also home to a natural terrapin hatchery, and so is off-limits most of the year. It does seem serene and oddly similar to some areas we left three-years and thirty-five-hundred-miles ago.

Even out here, in the quiet solitude of an estuary, off in the distance the skyline is visible.

Broad Channel, NYC Outpost on an Estaury

Getting on our train, the A train, going towards Queens instead of Manhattan, one can get to, in twenty minutes to a half-hour, the Howard Beach station, which has the JFK Airtrain connection to the eponymous airport.

The next stop along the A train towards the Rockaways, after a four or five minute jaunt over what appears to be ocean, is a stop called Broad Channel. Past Broad Channel is another over-water jaunt before you get to the various communities along the Rockaway Peninsula.

Broad Channel is a community, technically in Queens, that sprouted up in the middle 1800s along a salt-marsh archipelago and estuary that built up over thousands of years of run-off from rivers that flowed through Brooklyn and Queens. It sits in Jamaica Bay, a nearly enclosed briny body of water, corralled by eastern Brooklyn, south-western Queens, Kennedy Airport, and the Peninsula.

In certain places at Broad Channel, a visitor can view old-timey photographs taken when the community was in infancy, with wooden decks, boardwalks, and bridges linking up everything too small for the boats to accommodate. They were still at the whim of Mother Nature, and have been routed before by hurricanes.

Since the 1950s though, New York City industry and population had taken their toll, and around twelve-thousand acres of salt-marsh have disappeared. The people of Broad Channel got their voices heard, and over time, sewage has been diverted, laws against certain locations for developed have been enacted, and a concerted effort to stop the receding estuary and preserve the fragile diverse ecosystem have been implemented.

Today, it resembles any modernish beach community, like Pismo or Gordita, with a varied history resembling more of swollen Mississippi River towns mixed with New York-style Venice. All built up upon a freaking salt-marsh...

Here's a couple of pictures.

Quick Fires-Ravage-LA Note

A friend of the family on my mom's side is living in the LA area, and because of the raging fires, they've been asked to evacuate. Pretty scary, I'd imagine.

Bobbi Parker is her name, and her son, Scott, is also living in the area, and it sounds like while the state is calling for the evacuation, his town isn't, telling their citizens that an evacuation is unnecessary. It would be nice to get that directive straight.

In any case, Scott took a picture of smoke billowing in the distance, which I've included here. While this photo may not have the crazy action of wildfire or firefighters vs blaze that win Pulitzers, it does have, on the right, a tan house. This picture was taken in La Crascenta, in the Los Angeles area, and the tan house was the house in which my mom grew up. Pretty crazy.

Another Note for Dan

Hey Brother...

I may have turned 30 this year, but I think you have a high-school reunion this season...mine was in November, so I'm guessing yours would be as well...if you go, let me know how it goes.

I was instructed to skip the ten-year one and try to plan for the twenty-year bash, because after ten years, not too many people have done a whole lot worth bragging about, except possibly for you, brother.

I hope you're following the A's this year (or maybe not, ouch) or the Cubbies (again, ouch)...at least trying to care about baseball again would be cool for erstwhile fans...

Another Note for Norm

So, hey, another quick Pynchon note for Norm...

When you get around to Gravity's Rainbow, let me say that some characters from V. will be involved, namely Mondaugen, Weissman, the Herero people from Sudwestafrika, and the town of Peenemunde...

Also, if you get a chance and you haven't heard this, check it out...I heard it's Pynchon's own voice, and here he doesn't sound so Lawn Guylin-ish as he does in his Simpson's appearances.

Another Note on Pynchon

I changed my mind on how I wanted to word this portion of this post, or what's left of it...

Norm and I had a conversation last week where he said that, to him, Vineland is the best Pynchon novel to use to create new fans because it is more accessible, easy enough to follow, but still shows the dazzling use of language and multiple timelines that us fans love. Not too many books can you get half-way through, be totally mesmerized, and still not really know what the hell is going on (most of the others that I've read are Pynchon's).

