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 #133 New Moon of November 1, 2005 Contents copyright 2005 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. ********************* As I write this Halloween is just a few days away. Many houses have decorations up: Things like images of ghosts and witches and Frankenstein monsters, fake tombstones and skeletons, and pumpkins, carved and uncarved, along with strings of orange lights. Then by the time you read this Halloween will be over. Over the coming week or two the orange lights will come down, to be replaced by lights of a myriad other colors. The ghosts and witches and monsters will give way to elves and Santa Claus and Nativity scenes. And then it will be Holiday Season. This train of thought got me to wondering: Is Halloween part of Holiday Season? It wasn't when I was a child. Holiday Season started after Thanksgiving and ended with New Year's. But now some stores put up their Christmas stuff right after Halloween (or even before in some cases). So if that little early-November break is gone, does that make Halloween part of Holiday Season? It looks that way. But however you define Holiday Season, I think we're at least getting into the season for anticipating Holiday Season. So may you joyfully anticipate the holidays, and may the actual holidays be even more joyful than your anticipation of them. ********************* There was an amusing incident at a 7-11 a few days ago. As I was walking in I overheard one of the employees ask the other, "Since you're already a Witch, what will you be going as for Halloween?" My immediate thought was that since many Christians go as scary witches, a Witch might want to go as a scary Christian. But where does one find scary Christians? The Spanish Inquisition came to mind. It was horrible in its time, but that was long enough ago to be something we can joke about now. So I suggested that and they seemed to like the idea. ********************* I had a thought just as a Samhain ritual I was at was ending: What might it be like to be on the other end of a Samhain celebration, perhaps several hundred years from now? There we are in Heaven or Summerland or Valhalla or whatever, when word comes that we're invited to a Samhain feast on Earth. So some of us decide to go see what the world of our several-greats grandchildren is like. Perhaps we've been kept up-to-date on worldly news by new arrivals over the years or perhaps we haven't, but even if we have we may want to see it first-hand. The first question might be whether they still speak English, and if they do, how much the language may have changed. But since our ancestors don't seem to have that problem with us at Samhain, let's assume language differences are somehow magically taken care of. Then as we watch the ritual, waiting for our cue, we may notice changes there as well. Even if it's recognizable as being from a tradition we practiced in our days on the physical plane, details may be different. For example, do they still burn real candles with real flames, or do they use some kind of holographic projections instead, or do candles and holograms exist side by side with nobody being really concerned about the contrast between the old and new technologies? Will the scholars of that future have unearthed knowledge about our ancestors that we were not aware of when we were doing rituals on Earth? Or will they have lost knowledge of how we did things? Either way, will it make a difference in how they do the ritual? And is the ritual being done on Earth at all? Might it be on the Moon or Mars or in an orbiting space colony or something? If we can invite Old World ancestors from before the time of Columbus to celebrations in California, then there's no reason our descendents on other planets may not do the same for us in ages to come. New worlds for our descendents to live in implies new gods for them to worship and serve and be helped and guided by. Will they seem strange to us, or will we have already met them on the spirit plane? And as the merriment winds down to a close, what ideas and inspirations might we plant in the minds of those we leave behind as we return to our fair realms? ********************* Overheard: "She has a heart of gold with the brains of a goldfish." ********************* Back in grade school our music teacher gave us some definitions of musical terms. The only one I recall the exact wording of was that rhythm was "The heartbeat of music." At the time I didn't like it because it sounded more like a poetic metaphor than an actual definition. But now I wonder if in fact it might be literally true. I've heard scientists say that babies in the womb can hear and/or feel the mother's heartbeat. Then after they're born, they may still sense Mom's heartbeat as they breast-feed, or even are just being cuddled. They may also be aware, at least on some subconscious level, of how the rhythm changes when Mom is calm or excited or physically active. Could this be at least part of the basis for our emotional reactions to musical rhythms? Of course our ways of walking and running also involve rhythms of various sorts. So the web of possible causes and effects is quite tangled. But it does give rise to speculation: If beings on other worlds are built differently from us, how might that cause their music to differ from ours? If, for example, they have no noticeable pulse, will rhythm be less important in their music than it is in ours? And what of centaur-like beings whose gaits are more equine than human? The clippety-clop of a horse varies with whether it's walking slowly or galloping or doing something in between, but is almost always more complex than the simple