Who's Line Is It Anyway

Holidays

Another holiday season is upon us. Yay. With malls packed, streets clogged, and people milling about in front of stores for hours on end, you'd have to be living in cave on Mt. Everest not to realize the time of year. I'm not a big fan of holidays, especially Christmas. It irritates me when I just want to go buy an umbrella and have to spend half an hour waiting for some dude with a million shopping carts trying to shove everything into his trunk. Or when I just want to take my mother to the Oakley store in Santana Row to buy her a pair of sunglasses and get stuck waiting for the mass migration of people across a tiny side street. Well, now that it's all over, I'm going to avoid any kind of "watering hole" for the rest of the season. But I suppose this kind of mass congregation happens a lot. I'm sure it's the same for the animals who have to battle it out for a decomposing impala in sub-Saharan Africa. Lovely thought. Anyway, I have to figure out a place for dinner that doesn't involve headbutting someone to get a table.

Pale Blue Dot

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Carl Sagan

supersized buildings

I was watching the Discovery Channel on Cleopatra or something relating to Egypt and it came across the giant light house at Alexandria. It was supposed to be 380-490 feet tall, a feat of engineering, and a sign of wealth and power. We may consider this ancient, but people are still trying to build large structures and buildings today. I mean look at the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, the Taipei 101, or the Sears Tower. All these buildings are a testament to the engineering power and financial wealth and political power these countries have. But this is something that can be traced thousands of years back in time. That's what the pyramids of Egypt are, the Mayan pyramids at Chichen Itza, or Tenochitlan, or the large mounds of Cahokia and throughout North America. We've been building to best each other, to display the magnificance of our society. I just think it's interesting (and I chuckle) to see that this tradition of building increasingly larger and taller structures continues today.

moments of time II

I think I've had many of these moments to realize that I've avoided dealing with certain issues for a long time. Instead of doing so I simply pretended everything was fine and ran away from it. And even though there are these moments when time slows down, it only does so for a millisecond and there really is no time to just stop and deal with it. Life doesn't stop for us to have our meltdown and fix it too.