I told him that I felt that Inherent Vice, the newest novel from Pynchon that was released this month, was more accessible, mainly due to the fact that, since it's a detective novel, the structure was such that it went much more linearly, and reading it gives you really only one timeline to sort out.

I would have to say that I agree with Norm on starting off with Vineland. Inherent Vice is more like a candy reward for Against the Day and Gravity's Rainbow, and a suitable background helps a reader to fully enjoy how Pynchon makes fun of a genre taking itself too seriously...kinda like Denis Johnson and Nobody Move.

In any case, for (my) readers interested in finding out what it's all about: start with Vineland, then move on to The Crying of Lot 49, which is closer to the nearly impenetrable jargon that made Pynchon famous but is much smaller than AtD, GR, M&D. If you're ready for more, tackle my, and I think Norm's as well, favorite Against the Day.

The guy is one of the best in English, definitely since WWII, and possibly ever...

A Note for my Mother

Remember those two little succulents you got for us when we passed through on our way to New York?

I hope so, since I'm posting some pictures of their progress. I've got one almost ready to Bonzai out...I even tried tying it up a little, to make it strengthen its core/trunk. I like how the other one has grown to a near vine...I wrapped it around the pot. They're still going strong.

ATM for Tuxedo

When Corrie and I were in Berlin, in the summer of 2005, we took a bike tour. Our guide was an Aussie named Randall, his hair was probably the same shade of strawberry-blond as mine, but his was in dreadlocks, and still longer than mine. He told us the story about how he came to be in Berlin ("a dodgy British passport I got from the Canadian consulate in Havana after my original was stolen somewhere else in Cuba") and how he normally lived his years: bike tours around "Buhr-leen" for a few months, the rest of the time he spent living with his fiance, a pretty Costa Rican, and traveling around Central America.

What exactly does this have to do with ATMs and our cat, Tuxedo? Well, the ATM I'm talking about isn't that thing other nationalities call a Bancomat, but rather, what Randall told us we were going to attempt at a specific point in our bicycle journey: an Advanced Traffic Maneuver.

Last week Corrie and I got up early enough to cram our fuzzy little boy into his crate for a fun-filled morning excursion to the veterinarian clinic, right around the corner from Corrie's office.

Oh, you bet he loved the waiting at the bus-stop for the bus to take us to a direct train to Grand Central...he really loved the bus ride itself. Don't forget the commotion of the busy subway station and crowded trains.

Walking through Grand Central...walking the nearly mile route to the vets...actually, he handled it pretty well. Better than me, probably, since I was carrying his crate, which, Corrie and I guess, has the same amount of volume, when fully constructed and operational, as Corrie herself. I suppose; imagine Corrie crouched in a ball, made of plastic and hollowed out, with a handle and an angry cat inside--that's this crate.

Tux has been venturing outside lately, in our backyard space (through a tear in the screen) and we thought it was smart to get him his shots and whatnot.

They let us take a fancy cloth carrier that was much easier to deal with; the original owner didn't need it anymore (hopefully because the got a newer carrier, right?) and the vet just gave it to us. I took him home with no problems, and he was back to his spazzy, frisky self in no time.

The vet congratulated us on our ability to bring his weight down to the exact mark we were supposed to get him to, a weight that I originally thought was ludicrously low for Tux's size and shape. For anyone who's ever met Tuxedo, you'll be happy to hear he's now a lean mean spazzing machine, weighing in at just over 10 pounds! Can you believe it? He went from being mistaken for a shag bean-bag to an animal where you can see his hips as different from his back...and his pooch is almost no more.

