In order to build the Temple Mount in Israel, they dug all the way down to bedrock and started the support walls there. Otherwise, it would have sunk. So the deal is still basically the same, but I guess there are fewer guys with shovels and picks and huge boulders … and more machinery?
Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect, put forward a proposal to build a mile-high skyscraper, a building five times as high as the Eiffel Tower. Many slammed at the architect and argued that the tower would collapse. But today, bigger and bigger buildings are appearing. How did this happen?
This week’s provocative question deals with exaggerations, embellishments, and lies.
“How do you feel about people who always seem to exaggerate when relating a story? Do you equate embellishment with lying? As a blogger, when, if ever, is stretching the truth, other than when writing fiction, permissible?”
I think this is a question that has no bearing on writers because you are trying to draw a sharp line between “hard data” and “fiction.”
There is no such line. A myth is a story stretched out and exaggerated. Unless you are writing instruction — like a manual or the results of a scientific study — there’s no line nor ought there be one. Many “fictional books” are essentially true, but to make the story more readable, timelines are compressed and multiple characters are combined into one character.
Fact or fiction? Or maybe fictionalized fact or fact-based fiction?
That’s not lying.
That’s writing. That’s telling a story. That’s creativity. That’s what we are all about. It’s what we do. That’s why there’s no clear line between a “docu-drama” and “realistic fiction.” Why story-telling is an art and not a science.
I’ve written manuals and scientific studies. I did it for money. Those documents are fact-based and of necessity must be, but everything else is a story.
Blogging is what I do for fun. You are welcome to call it whatever you want, as long as I get to write in whatever form I choose. Once you start to define creativity, you effectively make it NOT fun anymore.
By the way … If you have a friend who exaggerates stories in which you were involved? You are welcome to interrupt him or her and add your piece of the adventure. Nobody ever said you have to sit passively by and just listen.
We have a president who lies. He says things are true that are not true and these things are supposedly based on facts. THAT is lying. But then again, I’m not the one standing in front of the American people promising to make it great again because I don’t know when it stopped being great.
Need another weird thing in which to believe? Try this one. It’s completely hidden, but apparently, it exists. So when the weird things emerge, you know where they come from. No kidding.
Not full of pseudo-humans, but microorganisms that are … well … different.
A mysterious new ecosystem which is being called the ‘subterranean galapagos’ is almost twice the size of earth’s oceans. No one has never seen anything like it.
The Ancient Greeks concluded Earth was a sphere, and it has been validated by scientists ever since. Despite this, there are people that insist the Earth is flat.
Did you see DJT on Fox and Friends this morning? Or maybe you saw him on Colbert this evening. He was also on the evening news, so if you watched TV at all, you saw him. It was also all over social media.
Whoa! Talk about out of control. It would have been funny if life on earth were a comedy. But this was our actual, elected President Of The United States. POTUS. The Man. Sounding like an out-of-control elderly family member whose drinking problem has gone way over the top.
2018 is 2017 on steroids.It’s almost October and it is crazier and much weirder than last year. We expected crazy — but weird? And there are midterm elections in less than 2 months!
In 2017, we experienced “Trump Time.” A crazy story which would have normally lasted a week or two — maybe even a month — lasted for two days, tops. We were reeling from the insane shit the Shithead-in-Chief did on a Monday, only to completely forget about it because he did something even crazier on Tuesday.
That’s how it went all year.
But something happened or seemed to happen on January 1, 2018. The crazy went into overdrive. I say ‘seemed’ to happen because his turning the crazy up to eleven was inevitable. Now those same stores last a couple of hours before the next bizarre event.
Why? Well, it’s because of the word exponential. Most of us know what it means, but I think most of us don’t really understand it.
ex·po·nen·tialˌekspəˈnen(t)SH(ə)l/
adjective
1. (Of an increase) becoming more and more rapid. “The social security budget was rising at an exponential rate.”
2. MATHEMATICS – Of, or expressed by, a mathematical exponent, for example, “an exponential curve.”
More specifically, we need to understand exponential growth, something that gets bigger and bigger or grows faster and faster over time.
It’s hard for humans to think like that because we are hard-wired to think linearly. It’s easy for us to understand it takes a guy two hours to paint a room, so he can paint two rooms in four hours. Commonsense, right? That kind of common sense is part of our DNA. It helped us survive in the old caveman days. Back then, we had to be able to figure out in a hurry how fast we had to run to get to that tree before the really large saber tooth tiger caught up to us and ate us for lunch.