Left, Right, Left of a human. How would this show up in their music? We can of course try to speculate, but I wouldn't be surprised if the truth turns out to surprise us. ********************* I've often heard it said that the Canadian Mounties "always get their man." That may be good for law and order in Canada, but isn't the wording of the slogan kind of sexist? Don't they have female criminals as well as male ones? Assuming the Mounties are equally good at apprehending either, shouldn't the slogan be something like "... always get their person"? Problem is, that version doesn't have the same ring to it. ********************* A recent spell of unusually warm fall weather got me to thinking: You often hear analogies between the yearly cycle of the seasons and the human lifespan. One example is the cliche line about May-December romances when there's a large difference between the partners' ages. One song line describes the singer as being in the autumn of his years. That, plus the weather, led to the thought that I've never heard anyone being spoken of as being in the Indian Summer of their years. What would that mean? Perhaps it might apply if they're getting old but things are going a good bit better than expected? ********************* I saw an article where the writer claimed that, digital copy protection or no, the Internet is bringing the days of the big record companies to a close. More and more small companies, or even artists on their own, are selling to more and more small market segments with specialized tastes. We'll be seeing fewer mega-stars but more artists earning at least a modest living doing things that the big companies, with their higher overheads, can't profitably do. Most of me thinks that's a good thing, even if the part of me that once dreamed of becoming a big star loses the last shreds of that dream. But I'm wondering about another effect: Possible loss of a unified national culture. Time was when people around the water cooler could always talk about Bing Crosby or Perry Como or the Beatles or whoever else was big at the time. Is that era passing? Will questions of the form "What do you think of Artist X?" get replies more like "Who's that? I never heard of them."? If that does happen, and there are signs of it in other fields such as broadcast TV vs cable TV as well, what will be the effect on our culture? Will it lead to less conformity and more tolerance for diverse tastes and lifestyles? Will it make people less able to pull together in a crisis? Will it have other effects nobody right now can anticipate? And will these changes be good or bad or some of each? Whether a given change is good or bad is at least partly a matter of personal opinion. But regardless of whether such a diverse computer-networked world is better or worse than the world we have now, we can be pretty sure it will be different. ********************* While attending concerts in various various small venues I've noticed that people setting up sound systems, and performers about to use them, test them by saying "check", sometimes repeated as in "check check check". They don't seem to say "Testing, one, two, three, testing" like they used to. Why the change? Is there some technical reason for it, or is it just one of those random style fads, or what? ********************* While out walking a few days ago I got to thinking about mining landfills for recyclables. It may not be profitable now, but if the predictions about running out of oil and other raw materials are right it may be economically worthwhile in the future. There are a whole bunch of ways it could be done, ranging from something like strip mining (basically the reverse of how the landfill was put there in the first place) all the way to autonomous burrowing robots or maybe some kind of nanotech stuff, and lots of things in between. No, I'm not about to try to start a company to do it. The world isn't ready yet. This is more the kind of idea that science fiction writers may want to stick in some of their stories as background. Then some foundation may start giving scholarships to study ways it might be done, and then after a decade or two of that some company may want to start trying to actually do something along those lines. That way the technology may be ready by the time it's really needed. Trying to do it sooner would be an exercise in futility. But it may not be too soon to start getting people to start thinking about the possibility that we'll want to do it eventually. ********************* [NOTE: This was written for places with dry fallow summers, where the main growing season is a mild wet winter.] Winter Construction We're half the year away From May. The dance of the ribbons and the joyful proclamations Of the season of outdoor frolic Are but dim memories, distant and unreal. This is a time for turning inward, As Nature rebuilds the world. As the cool rains of winter Bring new life to the parched land We gather 'round the hearth By Jack-O-Lantern light To welcome back old friends From the other side of Eternity. Then we defy the deepest darkness With strings of artificial stars And feast on songs of joy Among loved ones in the here and now. Finally, as the sun takes its first baby steps back to us We can begin to look forward To another season of light, When Nature once again takes down Her cold gray Construction signs And the time of outdoor frolic is proclaimed anew. -- Tom Digby First Draft 11:52 Sat October 22 2005 Edited 13:33 Sun October 23 2005 Note added 17:24 Wed October 26 2005 Note edited 14:42 Sun October 30 2005 ********************* 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. 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