Here is how he whiles away the heat and humidity we're getting nowadays:

Walking the Aqueduct Trail

I worked with Marc one Wednesday a couple of weeks back, then Corrie and I went up to Dobbs Ferry for a barbecue on the Hudson across from the train station down the street from where they live. Our friend from SLO-town, Tami, whom we visited in Munich and whom is doing some contract work out here-abouts in Westchester, joined us. The barbecue was nice, the weather nicer. Tami took the train as we were packing up back to Yonkers, and Corrie and I spent the night at Marc and Linda's. Corrie got to wake up a little later than normal, since the commuter train comes directly to Grand Central Station, and Linda was off to work by 6 am. Marc and I had some time, and he offered to take me on a walk of the Aqueduct Trail on that Thursday afternoon.

The trail runs along the top of the actual aqueduct that brings water from the Catskills and farther north, the Adirondacs, down to the bustling City. Along the trail are these possibly-exhaust chimneys, making it easier to find the trail if one loses their bearings.

Eventually we came upon the Lyndhurst Conservatory, a few miles north of Dobbs. Apparently, it had been a grand green-house, with plants from all over the American landscape. Now, it was a white-metal skeleton hanging over its original floor-plan. The photographic plaques give a visitor an idea of what originally lay there, but now the erstwhile beds are overrun with local vegetation and the occasional weed.

We continued on from there, north, and at a point the trail looked disheveled. We continued on past this point for a ways, as the guardrail went from orange-caution plastic fencing to a newly constructed post-and-heavy-wire setup. Eventually there was a large metal gate to our right, or east (since we headed north, and the Hudson flowed down a ravine to the west, our left), and we conversed about what lay beyond this serious fence, or rather, what was being protected from us. This gave us a laugh.

Eventually, the path deteriorated to mostly untenable past a bridge over a small creek. Below the bridge was a large pipe that spanned the creek, emerging from the soil and then back into the soil on the opposite side. I thought it would be a great place for some pictures, so I climbed down onto it, and carefully snapped away.

When I was done, I looked up and noticed Marc talking with a suit, who had been stationed on a second foot-bridge higher than the one we had passed. We were informed that we were trespassing, that the trail wasn't open yet, and that we'd better be on our way, since it was his ass if we got hurt. Later Marc told me that the gentleman had asked Marc if I was with the EPA, as I had on sturdy cargo-shorts and boots, and had been taking pictures of the creek. Again we had a laugh.

On the way back to Dobbs, we passed by a castle that had been built by some megalomaniac in the thirties (I think?), but was now part of an almost thriving tourist business. We took some more pictures and headed back to Marc's.

We saw lots of naturiffic things along the way--deer, hedgehogs, more deer--but my photos don't do them justice. There was a large swooping tree that one could enter through an opening in the canopy, look up at the majesty, and probably take a nap on the flowing trunks and limbs. The house that Corrie and lived in at Palm Street in San Luis could have fit inside...alas, again the pictures didn't come out very good.

New Profile Picture

I tossed a new picture of my shaggy self up for my dozen-or-so-deep masses. I thought it would make sense to periodically show off my ever-evolving mane of golden curls...

Those Wild and Crazy Canucks...

We hosted a pair of Canadians over the weekend before last, actually the nights of Sunday and Monday. There had been a miscommunication about the night of Saturday...

Freeloaders.com is the site that Corrie has us associated with, but there are many similar Internet-organizations out there that specialize in linking up travelers with possible places to stay for free. Since our travel budget has shrunk considerably, or at least it has shrunk past the point of traveling to places we can't already stay for free, it didn't seem like we even needed to be associated with it. But Corrie, being the hospitable person she is, left us on the list of possible 'destinations.' We thought if our schedules permitted, then we might take on someone from elsewhere wanting to stay, in a gesture that would karmactically help us out over time. We didn't lack for requests...people seemed to think of all New York City as all some romantic idea of Manhattan, large buildings, apartments close to subways, and the Empire State Building in view always. People can't comprehend that when we said, truthfully, on our profile for Freeloaders that while we live 'close' to Manhattan (in the broad terms of the five-borough's unique sense of geometry), after hours it was still almost an hour away by public transportation. This didn't deter some people to ask if they could stay for multiple weeks, and even one asked if they could stay for two months. Two months?

