SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #159 New Moon of December 9, 2007 Contents copyright 2007 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* It's the Christmas (etc.) holiday season again. Is there anything I can say about it that hasn't been said already? Or does that not matter because people want, or at least expect, to hear and see the old cliches again? Re-experiencing sights and sounds and smells and tastes that one has pleasant memories of can indeed bring comfort and joy, and this is the season for doing that. Of course there are those less fortunate. Even among those who at first glance appear to be doing well, there are some whose memories of Christmas Past and feelings evoked by Christmas Present are anything but comforting or joyous. What shall we say to them? The normal wishes for a joyful holiday season may only be a source of more inner pain. I like to think that I can at least wish them safe passage through this season of darkness and into brighter and happier times. ********************* On a less somber note, one modern Christmas sight that was not a part of my childhood is those large inflatable lawn decorations, snowmen and Santa figures and the like. They're all over the place today, but were unheard of when I was a kid. I don't have strong feelings either way about them. They're OK if others want them, but I wouldn't go out of my way to get one. But what when bedtime comes and people turn their lights off for the night? And what of the daytime, when many people leave their outside Christmas lights dark? If the giant Santa or snowman or whatever is on the same circuit, it won't stay inflated for long once the power is cut. And a deflated inflatable is a lot more noticeable, at least to me, than a few unlit strings of lights. So when I take my morning walk, I see quite a few homes whose front lawns are "decorated" with limp fabric, sometimes lying flat and sometimes crumpled at random or draped over the various and sundry smaller yard ornaments or whatever. Is that really the kind of thing that says Christmas to those people? ********************* Now I'm reminded of another childhood Christmas memory: I was sitting next to a wall, looking at my shadow. But it wasn't an ordinary looking shadow. There were a number of overlapping shadows, some of them different colors. I don't know if I deduced it at the time or whether I thought it out later, but I remember noticing the connection between those colored shadows and the colored lights on the nearby Christmas tree. This was back when a string of Christmas lights would have had a relatively small number of relatively large bulbs compared to most of the lights you see nowadays. The type we used came eight to the string. So today's children may not get to see the same display of colored shadows that I saw. ********************* Today's children also miss out on another aspect of Christmas decorations: Testing bulbs. Those eight-light strings were wired in series, so when one bulb burned out the entire string went dark. Guess who was given the chore of finding and replacing the bad bulb(s). That was rather frustrating work, especially since there was no way to test a bulb except by screwing it into a socket and seeing if the string lit up. That may not sound all that bad in theory, but sometimes there was more than one bad bulb involved. And by Murphy's Law, the last bad bulb was always hidden away in some hard-to-see and hard-to-reach location. That made things much more complicated. And don't get me started on Angel Hair: Itchy fiberglass Angel Hair, all over the tree. Yes, it did look kind of pretty with the colored lights shining through it, but still ... When I got a little older I rigged up a bulb tester, based on something I saw being used in a store to test bulbs at the register. Nowadays it would bring shrieks of horror from the safety people, what with exposed live contacts that you had to press the base of the bulb up against, but those were less risk-averse times. In any event, it worked and we survived and didn't get nearly as frustrated over burned-out bulbs after that. Later advances in technology have pretty much eliminated the problem. Kids nowadays should consider themselves lucky. ********************* Back on the lawn decorations, it occurs to me that a couple of years ago, around the bottom of the dot-com crunch, deflated inflatables could have been interpreted as symbolizing the state of Silicon Valley. But things are supposedly looking better now, so that seems less appropriate. Of course individual fortunes may vary. ********************* Something else in the news recently: Supposedly the Chinese army recently instituted a policy of having squad leaders and such hug their subordinates as a way of inspiring confidence or building loyalty or something. They wrote up detailed instructions on how to hug (where to put hands, etc.), along with little ritual speeches to be recited during the hug. But then when the news of this started getting out it became an object of public ridicule and was soon dropped. Or something like that. ********************* "What's with this stuff labeled ZOO GLUE with all these pictures of animals?" "The zoo was selling glue as a fund-raiser." "Is it really made from zoo animals?" "No. That was just a scare tactic." "So how did it do?" "ZOO GLUE sold OK for a while, but then people quit buying once the novelty started wearing off. The zoo eventually went bankrupt and all the animals got laid off." "Laid off? You mean like from a job? What happened after that." "They were homeless on the streets for a while, but most of them eventually got hired by other zoos and circuses and such." "Really? They let wild animals roam the streets here? And what's this about them having jobs?" "They're not really wild animals. They're cartoon characters like everybody else around here. It's just that their job at the zoo was to look and act like wild animals. They were free to be anthropomorphic after hours when there were no customers around. So they had as much right to walk the streets as anybody else." "You know, that almost makes sense." ********************* A friend gave me a bubble-blower neck pendant in the shape of a UFO alien. I think it's the type known as the "grays". It's humanoid with a large head with large eyes and relatively narrow jaw. Its entire visible surface is one shade of gray, probably because solid colors are easy to mold out of plastic with no need to print or paint anything. It is either nude or wearing some kind of form-fitting garment, perhaps a space suit or something similar. Be that as it may, it has no visible genitals. It does have fairly prominent abdominal muscles. That got me to wondering: Why do you practically never see obese or overweight or even slightly out-of-shape UFO aliens? Do they have a gym somewhere where they hang out when they're not busy flying around in unidentified objects? Do their space suits have built-in corsets or something to make them look physically fit even when they aren't? Do they get their nourishment by some means other than what we think of as "eating", so that there is no temptation to over-indulge? Or are the creatures we see not really sentient beings at all, but some kind of robot or something that the real aliens control from afar? I do recall at least one apparently obese alien in one of the Star Wars movies, but he(?) wasn't humanoid. So where have all the out-of-shape aliens gone? ********************* Speaking of space aliens and colony planets and such, how might Christmas look to humans on some far-off world? Let's Imagine Christmas on Terra Oh, Let's Imagine Christmas on Terra, Carols 'round a real organic tree. Someone's face aglow Beneath the Mistletoe Because you're someone they had hoped to see. Yes, Let's Imagine Christmas on Terra, Moonlight on the newly fallen snow. Cold December night, Candles burning bright Give the room a warm romantic glow. But Let's Imagine Christmas on Terra, Walking down a busy street alone. Over there's a tree Like you had come to see But somehow it just doesn't seem like home. And Let's Imagine Christmas on Terra, Carols on a jukebox in a bar. All the folks you know Who'd make your season glow Are waiting on some far-off Christmas star. So Let's Imagine Christmas on Terra, That's the song that's really big this year. Sing it if you will, But please remember still, If you go there you will dream of Christmas here. Tom Digby written 1215hr 12-28-86 entered 2200hr 1-30-90 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware and want to unsubscribe or otherwise change settings, the relevant URL should be in the footer appended to the end of this section. Or you can use the above URL to navigate to the appropriate subscription form, which will also allow you to cancel your subscription or change your settings. -- END --