Bunnies and Unicorns
For this blog I’d originally written a series of global improvements that would come about in 2021, suggesting that many of the planet’s ills – like the incarceration or sentencing to death of rebellious people in doctrinaire nations; like slavery (at least 20 million people throughout the world presently enslaved); and drugs, the bad kind, that companies and cartels … well, you get the idea. Anyway, these various chunks of badness, and many more, would go away when the perpetrators would, in this new year, so full of hope, join hands around the world with bunnies and unicorns. However, I doubt I need to spell out how unlikely this is. I mean, unicorns are notoriously antisocial, and they don’t have hands. As to bunnies … let’s not go there.
Alas. My wife thought my original repetitive list was annoying. She reminded me how much I dislike lists that employ repetitive verbiage. Good point. I felt uncomfortable with what I’d written and discarded it, but I did have one hope for the new year that pertained to physics. It was this:
“Mainstream theoretical physicists, who have spent decades using their power and influence to suppress contrary ideas, and to ceaselessly promulgate the notion that facility with analytical (QFT, ST, …) and geometric (GR, ST, …) tools is the righteous and sole path to truth, under the bizarre impression that having tools, and knowing how to use them, makes you an architect with a profound understanding of design … 2021 finds them repenting and joining hands around the world with bunnies and unicorns.” So, yeah, sarcasm.
Let me just add a brief postscript to that, and then I’ll move on. In the sanctified popular science media it is occasionally admitted that theoretical physics has dug itself into a very deep hole over the last few decades. One encounters occasional mutterings from theorists themselves that what is needed are well-connected young geniuses to come along and bring us into the light … in some ill-defined future. In almost every instance it is supposed, assumed, hoped, that these young turks, having come up through the sanctified ranks, will carry on using the tools beloved by those who failed, viz., shovels.
Never once is it suggested that young turks, working outside the consecrated mainstream, may already have developed ideas that could lead the hidebound into a brighter future, and that they may have done so years ago – decades, even. The very suggestion that there may – could, at least theoretically – exist a potential evanescent future that has been assiduously disregarded in favor of a comfortably crusty past is beyond anathema (to be clear, it is the suggestion, should it be made – and it is being made; please keep up – that is beyond anathema; lots of nouns in that sentence). Anyway, I’m blushing now, so let’s stop here. Don’t want to annoy my wife.
And speaking of books …
In 1965, I think, I first encountered The Lord of the Rings trilogy at a bookstore in Wellesley, Massachusetts. I read the trilogy so often in the 2 or so decades thereafter that I was able eventually to read it in German, despite having only two college years of the language. But I knew enough of it, and more than enough of the books, to be able to follow the story easily in this foreign tongue.
In more recent years, my wife and I came to understand that our travels overseas needn’t be as broad and expansive as once they were, and we zeroed in on a very limited number of nations and places that gave us joy. As a consequence, she began to study Italian, and I French. Recalling how helpful LotR was in helping me improve my German, I recently ordered all three of the books of LotR, and The Hobbit, in French. I have begun with The Hobbit, and although French is less logical than German, and much harder to understand, still I am enjoying the experience. Bilbo Bessac (not Baggins – although sac means bag, so …) has just listened to the dwarves sing their haunting song about far away misty mountains, but he has not yet come to understand how pointed all these shenanigans are, and that he is expected to visit said mountains, despite having indicated to Gandalf that he has no interest in adventures.
Eventually Bilbo will go on adventures, but, like my wife and I, in the fullness of time he will come to feel he has had enough of the broadening influence of travel, and he will settle in Paris … er, I mean, Rivendell.
Gonads, or why there is no cure
Few of us are actually individuals, so how can we be judged as such? We are cyborgs … no, replicants … no, that’s not right either. Gundams! That’s what we are. And the pilots do not drive us from our heads, but from our gonads. In the midst of fierce battle, with the life of the male Gundam in jeopardy, if the gonad pilots get kicked they cause the Gundam host to topple over and curl up into a ball – a ball intended to protect the gonad pilots. The Gundam itself becomes immediately of secondary importance, for it is only a vehicle intended to aid the pilots in achieving their ultimate goal, a kind of immortality. The pilots are amoral, and they don’t believe in unicorns, so there will always be Gundams willing to suck the life out of other Gundams at the behest of their gonad pilots. Avoid them, if you can. It will be easier to do so once the life-sucking Gundams are isolated in Antarctica, which is the plan. Or on Mars. Mars would be best, as on Mars they would be less able to get up to mischief.