This wasn't a problem the Canucks had. They were pragmatic and polite, knowledgeable, educated, middle-aged and square. She was 44, and he was 52, and as little as ages matter to Corrie and I, the fact they were pretty square was probably our biggest issue.

Not drinking doesn't mean you're a square, but these two never drank. My mother, for anybody who knows her, could, supposedly, be called a few various things, but "square" is definitely not one of them.

We made conversation while we had the chances, usually about the kinds of stuff Corrie and I normally talk about (you know, boring crap like politics, literature, and cinema), and I made an effort to learn about the visceral reality of life in Ottawa, Canada's version of DC.

The couple was nice, almost boring in their regular-ness, kind of like me and Corrie being boring, just without the beer, subversive attitudes, and boisterous laughter. They liked coffee, they didn't watch television, they liked traveling...The lady did tell us some of her personal history, which is pretty personal and which I feel I shouldn't relay here, but it did help out with the two-and-a-half day picture we saw, filling in blanks and what-not.

After showers, though, the bathroom was left in a state that implied the shower curtain was a foreign mystery to them.

Here is a picture of them, the nice unmarried couple from Ottawa. It bothered Corrie they didn't offer to do the dishes after we fed them...not that we would have made them clean up, but the gesture of offering would have gone over better.

Hopefully Tomorrow...

Hopefully tomorrow I'll find the time to sit down and add all the stuff I've been meaning to. I drew the Tristero plugged-horn symbol on the ice-cream chalkboard today, and only Marc and Tom knew what was up. It was late in the day...

Gonzo grilled on the stoop again this evening--a roll of parsley/cheese sausage.

The weather has been brutal the last few days and today may have been one of the worst to be out in all day slinging dairy. It fluctuated between steamy sauna and dark hot rain bursts. If you weren't getting covered in fat raindrops, then your clothes began to feel like they would need to be peeled off your body like used up Saran Wrap. Every eighty-five to maybe a hundred minutes though, you'd get a breeze that reminded you of Mexican-beach vacations. All day today. The sky never made up its mind.

Alive...but busy...

I'm pretty sure nobody thought I was dead, but I have been lagging on keeping up with this blog.

My bad, all of my loyal readers, whom I love and think about often, especially with some of the cool things that have been going on in the City.

For one, Corrie and I hosted a Canadian couple from Ottawa as a result of Freeloaders.com, a website that connects foreign travelers with people willing to open up a room or couch for strangers. We wanted to utilize the site for our travel purposes in the future, but we get all sorts of requests because we live in NYC. Finally the request dates fit in well with our schedule, and we had a nice middle-age boyfriend-girlfriend couple staying in Tuxedo's room. I'll enter some more later (with pictures!).

Marc and I took a long walk in Westchester County, on a warm and overcast day, and eventually got tossed off of private property (there were no signs or fence jumping...both of us are too old for that kind of trouble). I'll post some pictures later.

In the news, maybe some of you've outside the five boroughs have heard of this, a kitchen supplies salesman located in Harlem, who works mainly in cash, was attempted to be robbed. The same thing happened thirty years ago, and afterwards he bought a shotgun. Licensed and registered and everything. You can see where this is going. Four young hoodlums came in right after a stove was sold and started yelling at a young guy working there. He was being uncooperative, and they started pistol-whipping him. The old owner, 70+ year old lovingly called "Shotgun" Gus, pulled out the piece and stormed over to them. He blasted two pretty quick, and the other two as they fled. The two shot at close range staggered off, across the street, and died in pools of their own goo. The other two took off, and police followed trails of blood and caught both of them. Gus fired four rounds, and connected on all four. The pistol-whipped employee was seen chasing the dying guys and screaming at them, kicking them as the fell. He was arrested and released later in the day. No charges have been filed against Gus.

The poll in the paper said readers in this extremely anti-gun city had a whopping 86% approval rate of the defending-shots, vs 2% disapproval (somehow 12% had no opinion).