The best example of exponential growth today is in technology. Like, say, computers. There’s a thing called “Moore’s Law.” It says the processing power of computers doubles and the cost is cut in half every 12 to 18 months.
That was true, but, it is a perfect example of linear thinking. In reality, the time that computers double in power and drop in cost is taking less and less time. Science and all knowledge, is growing at an accelerated rate.
It has always been that way. The increase in human knowledge has always been on an exponential curve, but the way the curve works didn’t make it seem that way until recently. On an exponential curve, things grow at a steady rate for a long time. Then suddenly, it hits a tipping point and everything begins to race along much faster.
Think about it. Humans have been on this planet as Homo sapiens for a few million years. Most of that time, we spent surviving. And throwing rocks at each other. Then, about 12,000 years ago, we stopped roaming and settled down. Although we still threw rocks at each other.
We created agriculture and civilization. Why did we do that? Because we discovered beer. I know this sounds like a joke, but it’s true. There’s a great documentary called “How Beer Saved The World.’ It’s fascinating, but that’s another blog for another day.
Basically, we had a choice. We could continue to wander around and throw rocks at each other. Or, we could stay home and make more beer. And throw rocks at each other. It wasn’t a hard decision.
Think of all the science — all the knowledge — mankind figured out starting 12,000 years ago up until 1900. By the 1900’s the industrial revolution was well underway. Cities were lit by gas and some places, by electricity. People and industry moved on steam-powered trains. The internal combustion engine was in production.
All this knowledge doubled between 1900 and the 1960’s. From horse-drawn carriages to putting a man on the moon.
The knowledge of mankind doubled again between 1960 and 1980, then doubled again by 1990.
Can we remember when smartphones didn’t exist? When iPads didn’t exist? They’ve been around for a while, right? Actually, the iPhone came out June 29, 2007. That was just eleven years ago. The iPad was released on April 3, 2010. Just eight and a half years ago!
When my stepson was diagnosed with kidney disease, he was told he would need a transplant. I asked his doctor if an artificial kidney would soon be available. He said, yes, but not for at least 50 years.
A few years later, he received the transplant and Ellin was the donor. After the surgery was over I asked the same doctor the same question. His answer? “Oh yeah, they will probably make a kidney from his own stem cells. Maybe five, ten years from now. ”
That was five years ago. Today, they’re talking about making kidneys with a 3D printer.
What happened?
Mankind reached the tipping point of that exponential curve. We’re at the point where the curve ends and the line goes straight up. This is when our knowledge quite literally explodes.
We’re way over to the right.
This is not something I thought of myself. There is a fascinating book by futurist Robert Kurzweil, called “The Singularity Is Near.” I highly recommend it.
What does any of this have to do with our Toddler-In-Chief? A lot. In particular, with his mental illness. Literally, hundreds of psychiatrists and psychologists are screaming at the top of their lungs that this nut job is, well, nuts.
And getting worse.
Fear
They have collectively pointed out that the stress of the job is accelerating his illness. He’s not merely getting crazier at warp speed. He has gone all the way to plaid!
You can see it yourself and you don’t need a Ph.D. either.
Every interview he gives is a trip further down the rabbit hole. His last few interviews have gone from, “Bizarre” to “Unhinged” to “Insane” to “Insanely insane.” Read the transcript of his last interview with The Wall Street Journal. It was a literal word salad. Not a single sentence was complete or made any sense.
Remember the news conference where the doctor that supposedly just examined Trump said he passed a cognitive mental test and he got all 30 questions right!
Really? The questions were things like “name four animals” and “point out what 3:15 looks like on a clock.” Wow, so the President is sane because he recognizes a cow, a pig, a dog, a rhinoceros, and a pussy. He also knows when it’s quarter after three.
Meanwhile, the doctor in charge, apparently known locally as “Candyman,” excused himself from his upcoming promotion to run the V.A. Maybe the doctor should be taking the test.
I think Grandpa is not just losing it. He’s losing it faster and faster each day. It’s time to take away the keys to his car. Remove the big nuclear button from his desk. Get him into the memory care unit at a good nursing home. Hell, you can designate Mar-A-Lago as his official nursing home and lock him in his room. It’s the end of September as I write this and I’m hoping we make it to November and elections. Last year, at this time we were hoping to make it to 2020.
