rabbit holes

 To use a phrase that Old Dog is fond of, I am not going to go down the Stones/Beatles rabbit hole this morning.  Well maybe a little.  I am aware that the Stones came from a crust upper than that from which the Beatles sprung.  I reckon their greaser look is because they were rockers to the Stones' mods.  I remember early on during the British invasion reading an article about the Stones and it casually mentioned them lighting up cigarettes, and I was like wow. I suddenly realized that I had never seen a rock and roller smoke a cig before.  I always liked the Stones better, not because of their talking about Street Fighting but their sound was heavier, closer to the blues, while the Beatles often seemed a little flighty.

I did indeed write part of that blog, save it, then add to it later.  I guess I should have just started a new post, but well I always think everybody is reading the blog in the morning as I am.

I too have wifi, but for the sake of expediency I am plugged directly into the modem from RCN and it is much faster.  Why not add one cord more to the spaghetti behind my tv and computer?  

You know it kind of reminds me of the difference between apes and the other mammals in that our spine goes right up from our butts, but then just before it hits the brain it does a ninety degree turn from vertical to horizontal and this gives that stream of info a pause, likely slowing it down so that we may pick through it for what is important and what is not.  Other mammals on the other hand, having chosen to stay grounded on four feet, get the blast straight from their spine without having it slowed down and that's why my cat sometimes goes bat shit crazy.  I haven't put this theory up for scientific debate, but as Beagles is fond of saying, that has never stopped me before.

Funny that Old Dog mentions fractals.  I just pulled my dogeared copy of Gleick's Chaos Making a new Science, from my bookshelf and moved it to the bathroom where it will get a rereading as regularly as I am regular.  

I used to be a fractals groupie, I read my hardcover Mandelbrot and maybe a dozen more books, some a little scholarly but others with their slick central pages blasted with colors and very odd shapes upstaging the text, math porn.  

All that chaos stuff reminds us that we aren't crazy, the universe is, and the universe is crazy because those nice solid predictable numbers marching from one to infinity, well not infinity, just a case where whatever number you can think of there is always a number that is larger, infinity is just, well you just can't speak of it because that would be like Satan's name being spoken aloud and that allows Satan to show up in person and then everything goes to hell.

But even without infinity, if you stray not too far from oh, multiplication and division you are in the land of chaos.

Okay now that is a rabbit hole, and the more I speak of it the less I know what I am saying.  Speaking of which:

but there are differences between those clowns, not easily discernable.  The clowns, like many humans, will say one thing in public, another thing to fellow clowns, still another to their nearest and dearest and finally, their truest thoughts and beliefs known only to them and carried to the grave.  

They are not separate from us.  They are us.  People like to think of themselves as that phrase that Beagles and many of his ilk use when portraying any clown that walks into a gun store: law-abiding citizens.  Just John Q Public trying to feed his family while thieving politicians are stealing him blind.  But they are are of the same cloth as us.  

Well maybe not.  I remember a boss I had when I worked for the state and if you didn't know him well you just thought of him as an affable guy, easy to get along with, quick with a joke, albeit usually a lame one.  But as you got to know him you noticed there was always a slight pause before he responded to what you said to him.  

You know like if I said isn't it a nice day, you would likely respond sure, or maybe if you were in a mood or of a thoughtful state of mind you might reply, not all that nice.

But Dennis, I will call him that because that was his name, would be thinking what is the best response I can give to advance my cause, in the case of say, me, to get more work out of me.

Hmm, if I say sure is that will kind of set him at ease, maybe getting him to day dream about the carefree days of his youth when a job was the furthest thing from his mind, and maybe he will pause and look out the window, and that will cut into time when he should be working.

If on the other hand I say not all that nice, and just for kicks add one of those inscrutable looks of which I am a master, that might unsettle him a bit, not unlike the way chaos unsettles square, law-abiding, numbers, and get him to worrying a bit about his job security and that way I will get more work out of him.  Yeah, that's the ticket.

See this was what I was thinking of when I asked the dawgs about being in the military and mostly they just responded with talk of rank titles and chevrons, but I was wondering about the power differential.

Dennis had power over my paycheck so I was a moderately boss-abiding citizen, but if worse came to worse I could always tell him to fuck off and walk out the door.  I would lose that fat paycheck but I would also be free of any power he had over me.

But if a grunt soldier said fuck off to the sarge or the looie (had to look that up), or why not, the general, he could get into deep shit.  I reckon not as bad as the old days when whipping was always just around the corner, but couldn't any of those guys ask you to drop down and give him five or ten?  

I don't imagine they would very often, but just the knowledge that they could, was that different from having a regular job and being in the army now?

That is what I was wondering.

And speaking of rabbit holes, remember this guy?

It seems like he was all over editorial pages when I was a kid, but you almost never see him anymore.  

The term John Q. Public was the name of a character created by Vaughn Shoemaker, an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Daily News, in 1922

How about that? A hometown guy.  

Oh I almost forgot.  What about that tomato?  Did that come from the tomato plant you were growing inside.  Kudus for the Gentleman Scientist.  I would never have thought you could get fruit from an indoor plant.  Can we get photos?  And how about the mangoes?