The same day (!) in the Bronx a meeting between judges, prosecutors, and public defenders being held at the courthouse ended, and as they left the grand chamber--still inside the courthouse, mind you--there was a present waiting for them. Somebody had dropped deuce right next to the chamber's door. Can you believe that? Inside a courthouse, dropping your pants, pinching one off, and not being seen? They said it was something they'd never seen. You don't say...

A friend of mine is on a small vacation, and they've asked me to come in and cover a few days at their restaurant, so for the next few days, this site will probably be a little light.

The past few days I've been writing a ton, but not on this blog. I've been getting my next novel hammered out, as somehow my motivation is to that and not this site, which sucks for people who like to read this site regularly, but, in the big picture, doesn't suck for me.

Right now I'm calling that novel Epsilon Neighborhood, and I'm trying my best at gluing together the traditions of Denis Johnson and Thomas Pynchon, not consciously of course, that's just kinda how my stuff comes out.

Tomorrow I'm working the market at 6:30 and then straight over to the restaurant til about 8 or 9. Nice long days, getting that extra scratch we all need.

Hope everyone is well, mad I can't talk enough on the phone, and miss and love everyone...

Could a Boricua President be Eligible?

I learned something a few weeks back that got me thinking...

I didn't know that people born in Puerto Rico were automatically citizens of the United States upon birth, as per legislation that Pres. Teddy Roosevelt had signed. That makes sense, in its historical context, and makes sense today, seeing as how Puerto Rico is still a territory of the US while enjoying some autonomy.

But that got me thinking...This past election year had some debate (obviously in the early goings) about the candidacy of John McCain, since he was born on a naval base in the canal region of Panama. Since he was a Republican (this is my educated guess), the media gave him a pass and asked some right-friendly scholars to weigh in, and they said that an American naval base anywhere in the world is considered American soil, so his birthplace shall not be questioned. Fair enough (unless you're Obama and fighting a ridiculous battle against anti-US jackasses convinced he was born in Kenya), naval base soil shall work, unquestioningly.

Another piece of this topic is Barry Goldwater. He ran for presidency against LBJ and lost due to a successful campaign that he'd nuke Vietnam (he probably would have). But Barry Goldwater, Republican candidate for the presidency, was born in Arizona. So what, you may ask? This was the territory of Arizona, and not the state of Arizona. His candidacy was never fought along the lines that he was ineligible due to his birthplace.

He was born in a US territory and was apparently successful in gaining his party's nomination.

So my thought, or my question, is: Is it possible for someone born in Puerto Rico to win the election for the office of President, and actually be eligible to hold the position?

I'd imagine, if it'd ever come to that, that if the possible candidate was a hard-liner against Hugo's and Raul's regimes, then, like McCain and Goldwater he'd get a media pass, and be championed like Obama. And, if the candidate had a progressive social plan, like, say Evo Morales or somebody similar, and they appealed to intellectuals rather than business interests, the media would howl with indignation, and every attempt to foil their pursuit would be made, probably starting with an attitude of "they're not even eligible"...

What other expectations would you have for a system where business controls the media?

The High Line

On the west side of Manhattan exists an elevated train line that's been out of use for years. I think the last time it was even in mild use was back in the '80s, but really, it hadn't been in high demand for much longer.

Eventually it was decided to convert it into a park, an elevated park, with some nice views of the Village and Chelsea. It was finished just this past July, and Corrie and I made it out this past Sunday.

There we are with Jersey in the background. The walkway had sections that resembled train lines, and in fact there were sections that the lines and wooden beams were intact under the local (but introduced into this man-made environment) foliage.

The views were okay, pretty nice, but really to get incredible views in this city, one would have to be much, much higher.

Work continues to extend the High Line towards its termination point, and as it is, it covers only a half-dozen blocks or so. Not to take away from it, as that is a pretty cool thing to walk along and witness. Near the northern end a jazz band played on their fire escape providing entertainment for us visitors. They were pretty good.

I recommend any visitor with some free time to the City should check it out; it's free, it's interesting, and it's classic New York weirdness.

