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 #231 New Moon of October 4, 2013 Contents copyright 2013 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See the Creative Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* As I first-draft this the politicians in Washington are refusing to budge on the budget. The government is in a partial shutdown, and a more serious financial deadline may be missed in a couple of weeks or thereabouts. Or it may not be. By the time you read this it may have all been resolved. That's what many of the media people seem to be expecting. But what if it isn't? What if it's never, Never, NEVER resolved? Even if it does get resolved this time, what if there's a next time when it doesn't? Would the Federal government evaporate for lack of funds, leaving the fifty states (plus a few odd territories and such) to go their separate ways? If that were to happen, how would the various states deal with it? If the Feds manage to hold together long enough it may get resolved by whatever new Congresspeople get elected in November of 2014. Or if not then, there will be a new President (along with more Congresspeople) elected in 2016. Would that fix it? Or would things have gone too far toward total collapse by then? And what of the military? Back in Revolutionary days, when armies and navies relied on muskets and horses and cannon and sails, the military could probably have survived on some mixture of freelance mercenary work and random plunder. But nowadays, what with all the high-tech stuff that needs a sophisticated industrial base and a somewhat stable economy to keep supplied, that seems doubtful. So what would they do? Many of you are much more into political stuff than I am. Any thoughts? ********************* Maybe the budget mess never ever gets resolved, and eventually the Federal Government withers away for lack of funds and is replaced by something else. After a few centuries it's pretty much forgotten. But legends linger, and there are those who whisper of some eventual Chosen One who will some day rise up and lead the True Americans into a new Golden Age... ********************* "Your writing stinks." "So instead of a spell checker should I have gotten a smell checker?" ********************* A recent XKCD page ( http://xkcd.com/1274/ ) has an open letter to all the groups secretly running the country, asking them to please get their act together (he didn't used the word "act", but the word did end in "t"). That reminded me of an earlier thought that the various groups secretly running the world may be constantly trying to take each other over. Then one of the groups had gotten control of another in a way that put the whole chain of command and control into a closed loop. So now it's running out of anyone's control, making decisions more or less at random, with everyone involved thinking the resulting chaos is in accordance with someone else's master plan that would make sense if only they had the big picture. But it isn't being planned at all. It's just chaos. It may eventually break down and reform itself into something stable. But don't bet on it. ********************* A few days ago I went to the dentist. While I was waiting I bubbled the receptionist and a couple of other staff people who wandered into the waiting area. They seemed to enjoy it. The dentist enjoys it too, although he spends less of his time in an area where it's safe to have bubbles floating around. Later on the dentist said something about how seeing the bubbles made him kind of want to do some himself. I suggested he buy some the next time he's at a store that sells it: "They do allow dentists to buy bubble stuff." This led to a slightly silly discussion of how stores might enforce a rule against selling bubble stuff to dentists, and how he might circumvent such a rule. In this age of computers and databases and such, the authorities pretty much know who is a dentist and who isn't. So they could simply require ID for all bubble sales and refuse the sale if the buyer is a dentist. This, however, isn't foolproof. Many dentists have non-dentist employees such as receptionists who could make the purchase for them. Even if you managed to trace those relationships, most dentists have friends who may not be listed as such. And even if you were to track down all friends of dentists, it's possible to make your own bubble stuff from dishwashing liquid or shampoo or similar materials. So it may be just as well that they do allow sales of bubble stuff to dentists. ********************* "He grew up in a place where too many people were crowded into too few houses. The houses were fairly old, built when high ceilings were in style. This seemingly wasted space in otherwise cramped quarters inspired him to invent a bottom-loading washing machine that could be hung from the ceiling. It was not commercially successful." ********************* Several times a week, weather and other circumstances permitting, I'll take an afternoon walk around a neighborhood park. There are a couple of baseball or softball fields there, and quite often, at least during baseball season, there will be a game in progress as I walk by. Most of the ones I've seen over the past few months have been rather mellow softball. The pitching is underhand slow pitching, the players don't seem to worry about stuff like uniforms, and I got the feeling of an informal party mood, even if they do keep score. They may have eventual tournaments and champions and such, but most of the games have been between what appear to be neighborhood teams that aren't likely to get into that kind of high-stakes situation. But one day recently there was something different: The teams appeared to be playing hardball. They may not have been literally using a baseball as opposed to a softball, but they were wearing uniforms (or at least matching shirts), the pitching was overhand like in baseball, and coaches or maybe parents or somebody was shouting advice to the players. The overall mood had more of a hard-edged feel to it. I got the feeling that I was seeing two different cultures, one based more on having fun and the other more on winning or otherwise gaining status. ********************* Halloween is coming up. The stores are in bloom. We're also seeing the fiftieth anniversaries of various pivotal events back in the Sixties. All that reminds me of this: Going to Seed On a mild October evening I browse the Halloween store, A place of gore and gravestones, spiderwebs and skeletons, costumes and cauldrons. A packet catches my eye, Stirring up memories of days almost forty years gone. It is a "HIPPIE KIT": A headband with the word "PEACE" on it, A large peace-sign neck pendant, And a pair of rose-colored glasses, All marked "Made in China". The tie-dyed T-shirt and longhaired wig are not included, But no doubt await me down another nearby aisle. As a plastic skull blares a tinny rendition of the well-known Funeral March Part of me dreams of taking a time machine back to those days of overwhelming optimism in the face of overwhelming adversity. Would those I would show it to laugh or cry to see all their grand world-changing dreams summed up in a pack of trinkets in a costume shop? To those who would cry I have words of consolation: While the bloom of the Flower Children has faded, their seeds continue to grow and spread, flowering anew into a rainbow of colors beyond what they could have ever imagined. -- Tom Digby written Tue Oct 5 20:54:34 PDT 2004 ********************* 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 you can tell which list you are on by looking at the email headers. If the headers include a line like this: Silicon Soapware zine with reader comments you are getting it via the list that allows comments (some software may hide part of the line, but there should be enough visible to recognize it). 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