Time Share

While computing quantum computer computations, the Committee today announced a joint agreement between major professional sports organisations and carpark services.

From now on, tickets to a sporting event are leased an on hourly basis only.

For instance, those attending American football events such as an NFL game may lease an assigned seat for up to two nonconsecutive quarter periods, but not the first and fourth, first and third, or first and first (figure out the last conundrum on parchment paper, preferably highly-combustible flash paper near a blast furnace).

In a motorsports event such as a Sprint Cup NASCAR race, tickets will be issued on either a per wreck or per time-period basis, as well as both.  One may use a seat for up to three wrecks in any fifteen-minute period, or three laps, whichever comes first.  No refunds for snoozefests.

Carparks may remove vehicles occupying a carpark space greater than 50% of the time length of a sporting event, towing vehicles to impound lots on the other side of the ocean via moldy cargo carriers, stowed behind impenetrable chainlink fences and guarded by dogs impervious to taser attacks.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has announced that, contrary to popular belief, Miss Baker‘s cryogenically-preserved body had not been fused with the DNA of Merkozy to create the lab specimen Francois Hollande allegedly planned for a secret launch to the ISS for the first orbital celebration of a French citizen taking office without getting elected or giving rivals the guillotine while smoking nicotine and drinking Ovaltine outside the Oval Office.

On a personal note, thanks to the cast of billions supporting my father’s health change adventure.  May the moral of this story (or the storal of this mory) be a tale worth regaling with humorous (or “humour us!”) afterthought, aftertaste and a sweet aroma of eau du backwash.

More as permits time (or Kermit mimes).

A reader asks…

A reader asked, when calculating departure and arrival times between two undisclosed locations in Iran and India, why are the time zones only a half-hour apart?

Good question.

Here are some answers for your reading enjoyment (truth/fact verification is up to the reader):

  1. Only the Swiss can make perfect timekeepers so the rest of the world’s clocks have drifted with time.
  2. The Iranian nuclear research programme has been going on longer than we thought and messed up many atomic clocks in the Middle East.  Same for India and its clock-based relationship to Pakistan, Nepal and the rest of the world.
  3. The Einsteinian gravitational wave spacetime field bending theory never really caught on in certain parts of the globe and thus seems to have a weaker effect there.
  4. There are many nations that opt to follow a different time zone than is common elsewhere. Some locations opt to observe times that are less than a full hour off of neighbouring time zones — Nepal for example is a quarter hour off India, which is a half hour off the normal pattern. Nepal does not recognise summer time and never alters the clock during the year. The abnormal time zone settings are not limited to Asia — the State of South Australia, for example, opts to use a half-hour time zone rather than a full hour. [Read more: Why is India, Nepal, Iran, and Kabul thirty minutes off of the rest of the world’s time? Ex. It’s 7:18 pm in Houston Texas, 1:18 am tomorrow in London, 7:18 am tomorrow in Bangkok, 10:18 am tomorrow in Sydney, and 4:48 am in Kabul. 4:48. Why 30 min diff? | Answerbag http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/909906#ixzz1oTCYg64d]
  5. The Chavez Rule: It’s my country and I’ll do what I want to distinguish my people’s proper sense of time from yours.
  6. Forget about me.  Ask you average basement geographer.
If that doesn’t answer your question, nothing will because, quite honestly, time is irrelevant in this day and age of GPS where we can precisely tell you what time it should be in relation to your geographical location and the position of Sun/Moon/stars.  Hey, you astrologers, step away from this blog entry very slowly, hands in the air — you’re not needed here to answer this question.

[Copy to be inserted into e-brochure]

Welcome to the wonderful world of space travel.  The package you have selected includes the following itinerary:

Days 1-7: Orientation — physical fitness examination, G-force simulation routines, safety procedures

Days 8-9: Travel to first destination — launch from spaceport, short G-force experience followed by two days of weightlessness, sightseeing from viewing ports, preparation for docking

Day 10: International Space Station excursion — shuttles will take those who paid for this 8-hour tour of the ISS, starting with a quick Q&A session between you and the ISS crew members (subject to crew member availability; specific crew members requests cannot be made at this time), introduction to the features of at least two modules and more as time permits

Days 11-12: Travel to Bigelow Space Hotel — in-flight entertainment includes an acrobat show, singalongs and 3D roulette wheel gambling, not to forget the 24-hour freeze-dried food buffet!

