All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
If you go long enough without a bath, even the fleas will let you alone. … For a lifetime I had bathed with becoming regularity, and thought the world would come to an end unless I changed my socks every day. But in Africa I sometimes went without a bath for two months, and I went two weeks at a time without even changing my socks. Oddly enough, it didn’t seem to make much difference.
Ernie Pyle
In the words of Anthony Quinn in his portrayal of Alexis Zorba, “I’ve got a plan. A great big crazy plan. But I’ve got things to figure; angles, forces. Otherwise, it will be; catastrophe.”
So, I think I’m going to take the plunge and try to market my book with a professional campaign. And just as with Zorba it may turn out to be the full catastrophe!
But you only live once, you know and there is a certain satisfaction in throwing the dice. Of course, when the dice come up snake eyes that’s a tough moment. Especially if you’ve bet the bundle.
Be that as it may, I’m feeling pretty good about this and I want to try it. Of course, now there are all the details. I’ve got to put a cover on the book. Maybe I’ll hire a proofreader and I have to come up with a nom de plume. “photog” is kind of informal for a great author. Grok recommended the following:
Well, I’ll have to give it a little thought.
I can just see me now, with “The Sniper” on top of the New York Times best-seller list for three or four years and the royalty checks piling up in my mud room and Camera Girl forced to keep her innumerable diamond tennis bracelets in an antique bath tub in the laundry room and me building a giant garage on the Compound filled up with antique Dusenbergs and Rolls Royces that I’ll buy from Jay Leno. But I’ll still be “just folks” and I’ll still use my Sony 90mm F/2.8 macro lens to take pictures of spiders and flies. I’ll never become a photo snob and buy a Leica or anything like that.
But I will have to take on some eccentricities in order to capture the imagination of the reading public. I think I’ll take up big game hunting. But not just shoot boring things like elephants and polar bears. I’ll pay those guys who are restoring the wooly mammoth to name it after me and then I’ll shoot it and make it extinct again so I’ll have the only stuffed wooly mammoth in the world. Then I’ll have them bring back the Giant Rok bird and I’ll shoot that too and I’ll have my Michelin Four Star chef cook the drumsticks specially for me. And then I’ll commission Elon Musk to build me a moon ship. I’ll go to the Moon, set off a nuke and name the subsequent new crater after myself.
And after that I’ll rest.
One of the parodoxes of war is that those in the rear want to get up into the fight, while those in the lines want to get out.
Ernie Pyle
As I have whined interminably about, I am in the midst of a long, boring and exhausting project from which death would be a welcome release. But today I unexpectedly discovered that I have a two-day respite from this miserable existence. I have Friday and Saturday off. And just like that my heart is full of joy. I can sleep in tomorrow morning, maybe as late as 6:30 a.m.! “I’m as light as a feather! I’m as happy as an angel! I’m as merry as a schoolboy! I’m as giddy as a drunken man!”
Seriously, when some onerous burden is unexpectedly lifted off your shoulders, even if only for a little while, it changes your attitude. Because now the thing that you had seen as impossibly hard has been cut into a smaller piece. It can never now be what it was. It is diminished. Even if the diminution is minor, the psychological effect is great.
I will spend tomorrow weighing some decisions that I need to make. I have a lot of factors and unknowns that need to be considered and somehow weighed against each other. I have to perform the hardest of all tasks; think intelligently.
But all that is okay. This two day carve out of time is a perfect interval to look carefully at the problem and make some kind of decision. Maybe it won’t be definitive but at the very least I’ll be able to define the time parameters needed to answer all the questions. And to me that is an important milestone in any project.
I was watching a YouTube video from someone who argued that human colonization of other planets was highly improbably and interstellar colonization was completely impossible. For interplanetary human travel he pointed to the health problems associated with extended time in freefall and the damage to human health from radiation that permeates the environment beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. In addition to these problems, for the case of interstellar travel, he pointed to the issues that a twenty-thousand-year multi-generational space ship would create for the humans within. First off, he reiterated that all health issues would be magnified by several orders of magnitude over such an enormous length of time. But he also stressed that a flight of that duration would see a genetic selection among the crew for individuals with anti-social or even psychopathic tendencies. He predicted that well before arrival, the crew would have sunk into barbarism and cannibalism. Now that’s a scenario I can stand behind!
Anyway, it was very interesting, if a little bit depressing. One thing I learned is that mammals brought onto the International Space Station to test the effects of microgravity on reproduction had a 100% rate of birth defects due to developmental anomalies caused by the lack of gravity. Well, all this negativity sure puts a damper on a lot of my favorite science fiction stories from the golden age of science fiction. Where does that leave “Red Planet,” “Farmer in the Sky” and “The Rolling Stones?” Well, maybe we can find a workaround.
I try not to take any foolish chances, but there’s just no way to play it completely safe and still do your job.
Ernie Pyle
I have a theory. I think that human intelligence will spawn higher intelligence in other species of animals. And this isn’t mysterious. Higher intelligence will produce greater success when sharing an ecosystem that more and more is dominated by human actions. And the negative situation is already well known. Animals that can’t adapt to interaction with modern humans have a much lower chance of thriving in the current world. Maybe the grizzly bear is a good example. In the first century of interaction with Europeans, the grizzly’s instinct told him to charge into a pack of Europeans. This resulted in many, many dead grizzly bears. And this pattern continues to this very day. Result? Grizzlies were extirpated from all parts of United States other than Yellowstone where they were protected by law.
But what about animals that have adapted? Which animals thrive in our company? Well, obviously dogs and domesticated cats are the prime examples. And as far as it goes, we’ve done a lot more with selective breeding of dogs than cats. And I’m guessing that canine brain development has been fundamentally changed by association with man. I think that some kind of selection is happening that will attune dogs with human intelligence. Now, don’t get me wrong. Dogs are not geniuses but they are relatively intelligent animals and so the potential is there for them to continue to evolve into a creature that interacts with humans at a much closer to equal level than is currently seen. Of course, if we were domesticating chimpanzees or bonobos, I think the process would move at a much faster pace. Those apes already have significantly greater intelligence. But apes are truly dangerous animals with unpredictable behavior. Dogs, for the most part, are already part of the human household and have enormous empathy for people around them (for the most part). So, I think that some time in the future dogs will move forward significantly in intelligence.
But what other creatures huddle around humanity successfully? Well, rodents. Mice, rats, squirrels and chipmunks. They’ve adapted to humans in a big way. And their numbers have probably never been higher than they are right now. But humans are getting better at killing them. New poisons, better traps and strategies for preventing them from getting into our food stores seems to be making a dent in their success. My guess is as we use smarter and smarter methods to keep them at bay, we will produce smarter and smarter rodents that keep wanting to break in.
And I have this feeling that one day there will be rodents that are orders of magnitude smarter than they are now. I’ll go out on a limb and say that rats will be the ones to noticeably grow more intelligent. This will sound crazy, but I envision a species of rats that become social in a way that mimics human socialization. I think they’ll develop something approaching speech. It’ll be like something out of a Disney cartoon with the rats having tribal gatherings and getting their marching orders from the head rat. Well, I better get some sleep.
For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.
Ernie Pyle