I apologize for not finding more humor in all of this. I try, but sometimes it just ain’t there. So, to make up for it. Here are two dogs playing “I Got Your Nose!”
Earlier this month on August 11th, NASA launched its newest spacecraft, called the Parker Solar Probe. The probe’s mission is to study the outer corona of the Sun to better protect our tech-driven lifestyle against destructive solar storms that could take us back to the stone ages.
I wrote this post while back. I’m re-posting it because it’s back in the news again. Our Twittler-in-chief announced that he wanted to create a new branch of the military, the Space Force (pronounced SPAAACE FOOORCE!!! With reverb). It was just the latest gift for late night talk shows.
But recently Vice President and whitest human being on Earth, Mike Pence had a press conference with the Secretary of Defense announcing the creation of SPAACCE FOOORCE!!!
We must be prepared to fend off illegal aliens, or gay aliens, or something like that.
Here’s the original post. It’s supposed to be old news, but as usual, it isn’t. Look in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s SPAACCE FOORRCE!
Every week since our Fucking-Idiot-In-Chief got into the Oval Office, every news report starts with a version of “This is the worst week yet for the President.” And there’s a reason they say that. It’s true. What’s amazing is how he manages to make this week worse than the last.
There’s no floor. You can’t say, “he can’t get any worse than this” because he will just say, “Oh yeah? Hold my near-beer.” (El Presidente doesn’t drink so I had to modify the meme).
Near-beer!
For a while, he was at least funny. He says stuff so stupid you just have to laugh. He writes all the late-night show’s monologues by himself (with a big assist by Fox News). But last month, he stooped to depths of depravity so low, so disgusting all the humor got pushed aside. Ripping children from their parents and putting them in baby/toddler jails.
In the midst of this unspeakable evil, he was still trying to give us some comic relief. We were just too appalled, disgusted and enraged to notice it.
Our Chuckle-Head-In-Chief announced that he was ordering the Pentagon to create SPACE FORCE!
A “separate but equal branch” of the military. Separate but equal? What the hell does that mean? The Air Force and the Space Force have separate drinking fountains?
Then he actually said, “There’s no place like space, there’s no place like space.”
That night, all the late show comedy writers went “Well, we can take an early lunch.”
Just one thing. There already is a Space Force! Really! It’s been around since 1958. It was a syndicated comic strip called “Sky Masters of the Space Force!” created by Wally Wood and the great comic book artist Jack Kirby.
Can they sue? Probably not because I’m pretty sure they’re both dead.
He said we need the Space Force because we not only need to be in space but we need to DOMINATE SPACE!
Now the question becomes, who do we draft into the Space Force? We can’t use all of our current astronauts. They’re all scientists and engineers who work at an international space station where people from different countries all get along and work together. We can’t dominate space with these wimps!
We need real Americans.
Americans who want to make the galaxy great again!
The only problem is, Trump only picks people for his administration who are on television. But don’t despair! We have those heroes. Heroes like the Sky Masters of Space Force!
Oh wait, that was just a comic strip, not TV. OK, what about Tom Corbett, Space Cadet! He’s an American hero! He was on TV.
But, wait, he’s dead.
OK, what about Colonel Ed McCauley, head of the American Space Program in the 1959 TV show “Men into Space!” He was only on the air for a year, but he was still the head of the American Space Program!
The only problem is, he’s also dead.
OK, how about Ed Norton from the Honeymooners? He was an official ranger of Captain Video and his Video Rangers.
And what about Captain Video himself?
Shit, both dead.
Captain Kirk and Captain Jean Luc Picard are both still alive, but they don’t strike me as Trump’s kind of guys.
And hell, Kirk kissed a black girl.
Wait! Darth Vader! He’s totally a Trump kind of guy.
Crap, he’s dead too.
This could be a problem. Because let’s face it, we know that aliens have already visited Earth. And what do they do? One word. Anal probes.
They’re sending rapists! We need to stop the infestation of real, actual illegal aliens! What can we do?
Build a wall. A wall in space! We’ll make the aliens pay for it!
OK, we’ll make Mars pay for it!
We need real Americans to step up. How about the real American’s at Fox News? Hannity, Coulter, Ingram, Carlson and those three stooges who do Fox and Friends.
Draft them.
Send them into space to defend America! Defend Earth! Whatever. Just send them into space and make sure they stay there.
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