Days 13-19: Your ultimate destination for luxury space accommodations, BIGELOW SPACE HOTEL!!!  During your stay, your personal assistant — programmed to look like the person of your choice, including a wide range of celebrities or a “friend” from your past — will provide anything and everything you want to make your stay the guaranteed most wonderful experience of this or any of your previous/next regenerated lifetimes!

Days 20-21: Return to Earth.

Days 22-24: Gently reintroducing you to the drudgeries of your daily life, including Earth’s painful gravitational pull, global warming and overcrowding, just enough incentive to get you to book your next trip with us very, very soon!  We guarantee it because we have your personality profile on immediate e-memory recall!

Economic Data, a what-if scenario

While I turn my front yard into an art exhibit using live plants and animals, as well as found objects, I’ve got a question in my thoughts that begs for a simple answer, although I’ve yet to find one:

What is the relationship between the most common products/services and their cost and how is that reflected in the characteristics of subcultural living habits (which are indirectly related to cost of living and standard of living)?

Everyone drinks water but we don’t all pay for water by volume.

Not every subculture uses toilet paper for bodily waste elimination cleanup, but for those that do, is there a cost/volume relationship in this basic commodity?

In our breakdown of people by their economic wealth, what is the tradeoff in terms of the perception of quality?

Most importantly, for all the questions above, why?

Is there a nature/nurture aspect to any of these questions?

As the sets of states of energy reproduce themselves offworld, how do we maintain a certain level of cost/benefit analysis in every set’s thoughts/actions, such that waste/inefficiency is minimised or completely eliminated in situations where excess production cannot be avoided temporarily?

Bottom line: how will supply-and-demand mentality play into the success rate of an offworld colony’s growth?

Will scarcity automatically lead to a higher social cost?

Three types of storytelling: show, tell, ask the audience…

International Women’s Day

Most days, my agenda is filled with evaluating rocket fin designs or applying “think outside the fuselage” reasoning to assess the most cost-effective means of advancing our planetary lifeforms outward into the galaxy.

I pay advisors to tell me where to put my investments to give our group the most play money for building outer space travel toys.

In a few days, I’ll spend a few minutes with half my staff to evaluate any discrepancies we have concerning gender-neutral compensation.

We have a wide variety of people involved in running the organisation smoothly, from the least socially aware to the most brash, politically incorrect loudmouths.

Hey, when you manage seven billion people, the variations are nearly endless.

But not nearly enough.

Every other year, I ask one gender and then the other to review our employee policies and practices.

Because our subcultures are sometimes incompatible, I ask the people whose beliefs are separated the most from one another to meet and talk.

During these meetings, our supercomputers are listening, increasing the resolution of their intuition algorithms substantially.

Then, a panel composed of people and supercomputers is asked to evaluate the meet-and-greet session, resulting in a summary report that is sent out to all subcultures in formats they believe represent a view from their specific subcultural perspective.

I assign one of the Committee’s subcommittee ad hoc teams to rate the effectiveness of the absorption of every report into individual subcultures.

The reports with the lowest effectiveness score are sent to a new meet-and-greet team for discussion, which is, again, overheard by our supercomputers for error detection algorithm correction and fed into intuition algorithm automatic reprogramming routines.

In this week’s yearly event called International Women’s Day, we’ll ask the female gender to pull two “opposite” subcultures together for one of the meetings — female leaders of the porn industry, such as Lux Alptraum, and female adherents of celibate life, such as members of the Focolare Movement.

Because no two people are exactly alike, we prepare the participants, asking them to listen with respect, disagree passionately, do not compromise simply to avoid conflict, and find common ground that excludes the fact we are of the same species.

