Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!
Fri., May 28, 1999
 

"Dear Diary: Today I woke up with the urge to break my society down into demographic groups.  Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that my society had already broken down into demographic groups all by itself!" - Almost A Jester's Journal: The Lost Entries
 

    Gee, that was so much fun, thought I'd write another entry now in hopes that it will immediately become lost, too!

    So: I now have central air.  Either the men who were in my basement yesterday really were the heating and cooling professionals they claimed to be or someone is going to an awful lot of trouble to fool me for reasons I can't fathom.
    They obviously weren't school kids who'd disguised themselves as such professionals and then given me a free central air system in a pathetic attempt to get me to buy band candy before they would agree to leave.  They weren't Mormons who ended up withholding the booklet of a/c operating instructions until I'd converted.  And my initial suspicion that they were Kosovo refugees seems quite silly now in retrospect (though it would explain the angry email I got this morning from Macedonia regarding my alleged theft of its "beloved guests").  
    Of course it really doesn't matter that I now have central air.  Not only does the personal acquisition of such decadent creature comforts shrink to insignificance in a world full of pain and suffering, it just so happens that it's not warm enough today to use it.
    In fact, a quick check of my records reveals that there were only 19 days in all of 1998 when the temperature here was 90 degrees or more.  If 1998 is typical (and, having just sniffed my records, I can say it certainly smells typical), this means that I'll probably only use this cooling system 19 days out of each 365.  That's a mere 5.2% of the time, and even that overstates the case since the system won't be running all the time on those days I do use it.  Let's be generous and say it'll run half the time on the hottest days.  That means that it'll be called upon to perform its designed function just 2.6% of the time it might have been called upon.
    Kinda makes me wish that I'd been born a central a/c unit myself....

    Excuse me - that was a rather stupid thing to say, wasn't it?
    Why in the world did I limit myself to the a/c unit??
    Looking around me I see an entire houseful of things that are actually put to work a very small fraction of the time.  Spoons and forks coast through life save for a few, occasional moments spent shoveling food into a mouth.  Much of my carpet just sits there, aging, and much of the rest of it suffers the weight of foot falls for bare seconds, just now and then.
    And those are the most useful, most often used things.  The fact is, there are stuffed animals of mine still in boxes from my last change of residence over two years ago.
    And I own books I haven't opened for years longer than that!
    Clearly, scientists and philosophers have been wrong all along.  We don't live in the world - we live in a rest home for material goods!
 
    Just how bad is it, really?
    Before me, right now, is Moby Dick (the novel, not the whale).  I've had it for at least 20 years, yet have never read it.  I'm not sure when this paperback edition was printed, but it carries the copyright date of 1961.  So: It's possible that this one item of mine has been occupying space, utterly unused, for 38 years....
    Ok, maybe that's just me.  Maybe I'm weird.  Let's consider Moby Dick in general and not a specific copy of it.  It's a Great American Novel.  It's regularly assigned reading in high schools and colleges across the country.  How many people have actually read it?
    And more to the point: How many people have actually dragged their eyes across the line "Therein no fairy's arm can transcend it" that I found at random upon opening my copy at page 361?  (Melville's talking about the whale's tail, by the way.)
    How many people?  A mere fraction of the 260 million-plus Americans alive today, for sure.  Let's be extremely generous and say 10% are old enough and literate enough and interested enough to have tried to read this book.  Let's say half of those who started reading actually got to page 361.  That gives us 13 million people.  (Or 13 million and one, counting me now.)  The line takes perhaps 3 seconds to scan.  That means that it's been in use in modern times about 39 million seconds, or the equivalent of about 450 widely-scattered days.
    That's 450 mind/days out of a total possible of at least 2,847,000,000,000.
    In other words, even a line from a Great American Novel comes to life in a mind just one time out of every 6,326,666,667 possible times.
    The vast majority of its existence is spent instead in the utter darkness of a single page in a closed book of 536 pages in a world in which over 50,000 new books are printed every year in the U.S. alone.
    And even when this line has been scanned and read, who remembers it?
    Were it to be expunged from every copy of Moby Dick tomorrow, who would know?

    Still, I admit that I envy this line.
    For it is Immortal Literature.
    And I am molecularly incapable of being so much as a grocery list....

    Then again, I'm the one who knows exactly what to do with every color of M&M.
 

***************************************************************************************


 

IT'S FRIDAY!  Bargain Basement day here as I drag out the last of my overripe U.S. nuclear secrets in a misguided effort to attract more mainland Chinese web surfers to this site.

Remember:  No pushing!  No shoving!  And small, unmarked shovelfuls of gold bullion only!

GO!!!
 

Table One - "You Detonate it - You bought it"


table two - "accessories to die for"


table three - "Mix n' match launch Codes"


Plus: Free Bonus Secret To Every Chinese Secrets Shopper - Just For Stopping By!  Choose From Any Of The Following Extremely Informative TOP SECRET Anagrams Derived From "US Nuclear Weapons Secrets" & "US Nuclear Weapons Lab Secrets":

Attention Shoppers!
There's No Wait In Line Now At
Checkpoint Charlie!!

Thanks For Shopping USA!
Watch For Our "Secrets Of The Kennedy Assassination" Sales Tent
Coming To A Continent Near You
SOON!

******************************************************************************************
Back To A Simpler Past
 
Home To Lick Those Radiation Burns
 
Forward To A Brighter Future

*****************************************************************************************

("Mr. President, Satellites Reveal That All Material In This Sorry-Ass Entry That's Not An Obvious Rip-Off
Of Some Other Aspect Of Western Civilization © 1999 by Dan Birtcher!")

("Thank you, General. You may launch when ready.
Just take a moment first to beg God Almighty to have mercy on our souls.
And while you have Him on the line, how about you ask Him
to help you break that bad habit of capitalizing the first letter of every word you say, too?")