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 #196 New Moon of December 5, 2010 Contents copyright 2010 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. ********************* The Christmas shopping season is officially under way. Preliminary figures give reason for cautious optimism, or so said one news report. I've been thinking about this, and sort of wonder if what's good for the economy may turn out to not be so good for the ecology. One slogan I've heard repeatedly over the past few years is "Reduce, reuse, recycle." Doesn't this translate more or less directly to buying less stuff? The first part, "reduce", certainly seems to. The second, "reuse", also implies not buying as much new stuff. If you have something that's no longer suited for its original use, you may have to buy a new item to replace it. But if you can reuse the old item for something else you (or whoever you pass it on to) may be able to avoid buying a new one of whatever it's being reused as. Reusing kind of blurs into recycling here. For example, you won't need to buy as many towels or sponges if you have a bunch of worn-out clothing you can use instead. But, again, won't that put towel makers and sponge divers out of work? The third word, "recycle", does have some potential to create jobs. People can be put to work collecting old things, transforming them into something new, and redistributing and selling the result. But note that recycling is not the first item on the list. Only if you can't reuse something more or less as-is are you supposed to recycle it. That's the last resort before throwing it away. I'm not advocating dumping "Reduce, reuse, recycle," in favor of something like "Use it once, then throw it in the garbage," even though that might, at least in the short term, create more jobs. But I am saying that if we're serious about not using up the planet as quickly as we seem to be on our way to doing, then this whole idea of "stimulating the economy" and "creating jobs" and maybe even the very idea of "working for a living" may need to be rethought. So maybe we can ask Santa to bring us some new ideas on all this for Christmas? ********************* This issue is, as often happens, running a couple of days late (although many Pagans define "New Moon" in terms of the first visible crescent rather than the actual astronomical lineup). So we just had the anniversary of the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. I encountered little mention of it. There was one item in the paper about an anniversary observance, and perhaps some mention on the car radio. But nobody at a lunch get-together I went to mentioned it. Part of it may be that this is not a round-numbered anniversary. Next year will be seventy years, so there may be more notice taken then. Also, it's fading from living memory. Those who do remember (I was too young) are getting up in years. There are fewer of them left every year. In addition, we are now friends with the nation that launched the attack. There is little reason to rake up old grudges. Also, no one seems to be using the occasion as their inspiration for other observances. So even if the date does continue to live in infamy in the history books, it may be otherwise fading from general consciousness. ********************* This just sort of popped into my head. I don't know if someone else has been using it. It looks like the kind of thing that others might come up with independently. Live life. Love life. Love love. Live love. ********************* You may or may not be aware of the project getting underway to build a high-speed rail link between the Bay Area and Southern California. There's been some controversy because the first section to be built is sort of out in the middle of nowhere. Those in charge claim to have good reasons for this. Based on what I've seen in the news articles, those reasons make sense. But if this were a cartoon they would do it differently. They would probably start laying track in Hollywood, where many cartoon characters live, and work northward. And they wouldn't have all these meetings and hearings and such about the exact route. Instead, every few miles the supervisor would ask directions from some random person, and adjust the route accordingly. Now and then they would go astray, so the final route might be a bit reminiscent of those dotted-line trails the children in the Family Circus comic make, although probably nowhere near that extreme. But all in all it would generally head in something like the right direction. Although they could just as easily start at the northern end, or maybe start at both ends and work toward the middle, starting everything from the south would give them more opportunities to sing "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" And since trains would be running from the southern terminus to wherever the track happened to end right then, those workers who lived in the Los Angeles area could use the train to commute to the construction site. It's sort of like how writers in the movies write novels compared to how it's usually done in the real world. In the movies, an author who wants to write a novel just sits down in at the typewriter, puts paper in it, and starts typing. Type a title page, take that out and set it aside, put in a fresh sheet, and start the actual text: "Once upon a time, on a dark and stormy night, a shot rang out...", or whatever. Then