My Readers

This blog is more likely to be read by someone from the San Francisco area than from, say, El Paso. That red dot is Atlanta, I think.

We're all gonna die!!

Well, we're maybe all gonna die.

On April 13, 2029, the near-Earth asteroid Apophis stands a 1 in 50 chance of coming close enough to Earth's gravity field to be pulled down into our atmosphere and slamming into Earth with the violent force of thousands of thermonuclear warheads, probably ending life as we know it.

If you go to page 18 of this PDF document on NASA's website, you'll see the exact trajectory of the asteroid's path of destruction, slaughtering tens of millions of souls across the Eastern Hemisphere (Wait, Eastern Hemisphere? Phew! I was gettin' worried there for a second!)

That trajectory, for those of you who don't like PDF files, runs across Hadrian's wall in northern Britain, across central Europe, the Black Sea, the Caucasus Mountains, over south central Asia, and finally over the northern tier of Southeast Asia. Any one of the countries along that line of impact could become ground zero for the point of impact of the wayward asteroid that will scorch the ground, rip out the atmospheric barrier between the planet's biosphere and the cold vacuum of space, flood the world's shores, and spell the end of human civilization.

Of course, I'll be like 66 years old by then, so if I'm not dead by then, I'll at least be too old to really care. But anyway, that's what I learned today.

Two percent chance. Whatever.

One man, two shoes, and a very, very small measure of justice

My first reaction to the shoe thrower was: "I get his anger, but that's really not too cool". I also worried about the secret service not getting the jump on a violently angry man not 4 yards from the president of the United States.

In the last two days, I have done a 180 on all these thoughts.

1- The Secret Service can only stop shoe throwers if they keep all human beings away from the president. If the guy had anything more dangerous on him, he doubtlessly would have never got past security. His attack was not life threatening or even injury threatening. The NRA tells us that a well armed society is a polite society. I guess now I'd make the same argument about a well-heeled society.

2- It really was a cool thing to do. Again, Mr Bush was in no real danger of anything more than a scratch on his noggin. Compared to the violence visited upon the innocent people of Iraq, compared to the dead and the displaced and the kids with their arms and legs blown off and the women scared to leave their homes and the families torn apart and the communities irreparably divided along sectarian lines by death squads and kidnap squads and the weight of destruction and humiliation brought down on that nation, trying to bean the architect of that chaos with a pair of docksiders is a fitting (and culturally significant) symbol of the scorn of the world.

but my most important reversal of all is...

3- Actually, no, I do not "get" his anger. I live a good life. I drive to work without fear. I pay my bills without fear. I go shopping without worrying about a bomb blowing up the marketplace. If I lose my job, I can be sure I'll soon enough find another job. I spent two weeks without electricity because of a hurricane, but I never doubted I'd get it back; I never worried that terrorists would blow up the generator after that. I send my kid to college halfway across the continent and can worry only that she'll miss her flight back next week. I have not been kidnapped, as Muntadhar al-Zeidi was. I have not been beaten. My sister hasn't been raped; my father has not been murdered; my cousins have not been seduced into joining a ethnic cleansing militia; my mother's door hasn't been kicked down in the middle of the night by foreign troops. I have not seen hell unleashed on my community because some ideological thinktank in another hemisphere thinks it has an intriguing theory for global domination.

So I cannot in any sense get Muntadhar al-Zeidi and what made this man in the truth business flip out on President Bush. More importantly, I cannot judge him. I do not have that right. He has every right to judge us, however. When you look at what has happened in our name, I can only stand amazed that, having judged us, he sentenced us to so light a punishment.

I am a Jones

For years I've not known what I am--not generationally speaking, that is. At times I've been known to even say, with some pontification, that I was born on the cusp of the Baby Boom generation and Generation X. I joined the race in 1963, at the tag end of the post-WW2 baby explosion, but just at the start of the post modern zeitgeist. I'm too young to have protested Vietnam, but too old to get anything more than my ears pierced.

I was an American without a convenient marketing tag.

It turns out, I was not alone. I was part of a lost half generation--Generation Jones. Born between 1956 and 1965, we were the target audience for the first run of Schoolhouse Rock, but got out of college before dudes with pony tails was cool. We knew driving a VW was crunchy, but didn't get tattoos unless we joined the navy or had a midlife crisis after the first divorce. We have a dim recollection of Hef once being relevant, but still can't get used to the fact that he's so freakishly old. Hippies were passe before we got to high school, but the whole grunge scene came too late to get us dirty.

We're Generation Jones, though our years don't quite add up to a whole generation. Up till now, we didn't have a stereotype, or even a sense of being part of a real generational shift in history. We just had a vague 80s sense of not being able to keep up with feeding our empty, hungering Joneses. But that was before. Now we not only have a marketing tag, we even have our own president. And he's a lot cooler than yours.

Demonym

It's the name for the people from a place. I already knew the concept existed (Glaswegians are from Glasgow, Michiganders are from Michigan, outlanders are from a country besides yours, carnies are from carnivals, aggies are from Texas A&M, etc), but I didn't know that there was a name for it. Two actually: demonym is the noun version and gentilic is the adjective.

Also, geographers say demonym, if anybody ever says it. Professors of linguistics alone use the word gentilic.

When Horus Met Setty

I recently discovered that the overspun claim that the story of Jesus was derived from the myth of Horus is about 80% bunk. Claims of alleged parallels between the stories of Horus, the falcon headed Egyptian god of the lower Nile, and Jesus, the hippy headed rabbi who started Christianity, are either exaggerated or entirely false.

The erroneous parallels include Horus's mother being the virgin Meri (his mom was Isis and she was a freaked out necrophiliac), both Horus & Jesus getting three visitors after being born (neither the Bible nor Egyptian mythology makes any claim to getting three visitors; the story of the wise men never gives a specific head count), Horus's baptism by Anup the Baptiser (no such being exists in Egyptian mythology), and several other complete fabrications. The full debunking is aqui.

But that's not what I'm writing about tonight. What I learned today, in looking up this little diversion just now is the full story of Horus's knock down drag out with his upriver archnemisis, Set.

I can do nothing to improve on the story of this North vs South beat down as told by the anonymous Wikipedia author who, regardless of his/her expertise or truthful reportong on the matter, sure can spin one hell of a yarn.

Here's how it goes:

After Set killed Osiris, Horus had many battles with Set, not only to avenge his father, but to choose the rightful ruler of Egypt. One scene stated how Horus was on the verge of killing Set; but his mother (and Set's sister), Isis, stopped him. Isis injured Horus, but eventually healed him.

By the Nineteenth dynasty, the enmity between Set and Horus, in which Horus had ripped off one of Set's testicles, was represented as a separate tale. According to Papyrus Chester-Beatty I, Set is depicted as trying to prove his dominance by seducing Horus and then having intercourse with him. However, Horus places his hand between his thighs and catches Set's semen, then subsequently throws it in the river, so that he may not be said to have been inseminated by Set. Horus then deliberately spreads his own semen on some lettuce, which was Set's favorite food (the Egyptians thought that lettuce was phallic). After Set has eaten the lettuce, they go to the gods to try to settle the argument over the rule of Egypt. The gods first listen to Set's claim of dominance over Horus, and call his semen forth, but it answers from the river, invalidating his claim. Then, the gods listen to Horus' claim of having dominated Set, and call his semen forth, and it answers from inside Set.

It's going to take me about a week to wrap my head around that one little factoid: Egyptians thought that lettuce was phallic.

Lettuce.




Really.





Lettuce. Phallic.







I'm just not seeing this.






Lettuce.


No.

.