We expect members of the same subculture to share discordant opinions amongst themselves, let alone with people outside the subculture.

The Committee wants progress, even if movement in one direction appears to go backwards.

After all, the larger goal of culling the species for nearly ideal representatives to colonise and breed on nonEarth premises requires both conventional and nonconventional processes.

We need people who…sorry, sets of states of energy that can adapt and survive in the harshest conditions possible for what we’ll call living beings at this moment.

After a while, offworld colonists will no longer work to complete tasks assigned from Earth.

In the changes of the colonists’ agenda from external goals to local goals as the years pass, including reactions to adverse ambient environmental changes, the Committee wants to ensure our representatives will thrive.

As the current reluctant leader, my goal is to ensure the representatives can hold individual viewpoints that will adapt and grow together, even if the people pull apart, philosophically speaking, as all current models predict is inevitable.

The Committee advocates no specific subcultural belief.

We only believe in the capacity of our species to advance life out of the solar system while we have the means and window of opportunity to do so, holding to the basic philosophy of “leave the planet in better condition than when we got it” that each successive generation is taught.

We avoid words like mission or vision because we aren’t corporate entities that have to justify our existence although most of us depend on corporate entities interacting with each other to expand our budgetary constraints.

We make mistakes.  People will and must die to accomplish some of our major goals, and many will die accidentally.

All seven billion of us will die eventually but we empathise with those who feel individual losses, anyway.

However, at a global scale, we barely sympathise, partially composed, as we’ve told you, of supercomputers that are just learning to develop intuition algorithms and getting closer to acting like us on general subcultural levels that tend to gloss over the death of individuals, except those designated to represent the best or worst of us (e.g., ruthless dictators, popular entertainers, babies who died tragically, etc.), which the supercomputers simply assign as data points that may or may not designate significant changes to the subculture and are used as triggers for recording the conditions of the subcultural data sets for later comparison.

We hope you look forward to subcultural interaction reports containing gender-based information coming to a comfortable subcultural outlet near you, if you can recognise when we send them out and what they are.

Re-versed Psychology

A black fly taunts me, buzzing in close, just long enough for me to take a mis-aimed swipe, and then flaps its little numb-brained membraned wings up into the hard-to-reach edge of the intersection of the two trapezoidal picture frame windows of our cathedral-ceilinged living room.

Translate that sentence into the language of the colonists in the depths of the ice lakes of Space Base 45Zed9Alpha.

They haven’t seen flies there in over 20,000,000 generations, or about two years to the rest of you reading this on Earth.

My parents and their clones singing for supper -- whoohoo!

You see, we populated this solar system so far back in time with energised molecules that you’ve come to believe either you evolved from dust clouds in the formation of the solar system or some Being-related faith-based system created you.

You just don’t get it, and through consultation with the “professional” couch-talk, tablet PC scribbling, overeducated psychological psychiatrists — supposedly fellow members of your species — I’ve come to the conclusion that you never will.

Look at it this way — you’re a beehive, God is dead, the European Space Agency is just as clueless about the EU as the rest of us, Wolfgang is a name (not a gang sign (or is it?)), and if I could just see one tree leaf blow across the Martian plains, I’d go for a walk looking for another, instead of sitting in this space habitat waiting for my parents to assign me a job to do in this kid-free exploratory zone.

Send a male and female to Mars without birth control technology and I am the result!

So much for your modern science.

Now where is that nuclear fusion experiment I invented last night and was playing with this morning…?

Time to obviously send messages in open secrets under broad daylight to members of my gang to cause another prominent person getting in the way of our agenda to die of a “natural” heart attack.

If only you fools knew who we were.  Hahahahahaha….

If only I knew how to tell you…sigh…

What I wouldn’t give to hear a single severe thunderstorm warning on this planet!

Fashion Forward

Our friends in the Mob like to fund motorsports events, equating the smoke-belching monster races to gladiator events of old.

They passed on the word this afternoon that they approve the following fashion statement and will hire the designers to handsew space uniforms with child labour to show the real company mergers the Mob has planned to keep the general population buying goods at rock-bottom, low-quality prices.

