So, Camera Girl works double time for a week and I just spend two days eating thousands and thousands of calories of delicacies over the long holidays but I’m the one who’s exhausted and complaining! I guess we each have our own strengths and weaknesses.
So, mission accomplished. Two days hanging out with the grandkids and all the rituals were observed. I even bonded with my sons-in-law. They were good sports and tolerated all of my quirks. They uncomplainingly watched my showing today of W.C. Fields classic “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.” They even laughed at several of the most absurd scenes of Ambrose Wolfinger with his cellar full of singing burglars, his career as a “memory expert,” his criminal adventure as an unlicensed manufacturer of apple jack, his passion for professional wrestling and his trials and tribulations dealing with his truly awful wife and her mother and brother.
The kids fell right in with the silliness on display. The only protest came from my six-year-old granddaughter who recognized both Fields and the actress playing his wife from the previous showing of the other Fields movie where they played a husband and wife, namely “It’s a Gift.” Princess Sack of Potatoes wanted to know where the son and daughter in that previous movie had gotten to in this movie. I explained that even though Fields and the actress were playing husband and wife again they were different characters. I think this situation didn’t sit well with her. Apparently, she felt that her suspension of disbelief was being abused and she wanted those interesting characters returned. I did my best to smooth over this outrage but it took half the movie to return her to willing participation.
And as everyone was heading home, I was thinking what a strange world we live in. All the silly rituals and behaviors that we associate with happiness and family. Three generations of people playing penny ante poker or watching movies from ninety-some-odd years ago or eating peasant foods from a country none of us has ever lived in. It’s all just a hodge-podge of things that make up a stream of experiences that we all share together travelling down the years.
And for me, those are the realest things in the world. All the other things I read about “on-line” and the important progress that is being made by artificial intelligence, global convergence or whatever else they call what they are doing with government money are utterly fake. Watching my two youngest grandchildren trying for the first time to master the silly game of getting a wooden ball on a string to land in a little wooden cup was more meaningful than listening to two physicist talking heads debating about whether dark matter was faker than modified gravity. These high powered (we hope) intellects should be concentrating their efforts on solving the world’s energy problems. The physics they need to be studying is defining the criteria for engineering a safe fission reactor. Humanity needs to snap out of its stupor and produce an ecosystem of abundance and prosperity that fosters human happiness and maximizes human intellectual potential.
It’s amusing to hear people who “believe in science” stating categorically that there is no God and that the universe and life are just meaningless accidents. And their proof is “The Big Bang.” They declare confidently that the universe began x number of billions of years ago with all the matter and energy of creation appearing out of nowhere and all of that creation is still expanding at an ever-greater acceleration into empty space with entropy leading to the heat death of this universe in y billions of years from now. But if you ask them where the big bang came from, they just shrug their shoulders and say that is unknowable. In essence they are saying they don’t know anything about the beginning and end of the universe. So basically, they’re saying, “and then there was light.”
I tend to think life is not an accident. From my point of view, what I experience in my small piece of the universe is the point of the whole thing. A little kid playing with a ball and cup toy is the reason for the big bang and everything else that has been put in motion. Now prove me wrong.
Given the choice between kids with simple toys and physicists, I’ll take the children every time. There is something elemental about children learning a new skill. They have to understand trajectory, momentum, judging speeds & accurate distances, bound orbits; and then teach their bodies to react precisely to intercept a bound orbit vector at speed and to furthermore cushion the landing of the ball to prevent it bouncing out of the cup again.
Small wonder we have so much trouble programming humanoid robots to do simple things children can do.
Yes. I think the physicists will need a hundred years or so to regroup and figure out what questions to ask and what experiments to run.