SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #108 New Moon of October 25, 2003 Contents copyright 2003 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* I sometimes go out walking at various times of day, and I notice that early mornings seem to just sort of feel different from late afternoons, even when the sun is the same height above the horizon. Why is this? Is it because mornings are generally relatively cool while afternoons are generally warmer? On some warm winter days I've had late-morning walks that reminded me of summer evenings. Is it because mornings are generally damp with dew while afternoons are usually dry, at least around here? If that's the case, might a sunny afternoon after a rain feel like morning? I don't recall noticing that, but it could be that I just hadn't been paying attention on those days. For what it's worth, I do think I've had a couple of foggy afternoons feel sort of like mornings. Is it that my subconscious knows which way is east or west and notices that the sun is in a different place in the sky and shadows are pointing in a different direction? A test for that would be to see how mornings and afternoons feel in some unfamiliar neighborhood. Or does that part of me also notice that the sun is climbing and the day is getting brighter rather than darker? Or it is entirely a circadian-rhythm thing, so that mornings will feel different from afternoons no matter what my surroundings are because I've just come out of spending several hours sleeping in the dark? I'll just have to keep noticing my feelings about mornings and afternoons whenever I'm out walking. ********************* A few weeks ago some of us were watching a videotape of the movie "Chocolat". When it got to a scene where a dog was eating some unspecified treat while the people in the area were blissing out on chocolate, someone commented on the fact that chocolate is toxic to dogs. Did the movie-makers not know that? Or was the dog's treat something other than chocolate? I don't think any of the characters in the movie mentioned it either way. Later I started wondering whether chocolate is also toxic to related species such as wolves. And if it's toxic to wolves, is it also toxic to werewolves? If so, is it less toxic when the werewolf is in human form? Could chocolate toxicity be used as a test of who is or is not a werewolf? It might make an interesting subplot in a werewolf movie. ********************* The movie "Chocolat" is about a Witch who comes to a small French town and upsets the established Christian-morality applecart. For Pagans it has a happy ending, although at least one Christian movie-reviewing Web site ( http://www.capalert.com/ ) takes a much dimmer view of it. Later I got to thinking about it from the standpoint of Pagan ethics. Giving various characters magical or semi-magical chocolate looks to me sort of like casting spells without the consent of the person the spell is being cast on. Even if you take a more material-world view, she was in effect dosing people with chemicals (chocolate plus chili peppers and maybe other exotic stuff) without their fully informed consent. The combo was claimed to "unlock hidden desires". But what if someone doesn't want their hidden desires unlocked? Should it be done anyway? So even if you think the overall effect of her workings is good, she might be doing it by not-good means. ********************* Daylight Saving Time (known as "Summer Time" in some other countries) will be ending, at least in the US, about the time this issue comes out. That reminds me of an idea I had years ago of slicing the Earth in half along the Equator, inserting a giant Lazy Susan bearing, and rotating whichever hemisphere is going into Summer westward relative to the Winter one, back and forth every year. No more fumbling around resetting clocks. As your hemisphere moves westward for Summer, sunset will come later because of the change in longitude, while the time of sunrise will stay roughly constant, at least in middle latitudes. So we can get the benefits of Daylight Saving (more evening light) without the hassles of upsetting everybody's schedule. I wrote this up at greater length back in Silicon Soapware #51, which is archived in my Web area: http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SS0051.txt After it loads, scroll down to about the second row of asterisks. After you've found that item you may also want to read the rest of that issue. It has a couple of other interesting things in it that I'd sort of forgotten about. ********************* I'm also reminded that in past years I would convert each issue into HTML and post that along with the plain text version, and I kept an index pointing to the topics in each issue. If you saw something interesting in the index it would be linked to the issue (and even the place within that issue) it came from. But I fell behind in that endeavor, possibly due to pressures of various kinds in my life over the last few years. I've now and then thought of resuming work on it, but with the likes of Google around I kind of suspect it would be redundant. Why should I bother to index Silicon Soapware when Google and its competitors are indexing the world? ********************* One thing I don't think I've mentioned yet is that the hour one gains in the Fall is not the same as the hour one lost the previous Spring, at least in the US. It's the hour before the one you lost. In