Here's a link to peruse and get a feeling for it.

Happy (belated) Birthday Ryan!

So I screwed up and missed the day, missed the phone-call, and missed the post.

We got another 30-turner this year. Happy Big One, brother!

Mesoamerican Long Count/Apocalypse?

Soon enough you could be hearing more and more about the December 12th, 2012 end of the Mayan calendar and the possible apocalyptic ramifications. This will most likely end up in the mainstream culture by way of the apocalyptic film 2012 that's due out either this winter or next.

I'm here to clear up some of the confusion over the "end-of-calendar" date and related events. I may not be a Mayan scholar, but I do some diligent research, prize the thing that most resembles the truth, and try to tell it like it is.

The name used by actual Mayan and Mesoamerican scholars for the long form of calendar system used by those societies is Mesoamerican Long Count. Sometimes it's called Mayan Long Count, but there is a debate about whether the Mayans created the construct or adapted an already widely used construct (as the evidence seems to show).

The Long Count calendar uses a breakdown of five named divisions (actually six or seven might have had names, but the sixth and seventh were probably far too large to have any practical meaning). These divisions are (with their counter parts in today's life in parenthesis): the k'in (1 day); the winal (20 days); tun (360 days); k'atun (7200 days--almost 20 years); b'ak'tun (144,000 days--394 years). The devised way scholars today denote this is with a decimal system, where things tend to cycle over in 20s (except the tun (year), which cycles over in 18s). The notation is in descending order separated by decimals, similar in setup to binary:

(b'ak'tun) . (k'atun) . (tun) . (winal) . (k'in)

This is what I mean: 1 k'in (1 day) => 0.0.0.0.1

So, 19 days looks like 0.0.0.0.19

and 20 days looks like 0.0.0.1.0

and a solar year of 365 days would look like 0.0.1.0.5

This is somewhat reminiscent of binary code. Scholars have been able to back-log the Mayan dates to discover the starting date of what the Mayans called the Third Creation, the creation of man, to be August 11, 3114 BCE in our current Gregorian calendar (using the Julian calendar it would be September 6, 3114 BCE).

What is meant when it is said that "the Mayan calendar is ending, with nothing left afterwards" is slightly misleading. On December 11th, 2012, the day before the calendar "ends", the decimal notation will be: 12.19.17.19.19

You might notice, since this is a base-twenty system (with the exception of the base-18 "year" demarcation), that's similar to your car's odomoter coming up to 99,999 or, more accurately reflected by how the Mayans saw it, like the odometer rolling up to 199,999.

On December 12th, 2012, everything rolls over like your odometer, and we'll have 13.0.0.0.0.

Nothing in the Mayan literature says anything about apocalyptical scenarios, and many experts believe that if their culture was as strong today as during pre-Columbian times, they'd probably have a wonderful party that would last for weeks, as this would begin the Fourth Creation.

But, really, the largest division here, the b'ak'tun, at almost 400 years, is also in a base-20 system. See? The Mayans probably wouldn't be too scared, since, well yeah, 12/12/2012 does represent 13.0.0.0.0, but March 26th, 2407 represents 14.0.0.0.0 and June 28, 2801 represents 15.0.0.0.0.

But, you might be asking, if it's a base-20 system, what comes next, the day after 19.19.17.19.19? Well they have the answer for that with the introduction of the piktun, that sixth named element I mentioned earlier as being too large for practical purposes...

After the fateful day 19.19.17.19.19 everything'll roll over again, roll over to 1.0.0.0.0.0.

Really, it wouldn't be inaccurate to write the date as 0.19.19.17.19.19, that makes the roll-over look more natural. But really, at the start of the second piktun, on day 1.0.0.0.0.1, we'll be calling it (or maybe not, considering) October 14th, 4772, a full three thousand years after Luis Tolosa founded SLO-town and Sam Adams and Joe Warren formed the first Committee of Correspondence (both in the latter half of 1772).