Fortunate Drawers

Sitting here in a café in a small Turkmenistan town, watching caravan after caravan go by (what you Americans might call tractor-trailer rigs), smelling jet fuel and gunpowder, I figure this is part of the forward base action I was expected to report to my superiours in a conference call later this afternoon.

At first, I complained about this satellite phone, looking like a geek at a debutante party, or rather the rich geek father depositing his little princess at her coming-out party (and yes, you can take that for all it’s worth, these days).

But looking at those guys across the street cradling their smartphones covered with acronyms trying to get a good signal, I say being the sore thumb at an M.C. Hammer hardware store is a good thing, for once.

Besides, I’ve got a friend who carries her lucky knickers just for me.

And I’ve got another friend, El Presidente, who thinks about nothing but al Qaeda and schooling in Sunday afternoon football smackdowns to keep my thoughts warm at night, too.

I wasn’t always like this, sipping stale coffee, spreading badly-worded rumours from underpaid government copywriters, but then maybe I was…we just called it primary school back then.

That’s okay.  It beats sitting at home, not making any money there, either, watching the television news or surfing the Internet for useless tidbits like every other secret organisation in the “business.”

Where was I?  Oh yeah, spiking my coffee with homemade hooch.

You see, in the hinterlands of the former Soviet Union, radioactive material is as easy to get as rabies from the raccoons I used to…well, let’s not go into boring details at this juncture in the punctuated story.

But hey, when a guy gets lonely…never mind.

Anyway, I was sitting on a crate of rotten eggs, unable to distinguish the smell of my ripe, unwashed body from that of chickens that’ll never live to see the light of day reflecting off a machete swinging toward their heads, when it hit me.

The kid down the street, always pestering me to call a tobacco shoppe down the street from his cousin in London and asking if they have Princess Edward in a can, looked at this blog I was texting with my calloused thumbs (calloused, mind you, from texting — what else did you think caused the callousness?  I mean, calloused hands.).

He asked if I had a more interesting writing style, after he’d thrown the uranium/plutonium ball at my noggin.

Hey, that reminds me.  Maybe I’ve got a gold mine at my feet.  Either that, or the pyrite the panhandler pretended to think was gold and sold it only to me, his best friend in the whole wide world, if not the block in which we both live, at a bargain basement we were using to brew the hooch I give out to unsuspecting tourists before I remove their overweight wallets.

Seriously, what have I got that you don’t?

All this nuclear fissable material.  No, that’s the Coke gurgling in my stomach that’s fissable.

It’s the fissionable stuff I’m dreaming about right now.

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Yeah, you know it.  Re-activating Project Orion.

We’ll just declare Turkmenistan off-limits and use it to launch the Mars mission my fellow members of the Committee are dreaming with me.

We’ll rename the country ChernobylTwo or something like that.

We can put this whole “war” to contain nuclear proliferation to a rest and just keep starving the Iranian people to death while their leaders bask in the personal glory of the sacrifice of their people to show them old episodes of “Who’s The Boss?

Can you think of worse torture than that?

Rumour has it the last thing that Andrew World’s-worst-job-as-overpaid-angry-man Breitbart saw before his heart acted up was Alyssa Milano pretending to act.

Let that be a lesson to you, kids.  Don’t get your hopes up.  And further more, don’t listen to a word your clueless parents have to say.  They were terrible students in school and the only reason they’re doing well is that their bosses were even worse so the whole adult scheme is to pretend that everyone is smarter than they really are.

Of course, you kids have no clue what I’m talking about because, as we’re supposed to know, genetic research proves that our species has actually gotten worse, our purity as animals watered down with talks about backyard BBQ parties, easy-to-hack security alarm systems and other ways we deny we’re overdressed members of the fight-or-flight club.

Almost time for the conference call.

Go back to looking at your cute kitten videos and sports scores.

I’ve got a nuclear bomb powered rocketship to promote!

