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 #171 New Moon of November 27, 2008 Contents copyright 2008 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. ********************* This New Moon comes on the morning of Thanksgiving Day itself, although I'm very unlikely to get the issue out on that exact day. It'll probably come out later in the long holiday weekend. Hopefully most of my readers will be too busy with Thanksgiving stuff to notice. And even if they do notice, it's not that unusual for an issue to be a couple of days late. It's sort of like a grace period. Speaking of grace periods and Thanksgiving, I've been thinking off and on about the custom of saying Grace at meals. I was raised Christian, and whenever we ate together as a family someone would lead us in saying Grace. Sometimes it was just a token "Lord bless this food, Amen," but we said it. Another common one was "Lord, we thank thee for these and all other blessings. We humbly beg for Christ's sake, Amen." Now if you really look at that one, it doesn't make much sense. I'm guessing that somebody in the family (maybe one of us kids) just strung together some words and phrases they'd heard used in prayers at church services, without really noticing what they meant or whether they logically fit together. And once we got into the habit of saying it, we never paid that much attention to what we were actually saying. So it just sort of kept getting said. Then after I left home and set out on my own I got out of the habit of saying Grace at all. I seldom even thought about it except when I was at a restaurant and I noticed someone at another table doing it. I usually couldn't hear what they were saying, but I could tell from the bowed head and closed eyes and posture and such that they were probably saying Grace. Be all that as it may, lately I've been thinking that there may be good reasons to say Grace or do some similar ritual at meals, even if you're not all that religious. More than once I've been just at the point of finishing eating something when I realized I haven't been paying attention to what I was eating. Something else, possibly a problem I'd been working on or maybe just general frustration from traffic or something, had been on my mind. I'd wolfed down whatever it was without really noticing how good it had been, and as I savored the last bite or two I would feel a pang of regret. I would find myself wishing I'd taken time to taste what I'd just been eating. And sometimes I'd even feel tempted to get more of whatever it was to make up for what I'd missed. So even if I don't currently feel that some stern father-figure God demands to be thanked at each and every meal, I do see a need for what my Pagan friends call "grounding and centering". Grounding is an exercise in putting mundane thoughts and worries aside, usually by envisioning them as some sort of psychic energy which is allowed to flow down into the earth, where the various earth spirits will recycle it into something more useful. Once the unwanted energy has been disposed of, one can replace it with fresh new energy from the Gods and Goddesses, or from the earth and/or the sky, or some similar source. Once one's energy has been cleansed, one can more fully be in the here and now, able to give one's full attention to doing whatever one is setting out to do. This is the "centering" part of "grounding and centering". Thus if one is grounded and centered at the start of a meal, one is in a better position to more fully enjoy it. There's one change from tradition that might be worth considering: Instead of grounding and centering or saying Grace or whatever before you begin eating, it might be better to do it after some kind of appetizer. The reasons for this have to do with body chemistry. When you're hungry, your blood sugar tends to get low. And many people get irritable when their blood sugar is low. So there you are, trying to ground and center or say a prayer or whatever, just when you're feeling most impatient. Then you start eating, still feeling hungry and possibly a bit irritable. Although eating will increase your blood sugar, it may take a few minutes for your body to feel the effect. If you're wolfing down food because you were hungry, you may miss the subtle changes in mood and end up in that state of regret, wishing you had taken time to enjoy the meal. So grounding and centering, or giving thanks, or asking for blessings after appetizers but before the main course, should put you into a better position to enjoy and appreciate it all. ********************* Roughly forty years ago, when I was living in Southern California, I wrote a little song about a sort of live-action game some local science fiction fans were playing. At least I think it was just a game. Anyway, the song has been running around in my head lately: Oh, If you mention the I.T.R. They'll deal with you-u summarily. It gives them such a sense of power, Dealing with people summarily. So happily, so merrily summarily, So Mary Lee says If you mention the I.T.R. They'll deal with you-u summarily. They come to us from the future far, The fabulous Twenty-Fifth Century. They've come to the present and now they are, Dealing with people summarily. So happily, so merrily summarily, So Mary Lee says If you mention the I.T.R. They'll deal with you-u summarily. Notes (other than the musical kind): I.T.R. = Institute for Temporal Research They're time travelers, so "now they are" in the second verse is analogous to "here they are" for space travelers. Thus the comma