The world won't end. And if it does, it'll be a coincidence that we should have been able to foresee (asteroid, comet, nuclear proliferation gone bad) if not fully able to avert the disaster.

For The Simpsons Fan

Maybe this is how Hank Scorpio got started:

Two Days, Two Books, Twenty-five Bucks

I was as excited as I'd probably ever been for a new book release on August 4th, in anticipation of one of my favorite writer's new books, called Inherent Vice. This is Thomas Pynchon's version of a PI/detective story, and I must say that it's probably as linearly written and accessible as anything he's ever written. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

On Tuesday the 4th, I took some books with me to donate to the Housing Works bookstore, a very cool place that depends entirely on donations and volunteers to keep in business. They raise money for housing for HIV-positive and AIDS afflicted people. We had some books that we needed to excise from our library for purposes of space and an accidental over-estimation of their relative importance.

Pynchon's Inherent Vice was being released that day, and I wasn't sure if I was going to go buy it, despite how excited I was over its release. It wasn't going to be at Housing Works (since they run on donation only). As I was walking out of the bookstore, I stopped momentarily at the fifty-cent cart; a cart that has many stacks of books each for only fifty-cents. Glancing around I found something, namely a paperback edition of Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden. I thumbed through it and soon learned that it was Sagan's personal research project into the evolution of human intelligence and the brain. I read about forty or so pages on the way home from the bookstore, content to leave the Pynchon hardback for a later time. The price came to fifty-four cents, with tax.

The next day, Wednesday, I stopped by the market to say hi to Marc and Tom. The dairy stand is directly across from Barnes&Nobles. They had a problem with the refrigerator truck, and I was there, so I went to work for a while as they got control of the issue (mountains of ice). I was awarded for my service with Inherent Vice. It was on some sort of sale, a promotional thing for new releases, and after taxes the charge came out $24.42. Two books in two days, by two of my favorite writers (do yourself a favor and read Sagan's Cosmos; it'll change your life), for less than twenty-five bucks total.

Inherent Vice follows a 5'3" PI, Doc Sportello, around LA in 1969, with Pynchon's characteristic drug use, wild sex acts, and weird/magical paranoiac conspiracies. It was mentioned in a review relayed to me that it was reminiscent of The Big Lebowski, and at some level the comparison is apt. One difference is the time period (1969 vs 1991), while another is one stars The Dude, an out-of-work pot-smoking bowling enthusiast and the other stars Doc, a pot-smoking hippie-freak who's also a licensed investigator. The endless driving around LA is the same, for sure, and the dense entanglements of the plotlines are very similar, but you'd expect nothing less from Pynchon (and probably the Cohens as well).

To me, having last read Pynchon's Vineland, Inherent Vice almost seems like it's an untold story from that book's flashbacks, like you almost expect to see Zoyd or the 24 fps revolutionaries in cameos. In fact, the minor Scott Oof is more prominent here in IV.

I hope for those of you who don't care about or know about these writers that I haven't bored the crap out of you. I'd suggest checking both of them out.

For the Martial Arts Film Fan...

On February 5th, 1976, in the Issan hills of western Thailand, a Cambodian descended mamma gave birth to Tatchakorn Yeerum. His name was changed at some point to Panom Yeerum, and, when he decided to sell his skills as a martial-arts film star to the wider world, he changed his name again to Tony Jaa, our boy from Ong-Bak.

The first version of Ong-Bak I saw was in Thai with Japanese subtitles, called Mahha! (Japanese for Mach!), and even with no understanding of the actual story you could still be wowed with the no-wires and n0-CGI stunts going on.

Well, check this out. Once again, us martial-arts-action-film heads will be excited.

The actual website is here.

They've already started filming on the next installment.

Real Life X-File Update

So...the toxicology reports came back on the case that I concerned myself with in the last post.

Wow.

This woman, the driver who caused the accident that killed a total of eight people, had some stuff going on, you could say.