A magnified view

Can you believe this is a magnified view of a subterranean (actually, submartiansurface? [ 😉 ]) ecosystem captured in a photograph by a secret Mars exploratory mission sent by the Committee several years ago and just now returning to Earth with valuable data for us to get started on negotiating mining operations that’ll destroy life on Mars we never got to know personally?:

Just wait until we try to sell you underground warm mineral springs timeshares on the red planet!

And if you can’t/won’t visit our celestial sister, we’ll rent our virtual Martian surrogates to give you the experience of living there in hourly/daily/weekly slots, able to print 3D surrogate versions of you in no time flat!

Give us a call!  Availability is limited!  The first 50 callers get a special bonus just by mentioning this advert!

Usted es un colombiano experto en SEO, ¿no? Por lo tanto, hermanos, os encomiendo.

Here lies an outlier

As we get to know more and more about each other, we will grow more comfortable accepting each other’s subcultural differences, appreciating how the definition of success can vary so widely that it almost seems impossible seven billion varieties point to the same thing: our species’ survival and growth.

Yes, it includes fear, crime, ecosystem disasters, economic failures and myriad ways in which the universe we live does not always point toward our survival and growth.

Dust particles — small fibers, short hair, unidentifiable tiny, twisted objects — seemingly oblivious to gravity, float through a beam of sunshine propped up between the writing desk and the dirty window.

A few days ago, I visited with some friends whose father recently died.  My friends and I had spent a few years together in primary and secondary school over 30 years ago.  One friend I hadn’t seen in at least 35 years.

Needless to say, we knew little about one another except what we have seen in the past couple of years while sharing space on a computer server farm spread across data centers around the world dedicated to an online social media website called facebook.

In other words, we had little to say to each other in person that we didn’t already know, or should have remembered seeing in our online personality profile.

The moment was there for comfort at the time of loss of the family patriarch.

Soothing words.

Fond memories of our youth spent under the guidance of a chemical research/sales engineer and literal/figurative father figure.

I cough, sending dust particles on a swirling dance out of and back into the sunlight, which then disappears with clouds passing overhead, reappearing a few minutes later at a new angle, attached to the bright, yellow glob amidst the blue-painted dome high above.

An airplane swoops and circles the patch of sky nearby, making the sounds of the television playing a movie called “The Longest Day” seem live and in real 3D viewing/listening closeness.

After visiting with the friends, my wife and I returned to her mother’s house, continued our sorting through physical reminders of my wife’s mother, father and brother, all deceased.

My wife’s nuclear family is no more, except in her memories.

Her brother’s widow and children still live.  She has cousins spread around the globe.  And her family by marriage — my blood relatives, including nuclear family (father, mother, sister), as well as extended family (nieces, nephew, cousins, aunt, uncle, etc.).

My friends’ father lived for 84 365-day, 24-hour cycles around our local star.

As the planet spun, my friends’ family influenced those they met, all of them tied to Earth by gravity, the curvature of spacetime, we surmise.

We can see the familial influence through the eyes of the intersection of sets of states of energy, adding meme upon meme, including the word “meme,” to build physical representations of ideas like “idea,” to arrive at the point where schoolmates meet 30+ years later to reminisce about a few years spent in growing up together toward adulthood.

Did any of the dust particles floating in the air at the church where, due to one death, we met to talk about good times in childhood attach themselves to me and then re-enter the airspace in the sunbeam not far from this computer?

What about the particles I can’t readily see, such as water molecules, bacteria, dead skin cells or other microscopically miniscule minutiae?

We are connected in ways we rarely take time to notice, if we can see the connections at all.

How do I explain a blog post composed only of pictures to a blind person who uses a Braille keyboard and automatic audible reader?

How do I explain wireless radio pathways between a notebook computer and wireless router to people who can’t feel or don’t communicate signals at a wavelength of 0.125 m or about 5 inches?

Although… you know, some people say they can feel 2.4 GHz radio waves and other phenomena they claim causes them radiowave/EMF sickness.

But let’s get back to the global story of our lives, where financial gurus want to prop up a system that is no longer a viable connection between the macro and microeconomic levels…