The Star Wars One: Princess General

                 David Bowie has an honorary doctorate from the Berkeley School of Music.  Kermit the Frog has an Honorary Doctorate of Amphibious Letters from Southampton College.  Both of these celebrities, upon receiving their respective degrees, gave a commencement address and then went home.  Of course that’s what they did.  Bowie wasn’t going to hang around teaching bonehead guitar to a bunch of freshmen, and Kermit wasn’t expected to work toward tenure up in New York.  It’s just a way of getting someone cool to make a speech at your school.

                So what’s up with Princess Leia in Star Wars?  She’s a general now.  She is General Leia Organa.  I had to look up her last name and was surprised to find Organa.  I thought it would be Miss Skywalker, or Mrs. Solo, or Miss Jackson is you're nasty.  As near as I can tell the only thing close to generaling that she has done is stand around the glowing table while the fish-head “It’s a trap!” guy seems to be running things.  So is she really a general or is it more of an honorary thing?  Did she get her honorary generalship for defeating Darth Vader and the Galactic Tea Party using just pistols a Care Bears, and after giving a speech just stick around like a house guest that never leaves?  Is she wandering in and out of meetings, napping on the couch in the X-Wing pilot's break room, looking in the fridge for leftovers, getting free coffee from the Tatooine cafeteria? 

                I’m thinking that if you’ve got her in the movie and call her a general, have her strategize.  Have her put together a brilliant plan on how to defeat the Empire/First Order/One Direction.  I need to see a scene where the smug leader of the bad guys, quips something like, “That’s what happens when you send a princess to do a general’s job,” right before she pulls a tactical rabbit out of her hat, and his huge space-battle-destroyer-dreadnought-ChevyTahoe explodes into flames and crashes into yet another Deathstar.
                Oh, and if she has to sacrifice C3PO to do it, I'm good.   
                

               

Pussy Riot

“During the San Francisco Forty Niners victory celebration, a guy threw a lit flare on the hood of my car and yelled, ‘Niners!’”     -Bobcat Goldthwait

    As it turns out, despite all evidence to the contrary - lack of firearm ownership, little interest in shoulder punching, complete ignorance as to whether or not that thing has a Hemi, and an irrational fear of horses -  I’m a man. And being so, I’ve spent hours upon hours in the company of men.  I’ve experience what it’s like to be with them in both public and private venues.  I’ve have had friends, family, and co-workers who are men, and continue to be.  So I’ve been on the inside.  I’ve seen how men behave when they believe they are surrounded by those of a like mind, and those who believe that what happens in locker rooms stays in locker rooms.  And I’ve heard how they talk.

    First off, there are the words that are uttered at these times.  Words like bitch, pussy, and Niners.  As to the secret handshake, that will remain a secret.  

    Niners is a harmless and familiar nom de plume of the aforementioned, in the above quote, football team. It’s primarily used as a shortcut in place of the horrendously cumbersome and time consuming “Forty Niners.”

    As for bitch, as a young man making my way in a confusing world, I was amazed to find it is not only used as a term of insult, but also as a simple gender identification technique, and for the middle of the back seat of a car.  For instance, when a gentleman is among a group of his peers and wants to express his feelings for a woman who he feels is acting particularly unpleasant or “bossy” he will refer to her as a bitch.  As an example, “That bitch of a boss wouldn’t let me leave work early even though she knew the Niners game was starting soon.”  But later in life I discovered that a woman can earn the title bitch, in some men’s eyes,  just by existing in those men’s field of view, as in, “There were some fine looking bitches on the beach this morning.”  These women have not only not treated a man with what he or anyone else sees as “bitchy” behavior but in fact have not interacted with him at all.  They simply were unfortunate enough to need labeling by a man who was far too manly to use terms like girls or women.  Of course for these gentlemen the word ladies doesn’t even enter into the picture.  Finally when subjected to sitting between two manlier men in the back seat of a car, you’re riding bitch.  I don’t know if it’s because you are acting bossy or because you look fine on the beach, so I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

    So now it’s down to pussy.  I rarely used this word, most likely because I never heard my dad say it.  And by rarely I mean I don’t.  But recently an actual nominee for President of the United States, the one in America, was seen and heard making use of this word on a video from 10 years ago.  I’ve heard men use it as an insult to another man, “You’re afraid of horses?  What a pussy,” as a designation for acquiring sexual intimacy with a woman, “Gonna’ go get some pussy tonight,” and for describing a cat.  Actually I’ve never, ever heard anyone refer to a cat as a pussy unless he was trying out a poorly developed double entendre.

