Existential Wanderings

The Internet is getting to be a rather popular place (I just noticed this). I believe its appeal is due in large part to the combinations of vibrant colors. After about the 1st grade, they stopped letting us use crayons for everything, and Baby Boomers & Sons have missed that dearly. Once we hit adulthood, color went out of books too (no pictures either), and things were rather drab. Newsprint was all black and white. Magazines used to be as well, but since then in order to compete with the Internet, they've had to spice up their publications basically to look like the Internet, only without the clicker on the page. So now we have web sites exploding in all their digital glory, and surfing has become a veritable palette de resistance. They say there are over 16.7 million web colors, but I'd like to see someone differentiate between more than a couple hundred of them, so I don't know what good it does to claim that many when we can't even detect the many nuances. You could show somebody several thousand different shades of red independently, and almost all of them would be identified as merely 'red'. They aren't real colors anyway until Crayola comes out with a crayon for them. I'll give you your Burnt Sienna and your Forest Green, but don't push it. If Crayola uses 120 different colors, then that's good enough for me.

Although I haven’t travelled much, when I do I’m fascinated by all the places that are famous for one thing or another, even though you’ve never heard of any of them. Nonetheless, it is good to know that they’re famous. And then they’ll also call certain places historic. Isn’t everywhere historic though? I’m sure if you went back a hundred years, you’d still find that same land there. To me, it would be more intriguing to see a place that instead wasn’t historic. Now, that would be a good trick.

Why is rainy weather thought of as "bad", and sunny weather is "good"? Aren't the weathercasters who further these notions discriminating against people who actually enjoy rainy weather? They even go as far as calling it "miserable". Now, that's a little over the top. When they take a shower, is the shower miserable? And notice that rain gets a bad rap regardless of the temperature. But sunny weather gets a great deal of latitude, being referred to as "gorgeous" within a wide temperature range. The weather people talk as if they're the ones providing the weather too. They'll say things like, "We've got an absolutely beautiful day in store for you tomorrow." But do they take the blame for the "bad" weather? I can't remember hearing them apologize.

My overall navigating ability hasn’t gotten too bad yet, so I can usually find where I parked, which works out fine in that regard. The only problem is that I have trouble remembering what kind of car I have. That can complicate things just a bit. I can remember section E3 with relative ease, yet when I get to that section, I’m still left with all these choices. “Did I like blue? I couldn’t afford a car like that… I’d never park like that... Oh, there’s still somebody in that one — must not be mine.” If they’d just put a big E3 on top of my car in about that size 4000 font they use, then it would be a very simple operation — I own an E3 car. So through the process of elimination, on a good day I can figure it out in about twenty minutes. If I’m unusually lucky, though, everybody else will be in a hurry to leave, and they’ll just all drive away until there’s only one car remaining, and then I know that one's mine. This doesn’t work too well in the middle of the day at a mall, I’ve found. Another thing — don’t ever walk to the mall and then look for your car afterward, because it will really tend to throw you off.

So anyway, if I buy a plot of land, how much of the dirt from it do I get? I know the lot size narrows as it gets closer to the center of the earth, but up near the crust, can I take whatever I need? I’d bet you that half an acre could build me a mountain somewhere. If you were to look at the properties in our neighborhood from a satellite photo, you might someday see one that has a strange resemblance to an active volcano, with the various elements from the core of the earth gathering in my back yard. Ultimately, I think having such a gaping hole would be a good way to combat floods. Not just in my yard, but in the whole county. All it takes is just a little more ambitious drainage, and then you'd have no more flooding.

All this talk of making certain crimes legal leaves me a little dubious. I suppose, though, if we were to legalize counterfeit money, at least it would get it off the black market, so that would be a plus. This is a common argument you hear, disguised in various forms.

In news reporting, an anonymous source is quoted, and the article emphasizes that the person has spoken only on the condition of anonymity. So the reporter is expected to not do something the anonymous person did, which was to reveal details about their sources. Just once I’d like to see a news story that says “Henry T. Farnsworth, speaking on the condition of anonymity, was quoted as saying…” Or better yet, “Henry T. Farnsworth, incorrectly assuming that he was speaking on the condition of anonymity, and I might add vastly overrated as a source, was quoted as saying…”

When someone asks me how I’m doing, and I say “Couldn’t be better,” they probably don’t realize I’m being a fatalist. Ah, well... But there’s not enough time to explain in passing. You get a three-second window there to summarize how your life is on that particular day. That’s a lot of pressure. Maybe say: “Not enough time to go into detail... Watch the news tonight, I’m sending in a story.”