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Sunday, January 29, 2012

RANDOM THOUGHTS #75

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself.

1. In the basement of the Berlin museum, there are many crates of dinosaur fossils collected in Africa before World War I which have never been opened due to a lack of budget. Finding fossils is only half of the problem. The skilled prep techs who painstakingly scratch away the rock surrounding the bones (which are themselves rock of a slightly different kind) are underpaid, overworked, and in very short supply. In many museums, fossils pulled out of the ground wait 10 or 20 years to be dug out of the matrix of rock around them.

2. I hesitated to mention this one as I don't want to sound like I am bragging. I go to this one quickie mart most mornings on the way to work. I buy a Diet Doctor Pepper there every day and gas once a week and sometimes a snack. I went there on a Saturday and Judy (who has the Saturday morning shift) said she was out of nickels and dimes and had just given a customer 17 pennies in change (and Judy said she was running out of pennies). As I drove away from the place, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Knowing that the banks were closed on Saturday (it turned out that they were not) I went to WalMart, which I figured was a big store with a customer service desk and just maybe I could sweet talk them out of a roll or two of coins. Turns out, the little bank inside WalMart was open and took care of that, and Judy was very happy to have the supply of coins. I felt good because I had (as I only rarely do) fulfilled the Boy Scout pledge to do a good deed for someone every day. (The world would be a nicer place if we all did that.) Anyway, the lessons are that there is always a solution if you think creatively. Who (among those facilities that are open) has what you need and just might accept a sob story to sell it to you?

3. While I haven't always, I have for the last year or two tried to remember to be polite to women, opening doors, letting them go first in line, and so forth. Time and again, women are shocked to find someone who remembers the old way of doing things. In one case, four women who were present swore they could not remember a man letting a woman go first in line anytime in the last decade. One young man even asked me "Who said girls go first?" A woman standing at the scene said "Ask your grandmother. Your mother may have failed you but I bet your grandmother remembers how it's done."

4. Our local newspaper has been cutting costs, trying to stay in business. They cut back the number of big name editorials they buy from syndication and bought a bunch of editorials from people I have never seen on TV (but they did not buy Ann Coulter's column, which is pretty reasonable). The replaced most of the well-known comics they have carried for years with cheaper comics by new artists. The colored Sunday funny pages are now half color and half black and white.

5. It amazes me how you can forget things. When you're 25 you think that every fact you ever learned is still there, but when you reach 55 you realize your life has lasted long enough that you have forgotten things that were once well known. (I was fluent in Spanish when in the construction business. Now, I can barely manage a dozen words.)

6. Leanna and I had our house flooded by broken pipes twice and the ADB office once. All of the paper stuff is now on pallets (if not in bookcases).

7. I love the show ONCE UPON A TIME but it is driving me crazy because it's really two shows, one in the 21st century and one in the 14th (or maybe 7th) century. The story lines get confusing and I tend to think of it in casual conversation as two separate shows.

8. Some of our planets are missing! Turns out, when the Solar System got going four and some fraction billion years ago, there were at least 20 (smaller) planets between the sun and what is now the orbit of Mars. A couple fell into the sun, most merged into the four rocky planets, and others got gravity-flung out of the system entirely to wander forever in the interstellar void. One of those narrow escaped this fate when it was caught by the gravity of Neptune and became the moon Triton. Mercury got hit by another planet (much like Earth did) with its crust thrown into space (where it fell into the sun) and the cores of the two planets merging into the Mercury we know today. (The fact that Mercury is more or less solid iron resulted in a stupid SyFy channel movie about it getting magnetized and heading for impact with Earth at 1/10 of the speed of light.)