The war with the bushy-tailed critters has ceased momentarily. There are bits and pieces of styrofoam scattered around the ground below the tower. Evidently, the foam did not taste good, and there was too much of it to consume in one attempt. There is no telling how long this ceasefire will last, but my guess is that it will end when the critters find a new way to attack. In past battles, the enemy defeated me by using their athletic abilities and jumped the gap between the feeder and the house roof. Thankfully, they have not yet learned the pathway to the house, and I’m not going to show them.
This is GrumpaJoe, War Correspondent, signing off for now.
My logic on this perspective may be perverted, but hear me out. Recently, I have viewed several pictures of airplanes revealing themselves from within deadly glaciers. Many crashed in the nineteen forties, fifties, and sixties. All of them were buried in snow and ice until recent heat waves melted the ice and revealed the carcasses of the wreckages. My logic tells me that since they crashed there has been global cooling because the wreckages were covered in snow and ice, and further the many recent reports of global warming has caused the ice to melt and reveal the wreckages. This is evidence of a cyclic temperature change that has occurred. There is also evidence mastodons, long declared extinct, have been found in ice; also uncovered when the ice melted. This is evidence of another cycle of temperature change. My logical conclusion is that we are currently in another warm period of a cyclical shift in temperature that has absolutely very little to do with carbon dioxide gasses being emitted from man’s use of fossil fuels.
All it would take to shift from global warming to global cooling is for the volcano residing under Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park to blow up. The resulting volcanic winter would last for years afterward and cool the earth enough to give rise to another ice age. This event would change the process so fast from global warming to global cooling that the liberal geniuses who fear the polar ice caps will melt and flood North America would not have enough time to invent a new narrative.
The current theory is that we, as residents of the planet, should give up our fossil fuel-guzzling cars to prevent greenhouse gasses from heating the planet and melting ice caps, but shouldn’t we also be planning to avoid the ice caps going the opposite way to form another ice age? We should be inventing ways to deal with the mother of all volcanic eruptions from occurring. We have lots of evidence to show us that ice ages have occurred several times, however we have not yet uncovered evidence of ice melts that flooded continents.
Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? So asks the genie within my brain. Tomorrow I am committed to giving a short program to a neighboring Lions Club. Two months ago, I wrote a speech that I would use to give to fellow Lions to awaken them to blindness which is one of our pillars of service. I posted the speech on this blog, but no one has read it. That told me that the speech was not very good. Or else the title put people off. I thought it was rather catchy, “How Many Ways Can You Go Blind?” It turns out that there are so many ways that ophthalmologists have lost count. No one is interested into why some people go blind until that person is you. Then it becomes the number one priority on your list.
My job today, immediately after this post, is to rewrite my speech to eight minutes down from fifteen. Why am I procrastinating? I didn’t become a Lion to write and give speeches. I joined to serve my community, and giving speeches has become that service. So, I must put my mind into gear and rewrite what I thought was a perfect speech.
What was the world like before YouTube? My addiction to it is causing me to lose interest in doing things for myself. My sports, collections, friends, and social activities are all falling away from me because I watch videos of other people doing those things. My butt is slowly growing into the chair in front of my computer. My brain is creepily changing into mush, and my muscles are shrinking into strings.
How will anthropologists catalog our generation when, in the future, we are being dug out of the earth for study? Will they reconstruct us in the museums of future civilizations? How will people look upon us? As civilized humans or as programmed robots glued to a black box doing nothing? Where will they find all the millions of digital YouTube videos depicting the subject matter that kept our era so mesmerized? If, when they find the videos, will they have a way to know what they are and will they be able to play them or see them as we did? Even we have trouble playing old photos on new equipment. There is a business dedicated to converting old movies, photos, videos etc into the latest format so they can be viewed. I had all of my home movies converted to digital and stored on discs. Now, I find that I need to keep a disc player and a computer screen just for that. Forget about looking at an old vhs tape. My experience is that the few times I wanted to play, a preserved forever copy of my life, the tape was frozen to itself and could not be played. Technology changes quickly and our efforts to make the job of the anthropologist of the next millennia easier are nil. Instead of using brushes and nut-picks to uncover our bones they will be using ultrasound, x-rays, and MRI to interpret the mysteries they have uncovered.
One of the more interesting and educational video channels I am hooked on is “Desert Drifter.” This young man takes videos of himself wandering through the terrain of the southwestern states, looking for evidence of life from another era. He finds many sites on the face of cliffs that are almost impossible to reach. My knees quiver just watching him climb on slippery rack faces to reach a hollow in the rock face too high for anyone to want to live there. Yet humans have walled it off with rocks and mortar made from mud to create shelter. The best estimate he can give the viewer is that the civilization lived there about six hundred years ago. He will pick up chards of pottery and and arrow points chipped from flint stone and discuss them being careful to return the pieces back to the spot where he found it. He shows smooth and steep rock faces with footholds hollowed out of the stone to provide a staircase to a living space. Inside the living spaces he will find evidence like dried corn cobs indicating that people did in fact live there.
What will the Desert Drifter of 2624 find from exploring our habitats?