    Pretty much all the words and how they are used that I’ve put in the blog today can fit in the the deplorable basket that is locker room talk. So when someone says that something they said that has upset someone else is just locker room talk, can we disagree on that?  Oh yes.

    That brings us to what was said in the video years ago, by a man who wants us to select him to represent 300 million of us as President of the United States.  He wasn’t besmirching someone’s manliness, he wasn’t speaking of accomplishing sexual congress (although there was hope in his heart), and he certainly wasn’t talking about cats.  He was using a fourth definition of the word, to describe a woman’s genitalia. I’ve heard that fourth definition during “locker room” events too, but not in the way this man used it.  He basically said, as you all know, how delighted he is to be able to use his celebrity, his wealth, and his power to commit sexual assault on women without consequence.  That’s not locker room talk, that’s more like admission of guilt.  Again, if I were in a room with a bunch of other guys and one said, "Hey, you know what's fun?  Grabbing women you've just met by the short hairs and kissing her with you fancy Tic-Tac breath." I'm pretty sure I or someone else would suggest that he's heading the right direction for a night in jail and a court date. 

    Men can be vulgar.  Men can be clueless about their words. Men can do stupid and dangerous things when trying to impress their contemporaries; see the flare on the car quote.  Men can also be kind and caring, and goofy and stupid and heroic and strong and the list goes on.

    But this man that I at first considered to be both a lousy, unqualified presidential candidate and a lousy person, and later when he mocked the physical disability of a journalist considered to simply be a pig, has given me pause on what I should call him now.  Since he has bragged about what at the very least is a misdemeanor that is just a few steps from a felony I guess I have only one choice left.  Criminal.

Are The Stars Out Tonight?

              

                  So I was reading about this star named KIC8462852.  It sits out there some 454 parsecs from our cool blue home.  A parsec, which is a unit of distance and not a measurement of time regardless what my sister’s boyfriend Harrison Ford says, is around 3.25 light years.  So that puts this star 1,476 light years away.  That means that if you had planned to arrive at KIC8462852 today, and could travel at the speed of light, you would have had to leave Earth in 540 A.D.  But don’t wait up for news that Romans have arrived at KIC8462852, because it seems that Emperor Justinian didn’t invest in their space program back then but preferred instead to spend Rome’s treasury waging war on the Ostrogoths.  I guess it paid off; the Ostrogoths lost.

                Even though we won’t be visiting KIC8462852 any time soon it stills holds interest.  You see KIC8462852, also known as Tabby’s Star – named after a Yale researcher - has been getting dimmer.

So what’s the big deal Mark?  Nothing last forever.  Eventually all stars will get dimmer until the just fade away right? 

Right, sure, maybe.  But KIC8462852 dims and then brightens back up.

But Mark, isn’t this dimming and then brightening back up the behavior that observers use to determine that a star has planets orbiting it?  A planet goes by and the star dims, then the planet moves on and the star’s light returns to normal?

Yes, but most stars dim less than 1% when that happens.  Tabby’s Star dims 20%, and there is no pattern to the dimming as there would be when an object passed between it and us in an orbit. 

Okay, but maybe it’s something besides a planet.  Could there be something else that would cause this behavior?

There is speculation.  Maybe a huge cloud of space junk/dust.  It floats by and really, really dims the star, and then moves on.  Or perhaps it’s something some scientist call comet swarms, breaking apart (and you thought bees were bad).  But infrared observations show there is no cloud of dust and a reexamination of the data suggests that comet swarms were far too unlikely. 

Okay, so what is causing Tabby’s Star to fade and return?

Another idea began to orbit those who were studying this star; mega-structures.

Wow, that’s amazing!  Wait…what’s a mega-structure?