at the end of that line is not a mistake. It feels like there ought to be three verses, but if there ever was a third verse I don't remember what it was even if I wrote it. And I have no idea where it might have come relative to the other verses. Maybe instead of forgetting some nice neat third verse, I've forgotten one verse's worth of lines from different parts of the song and mixed up the rest. That just shows how powerful this outfit is. They can make people forget verses to songs, and even make them forget that they've forgotten. Or something like that. I don't even know who Mary Lee is, or was, or will be. Will she be some powerful ruler or some such centuries from now, or was "Mary Lee" just a random name that was sort of stuck in because it made the song scan, or what? Be all that as it may, I'm pretty sure they've made me forget all the really secret stuff, so it should be safe to sing or otherwise distribute what's left of the song. Even if it's real nobody will believe it. ********************* Say a mad dentist somewhere in my neighborhood invents luminous glow-in-the-dark teeth. Now no matter how bad the lighting in the dining room is you can still see what you're eating. Or at least you will be able to once the mad ophthalmologist next door to the mad dentist perfects his technique for transplanting eyes into the tip of the tongue. Then the ophthalmologist and the dentist might start seeking venture capital to start a Silicon Valley startup. There are hints that biotechnology may be the next big thing, and this could fit right in. Somehow I suspect that many will be reluctant to invest in such a scheme. But maybe the dentist and the ophthalmologist will be able to get some movie and TV script writers interested in the concept. Then once it's been seen in a number of movies and TV shows and such people will start to think of it as "normal" and will be more willing to invest. This seems especially likely if the economy continues to deteriorate to the point where there may not be anything else around to invest in. Somehow I suspect it won't really come to that. Someone else will invent some alternative for those who don't want luminous teeth. In fact, more than one other person may invent more than one other alternative. So luminous teeth may be little more than a footnote in the dustbin of history as someone else's newly invented metaphor-mixing machine takes center stage. So if you invest in luminous teeth and end up losing money, don't say I didn't warn you. Now I'm worried that people will sue me if I don't put enough effort into warning them against investing in luminous teeth. Should I put big "DON'T INVEST IN LUMINOUS TEETH" signs on the sides of my car and drive around on the busiest streets I can find so the public will know that luminous teeth are not a good investment? Or maybe when I do get sued for not putting enough effort into warning people against investing in luminous teeth, I can just pull in everybody else who didn't plaster their cars with big "DON'T INVEST IN LUMINOUS TEETH" signs as co-defendants. I could make it a class-action thing against the whole class of people who didn't put such warning signs on their cars. Then even if we lose, my share of the judgment might be down around forty-seven cents, perhaps with another two dimes or maybe a quarter for lawyers' fees. I could afford to pay that. So now I'm no longer worried about being sued over luminous teeth. ********************* A video game someone was playing at a party had scenes involving bombs with digital countdown timers. Such bombs have long been a cliche in movies and such. They usually start with times on the order of a few minutes to a few hours. But what if the times were longer? Say the authorities find a bomb with a countdown display showing a time on the order of several years. They know from experience that such counters can be trusted and that attempts to move or disarm such bombs seldom succeed. What should they do? Do they evacuate the region immediately and try to keep people away until after the bomb has gone off, or do they just sort of let things go until the countdown reaches a few days? I could see arguments both ways. Would the answer be different if the counter was showing a time on the order of decades or centuries? If the time remaining was extremely long (thousands or tens of thousands of years) would they bother doing anything at all other than perhaps keeping the public out of the immediate vicinity lest someone set the bomb off prematurely? And if it were to remain there, still counting as the millennia and centuries and years gave way to months and days, would anybody notice the approaching deadline? Or would people have become accustomed to ignoring it until the eventual explosion surprises everyone? What if the language had changed, so people no longer knew what the numbers (and any accompanying text) meant? That might make an interesting story. ********************* Running Out of Dreams Some say the gods deny men their dreams Lest they fill them all and dream no more. But what of the poets? By the time all has been sung About sunrise and sunset, seedtime and harvest, The sun will be a cinder and the earth will be no more And if there are still poets then They will sing to us of Whatever has taken the place Of the old things that have passed away. -- Thomas G. Digby First Draft 12:21 09/02/2001 ********************* 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 in the copy you received. 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 --