there's lots more typing, perhaps seen in a montage, until finally you get to "... and everybody except the killers and victims lived happily ever after. The End." Do any real-world authors actually write that way? It's fairly common in short forms such as poetry to plot the whole thing out in your head, perhaps at least partly on a subconscious level, before putting any of it to paper. But what of longer works such as novels or feature-length movie scripts? You might cite Kerouac's _On_the_Road_ as a real-life example, but according to the Wikipedia article even that was based partly on notes and went through several preliminary versions. I would guess successful novels that were "just written" without any advance planning at all are pretty rare. And even if some writers do work that way, pretty much nobody in a position to really know would say that just plunging into construction is any way to run a railroad. ********************* This may be more appropriate to Halloween, or perhaps the vicinity of November 22, than to Christmas, but it came to my attention only recently. Someone on the WELL mentioned a news item to the effect that the casket Lee Harvey Oswald was originally buried in is up for auction. It's expected to fetch several tens of thousands of dollars. According to the news item cited in the posting, the body was exhumed in 1981 to check its identity. It was then reburied in a new casket, because the original had deteriorated. And now whoever had been holding onto the original is planning to auction it off. But the person who posted about this didn't mention the part about how the body had been buried again. So my first thought was that the corpse might now be homeless. I found out that it wasn't when I went and read the actual news report, but what if it had been? Would his bones just lie there in some dank corner of some dark alley in whatever part of Dallas homeless people end up in? And would various people now and then gather them up from one alley and dump them in another, sort of like how the living homeless are forced to move from place to place? And would his ghost haunt the various homeless encampments, never to rest until the bones had once again been buried properly? But that's all academic because, as I said earlier, the remains are once again at rest. It seems rather boring compared to what might have been, but life and death seem to be like that. Well, not always, but a disappointingly large portion of the time. ********************* Speaking of ghosts, something I read about in the news got me to looking something up in Wikipedia, and that led through a chain of associations to the Big Bang, which then led to stuff about the ultimate fate of the universe. Some theories allow for the possibility of there having been other universes in the past that have since ended in one way or another. That leads to a question: If there have indeed been other universes that existed before this one, and if they once were home to some form of intelligent life, and if there exists some sort of spirit independent of the physical body, might ghosts of the inhabitants of those past universes be among us now? Of course even if they are here, they may not be able or willing to communicate with us. A radically faster or slower perception of time, for example, might mean that to them we're either just a blur or a set of almost-eternal statues. Or maybe they do make the attempt, but what they have to say is so alien to our experience that it comes across as garbled nonsense. Also, space is vast, and intelligent life may not be all that common. So maybe these ancient ghosts are haunting uninhabited worlds we may never happen to explore. But then even if a ghost did come up to you and say it was from some prior version of the universe, would you believe it? And even if you did, what would the people you tried to tell about it say? ********************* Speaking of the economy, this was inspired by a comic strip in the December 25, 1991, L.A. Times. I think it may have been "Jump Start", but I don't have the clipping handy to verify that. The Birthday of the Light On the Christmas morning comics page Two people slogging through the crowds of shoppers pause to ask one another "Isn't this all supposed to be somebody's birthday?" Yes, it is. This is the birthday of the Light. Different people see the Light differently: To many the Light is a babe in a manger, A child destined to grow into a great teacher and healer, Bringing the light of love to a world lost in darkness. To others the light is the light of freedom, Seen in the miracle of a lamp burning Far longer than its meager supply of oil should have lasted After the conquerors were driven from the Temple. And still others celebrate winter sunlight Bringing the promise of springtime And reminding us to look at endings As opportunities for new beginnings. But even though we see the light differently And hold different days in this season sacred to it, Let us all look into the light together To see opportunities for new beginnings For a world of freedom and healing and love. -- Thomas G. Digby written 1230 hr 12/25/91 entered 1905 hr 12/25/91 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware and want to unsubscribe or otherwise change settings, the relevant URL should be in the footer appended to the end of this section in the copy you received. 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