A mega-structure is something that is very, very large and is built by someone.  I mean really huge.  They are suggesting that someone has built or is building something the size of the orbit of say Earth.  Maybe these folks out there by KIC8462852 really like the star but found that there are no planets orbiting it that fit their definition of supporting life.  So they build one, or a ring in the orbit of where they want one, or a sphere around KIC8462852 the size of that orbit, shutting it in.

Is that what is happening?

Probably not.  At one point SETI, the people looking for extraterrestrial life, pointed their ears at Tabby’s Star and listened for “deliberately produced radio signals.”  They say they found none.

But what does a “deliberately produced radio signal” from an alien species sound like?  Especially from someone who could build a building the size of Earth’s orbit? 

They really look for patterns and found none.  If we’ve missed it we can only hope that they’re not asking how the Ostroghths are doing.

So now what?

Tabby’s Star is acting strangely and no one has a good explanation as to why.  But that’s okay.  Scientists know they won’t solve every mystery and they seem all right with that.  They know they are using tools invented by someone else while standing on the shoulders of those who came before them, and I believe they hope that someday, someone will figure out what Tabby’s Star is doing while standing on theirs.

KIC8462852 is in a group of stars somewhere behind the Northern Cross.  Unfortunately it can’t be seen with the naked eye so those scientist will be our eyes.  By the way, who wouldn’t go to a concert if the bands were named Naked Eye, Comet Swarm, and The Ostrogoths?

Sometimes I wonder why we’re allowed to view things that are impossible for us to ever have; like twinkling stars or Jennifer Lopez.  But I’ve come to the conclusion that we are disallowed nothing.  The fading and glowing stars are put there to make us look up.  To force us to imagine…well to imagine pretty much anything, including mega-structures.

Someday, if we don’t quit trying, we’ll visit KIC8462852 and see in person if there is a giant ring built around it, if comet swarms exist, or if the star has long ago simply died out. In the meantime enjoy the view, vicariously of course.

Harambe Must Die

     Harambe was a male gorilla who had never shown any aggressiveness toward the other gorillas in his habitat during his 17 years.  But when a boy fell into his enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo, it sealed Harambe's fate. Although it didn't look like the gorilla was trying to hurt the boy, it was determined that Harambe was just too powerful, and therefore too dangerous, to the boy's well being.  Even without malice, inasmuch as a gorilla can show malice, he could have caused great harm or worse to the boy.  Tranquilizers would have taken too much time according the the Dangerous Animal Response Team, something I was unaware zoos had.  So it was a sniper's bullet that flicked the switch that ended Harambe's life in the zoo that was his only home.
     Hopefully lessons will be learned.  Maybe fences will be made less porous, because a child in an enclosure with an animal that powerful is just too dangerous. I think most of us will agree that steps should be taken to ensure a child locked in with a powerful animal doesn't happen again.  But it does all the time.  Every day.  Maybe thousands of times an day in this country alone. 
     
     Yesterday an even younger child than the boy at the Cincinnati Zoo found herself in an enclosure with not one, but two very power animals.  This time however, one of the animals was know to be aggressive.  The two animals eventually attacked and killed the child.  This time the "enclosure" was the living room of a home in Fresno and the animals were dogs.  Shar Pei-pit bull mix.  
     I won't go into the details of the attack because frankly I didn't read them and will try not to imagine them.  You may be thinking that pit bulls are unfairly maligned.  That they have been singled out by the ignorant masses and media as the villain when it's the owners who bear the responsibility for the animals. I agree, it is the owners.  Owners are responsible for harm caused by pit bulls to children, and sometimes adults, but not just the owners who make sure they have aggressive dogs, perhaps to fulfill some macho bullshit fantasy, but also owners who put a pit bull and a child in the same room, yard, or even house together is sending that child down an path that could lead to great harm or death.  If simply having a child and a gorilla in an enclosure together means the gorilla must die, how is it that having a child and a pit bull together in an "enclosure"is okay?
    From dogbite.org, "In the 11-year period of 2005 through 2015, canines killed 360 Americans. Pit bulls contributed to 64% (232) of these deaths."  Out of the over 300 breeds of dogs, one accounts for 64% of fatal attacks.
     I tried to find statistics for fatal gorilla attacks for the same time period but there were none.  So I went back 20 years; none.  50 years; none.  100 years; none.  110 years; a zookeeper was attacked and killed by a gorilla in the Marseilles Zoo in France.  Obviously gorillas pose a greater threat to our children than pit bulls, so Harambe must die.