the Spring you set your clocks ahead from 2am to 3am, and then in the Fall you set them back from 2am to 1am. So you lose an hour from 2am to 3am and in exchange for that you get an extra hour from 1am to 2am. But what if you did get back the same hour you lost? Might the gods of time get confused, and now and then stick an hour of April into late October? Maybe it's just as well that they're different hours. ********************* A bunch of us were eating at a restaurant when somebody mentioned how the standard American diet has gotten less and less healthy over the years, and the idea occurred to me that it may be deliberate. Perhaps we are being infiltrated by extraterrestrials who are gradually modifying our diet to suit them rather than us. All those chemicals they're putting in nowadays labeled as dyes and preservatives and thickeners, as well as stuff like partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, are actually essential nutrients for the ET's. As those substances become more and more a part of our diet Earth-evolved humans will gradually die off as the infiltrators (who look just like us) increase in numbers until they own the world. Bloodless conquest. And it's not just food and drink. You know those pieces of furniture or equipment you now and then run into that seem to be ergonomic disasters? They're designed for the ET's. It's the same with those housing developments you now and then hear about that were built on top of toxic waste sites: ET kids living there grow up extra strong and healthy. They're also modifying our climate to be more like that of their home planet. That's why we have smog and global warming. It still isn't too late to defeat them if enough people know about it. So spread the word to all your friends. ********************* I just got another idea for a movie, probably best done as a semi-comedy: Earth is invaded by beings from another planet, and all seems lost. But then Earth's vampires realize they can't drink the aliens' blood, so they come to the rescue. Since they're already dead they aren't affected by the invaders' death rays and such. And even if the ET's know about wooden stakes and silver bullets and garlic, they can't do much with the knowledge: Garlic doesn't grow on their world, wooden stakes can be blocked by Kevlar body armor (even if bows and arrows count), and silver is too expensive in the quantities they'd need. So the invaders give up and the vampires make peace with the remaining living people, and everybody lives (or stays undead) happily ever after. ********************* We're coming up on Halloween, also known by other names in various Pagan communities. There they speak of "the wheel of the year." But in a sense it isn't really a wheel because each year is, at least for most humans in this society, different from the last. It's more of a helix, or maybe a spiral. That reminded me of this issue's poem, which I did a number of years ago and then sort of forgot about. I'd somehow gotten the impression that I wasn't done with it yet. But upon re-reading it I don't see the real need for any changes. Maybe I'd been intending to write a tune for it, and some part of my mind interpreted the not-yet-written tune as the whole piece being "Not Done Yet"? Anyway, here are the words, even if I do decide to change them later. ********************* The Spiral of Your Life You're so cozy in your cradle, Everything is safe and warm, You're the center of the only world you know. Then your eyes begin to open To the universe around As the person you will be begins to grow. Moving outward from the center you begin to see the world As you dance around the spiral of your life. There are places that are jungles, There are people that are cruel, And to stay alive you'd better be alert. But the warmth of loving friendship Is a joy you'll never know If you never take the chance of being hurt. And the love and joy you're giving will come back around to you As you dance around the spiral of your life. As you celebrate the seasons, Watching summer turn to fall And the dying winter world reborn in spring, Times of joy and times of troubles, Try to make the best you can With whatever gifts the Fates decide to bring. Try to let the dark of midnight be a promise of the dawn As you dance around the spiral of your life. Dance around the final turning And your days on Earth are done Though what lies beyond I cannot rightly say. But I know you need not fear it If you've lived a life of love And you've made the best of every passing day, Moving outward from the center through the boundless universe As you dance around the spiral of your life. Thomas G. Digby entered 2115 hr 12/25/89 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation. There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to almost nothing in between. Any post can spark a new flurry at any time. If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The zine content is the same for both. To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi and select the ss_talk list. Enter your email address in the space provided and hit Signup. When you receive an email confirmation request go to the URL it will give you. (If you're already on the list and want to get off there will be an Unsubscribe URL at the bottom of each list posting you receive.) To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or bubbles@well.com). I currently do that one manually. -- END --