She had a .19% BAC, more than twice the legal limit of .08%, which seemed to fit with the ten or so ounces of alcohol in her g.i. tract. She had about six ounces of still-undigested vodka in her stomach, actually, that was the sole contents of her stomach (they found an empty plastic handle of vodka in the car, which helps explain the contents in her stomach and tract). She also had elevated levels of THC in her blood, an amount high enough to suggest that the last time she'd smoked pot was about ten to fifteen minutes before she died.

So instead of an X-File, we have a vodka guzzling television executive with a car-full of kids driving outrageously while smoking a doobie. Her vision blurs, she gets in the wrong lane...shit.

I'd imagine to be pounding vodka with a car-full of kids wouldn't be a spontaneous thing, and that it wouldn't be a stretch to suggest she might have been an alcoholic. Blazing a spliff with your son, daughter, and three nieces in the car? Maybe in 1968 in California, but even then they'd throw you in jail for a while if they caught you.

They're calling it murder now, and not referring to it as an "accident" anymore. The husband has been quiet since he received the news, reportedly last Friday.

For those of you who know my stance on fast food, I stand by any recommendation to avoid Mickey-D's. But it seems like a spiked burger or shake was getting ahead of the evidence.

Here's a link for anyone who's interested in reading about it in our local press.

Some of the families of the victims are preparing to sue the woman's family for wrongful death.

Real Life X-File?

Having borrowed the first and second seasons of The X-Files from a friend over the past month, I'm getting a strange feeling about a current event in the area.

Having watched the first fifty or so episodes again, many for the first time in fifteen years, I was very impressed that my affection for the show has held up through my maturation. Other things that I hadn't noticed before, upon first seeing the episodes as a high schooler, were loud and clear this time...like the characters Scully and Mulder being fully in love, and the mythology becoming canonical even if it was a paint-as-you-go writing method.

In any case, let me say that I wish the grieving families no disrespect, especially since I'm making an allusion to a fictional television show in respect to the accident.

Maybe you've heard about the tragedy, but I'll summarize the events anyway.

On Sunday, July 26th, on the way home from a weekend camping trip, a mom from Long Island entered an exit lane on the Taconic Highway and drove for 1.7 miles against traffic along the busy thoroughfare before crashing headlong into an SUV. Three men in the SUV, including a father and son, were killed instantly, along with the mother, her daughter and three of her nieces. Her five-year old son was pulled from the wreckage and rushed to the ICU. He is clinging to life.

An autopsy performed on the mother revealed her to be in good health. Toxicology results are pending. Her friends said that she's driven that stretch of road hundreds of times, which to them makes it that much more bizarre that she could have made such a fatal mistake.

The first strange thing about this crash was that the mom's cell-phone was found along the side of the road, a few miles before the crash, on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, right after the Tappan Zee Bridge, which she crossed before heading south back to Long Island.

A second strange thing...1.7 miles? The wrong way? A busy Sunday afternoon? 1.7 miles?

When the camping trip ended, the mother and father left at the same time, in separate cars, heading to the same place. The dad was going straight there, the mom was taking the kids to get some breakfast before heading home. They stopped at a McDonald's. There have been reports that for a sixty mile stretch between the McDonald's and the point where she entered the north-bound section of the highway heading south, a minivan matching the description of the one she was driving (same make, color, driven by a woman, full of kids) had been driving erratically; weaving in the lanes, flashing high-beams and honking, passing people on the shoulder.

The woman's brother, and father of the three girls, had received a call from her while she was on the road, after breakfast, apparently before her phone was ejected from the minivan. Her brother said she called and said she felt sick and needed help.

A very large piece of this puzzle has yet to be pulled from its hiding place. Something's definitely missing. And, for anybody reading this who might actually eat at a McDonald's, and might be in upstate New York now or soon, I'd avoid the Mickey-D's close to Liberty, NY for a while.

If I were an investigator I'd want the toxicology results, and wouldn't be surprised to see something strange like spikes of meth or PCP. Then I'd head to Liberty.