Post: Yes there are homes where pit bulls coexist with children and adults alike for their entire lives.  Then there are the the 232 homes that will never be the same.  Why take the risk?

The Two Towers

           Rule Forty-two in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: "All persons more than a mile high to leave the court"

           Let’s talk about the number 42.  Sure there is the rule above, and of course it’s the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but it’s also the number of children God sent bears to maul for making fun of Elisha’s baldness.  You can look it up; 2 Kings 2:23-24 (Much like Donald Trump, I don’t know if it’s pronounced Two Kings or Second Kings.  Plus to add more muck to the rake, for some reason, it’s sometimes referred to as Fourth Kings).  But putting aside how much God likes bald people and how convoluted the numbering system in the Bible is, I’d like to point out that 42 is also the number of seconds that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake lasted.

            The 1906 earthquake was the big one for San Francisco.  Hell is was a big one for anywhere.  Had it been invented, it is estimated that the Richter Scale would have registered it as a 7.8.  Making it nearly 10 times more powerful than The Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, which lasted around 10 seconds.  Although there weren’t as many buildings or bridges in 1906, there was damage; in the Mission District the ground dropped 8 feet.  That’s the common height of a room in our construction, which sort of means if you were on the second floor of a building in the Mission on that day in 1906, you were on the first floor when it was all over.  Loma Prieta collapsed an Oakland freeway, many of the buildings in the Marina District, and broke the Bay Bridge.  The difference between these two earthquakes is like the difference between being punched repeatedly by Duane “The Rock” Johnson for 42 seconds and punched by me for 10.  What would have been left standing after Loma Prieta if it had been 10 times stronger and lasted 4 times as long?  I dunno, how much damage would The Rock’s Howitzers inflict on you as compared to my lady Derringers?

            So with that in mind, people who build things in San Francisco understand that earthquakes are the elephant in every room of those designs.  They can happen, they do happen, and they can be terribly strong.  So I hope it was the right decision to construct a 1,070 foot tall building called the Salesforce Tower on Mission and First Streets. - Salesforce of course being a company that does some stuff with some people in relation to some things. -  When finished, next year, it will be the tallest building in the city, surpassing the Transamerica Pyramid by 217 feet, although it will not be as pointy.  If fact it’s right flat on the top, and with the “ribbed” design, it kind of looks like an erect sand worm from Dune.  I’m secretly hoping that San Franciscans will nickname it House Atreides (Or House Harkonnen depending on your opinion of Saleforce).  You can look that up too.

            If you’re thinking that only those crazy San Franciscans would construct such a tall building in earthquake central, don’t call the Loony Patrol just yet.  Down in Los Angeles, where earthquakes are certainly as common, they are further along on an even taller building.  Although not much taller.  When completed the Grand Wilshire Tower will top out at 1,099 feet, perhaps as tall as House Atredies would be if it stuck out its tongue.  Do worms have tongues?  To me the Grand Wilshire doesn’t look like anything from Dune or any other science fiction movie.  But it will be covered with thousands of LED lights that perhaps can recreate the advertisements on the Los Angeles buildings in Blade Runner.  To me it just kind of looks like the world’s biggest thumb drive.  Unfortunately, regardless of what it resembles, the Grand Wilshire will have to start its life under a cloud, seeing as how a worker committed suicide by jumping off it in March.   

            Since these two building are taller than anything previously constructed in California, you’re probably wondering if you get to the top of one, can you see that other?  Sorry, but at nearly 400 miles, they are far too far apart for that.  If you wanted to see one from the other, you have to move them closer, something like…wait for it…52 miles.  I know you thought I was going to say 42, and I did consider putting that, but I thought that was something you might actually look up.

P.S. In all the Sundays I spent at Mass in my youth, why did no priest ever tell the story of God’s attack bears?