I actually missed my bus because of the trouble pushing through the people standing within the intersection.

Now, if they had been overcome with grief, I would understand the discourtesy.  But there seemed to be more of a desire to gawk, and perhaps to be able to tell friends afterwards that they saw the procession.

I can’t think Paterno would have approved.

One item of note, though:  several of the news reports I’ve heard on the topic stated that human error is considered the most likely cause of the crash, due to the ship’s possession of multiple high-tech tracking and location finders that should have made it impossible to stray into dangerous waters by accident.

The existence and possession of such technologies is only useful if you bother to consult them – and not, say, turn them off because their warning sirens are getting on your nerves.

There is no such thing as idiot-proofing a technology.  No matter how much of a process we mechanize, as long as people have some input, human error can enter into it.  Not that there aren’t other kinds and sources of error, but humans are especially good at screwing up.

Thus did I receive a complete set of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia one Christmas many years ago.  I had heard of them and wasn’t especially interested in seeking them out, but they were at hand and something new to read.  And they were gifts, after all.  So I dutifully began slogging through them.

Unlike some people, I recognized the Christian subtext fairly early on.  It wasn’t disguised very effectively in the latter parts of the first volume, and it only becomes clearer as the series progresses.  I tolerated it.  The fantastical elements of the books were very derivative, with a lot of material taken from old fairy tales andvarious medieval traditions that I recognized from my reading, but it was stitched together entertainingly enough.

Then I came to the volume entitled The Horse and his Boy.  No spoilers, but there’s a slave boy (with suspiciously fair skin) named Shasta who grew up in a vaguely Moorish country named Calormen and ends up running away to the vaguely England-like land of Narnia, where there are talking animals and dryads and dwarves and so on.  At one point, Shasta has sat down to have breakfast with a group of these dwarves, and they lay out an enthusiastically-described Traditional English Breakfast, with fried sausages and fried tomatoes and eggs and bacon and buttered toast… you get the idea.  The narrator emphasizes that Shasta has only had bread with oil before, and this is presented so dismissively – even contemptuously – that I was immediately brought out of story immersion.

I’ve had good quality bread with good quality olive oil, and it’s delicious.  It was the first form of garlic bread, after all – using butter is a latter variation.  While it’s good with butter, I knew it was also good with ‘mere’ oil.  And so I immediately began to wonder why the narrator was trying to get the audience to see this as a deprivation for Shasta, and started thinking about the story instead of just experiencing it as it went along.

It seemed obvious once I started thinking:  the presented breakfast was something that the intended audience (originally English children) would be familiar and comfortable with, and oiled bread would be something unfamiliar and unknown, and Lewis was trying to link unfamiliarity with a clearly implied judgment of inferiority.  He was trying to get the readers to link their sense of recognition with the judgement that a thing was good, and the absence with a judgment of wrongness.

The moment I saw this, I immediately began thinking of other ways that these ideas had been associated in the book, and then in the previous books.  I started examining the books as presentations of ideas, as propaganda, although that term is so loaded that I hesitate to use it.  I looked at them as persuasive interaction, and what I perceived horrified me.

Take the talking animals in the first book.  They’re presented as speaking various forms of common country English – mildly dialectical, but distinctly so.  Despite the fact that they’re the majority of the population – the entirety of it, in fact – they insist that only human beings may be rulers in that country, and thus the children who stumble into the magical country must overthrow the Witch who has enslaved it and rule as kings and queens, et cetera.  The connection of this idea with Christian doctrine was so obvious that I hadn’t looked any closer at it.  But when I did, I realized that the talking animals weren’t just representing people, but a particular type of person.  Commoners, basically.  And the humans weren’t humans really, they were representing a class of person – hereditary royalty.

Monarchy was one thing, but setting royalty as a category inherent apart from and better than hoi polloi shocked and disturbed me.  The sheer blatantcy of it… it was obvious to me why such ideas arose when kingship was passed down through inheritance, it was hardly new.  But how that idea and the attitude surrounding it was snuck into the story, stealthily associated instead of being presented in the open…well, I didn’t view it kindly.

Further examination of the works of C.S. Lewis lead me to a very distinct opinion of the man and his ideas.  More on that later.

So far, it hasn’t been rigorously tested in human beings, and there are just tons of potential complications, obstacles to overcome, and hurdles to leap… but the potential is staggering.  This is the sort of thing which science fiction has only speculated about.  A few people have said this is like hearing about the initial research into penicillin.  They’re wrong.  This is way, way bigger.  Potentially.

There are some obvious possible drawbacks.  The therapy wouldn’t be all that useful for conditions in which the nervous system itself becomes infected, for example, not beyond perhaps the very earliest stages of infection.  And conditions in which immune cells are infected?  I don’t know that this would be useful for, say, HIV, once the infection is established.  The drug used has to diffuse throughout the body, which is going to require quite a dose, and I’m fairly sure it’s expensive.

But this could change the world substantially, in ways we can barely imagine.

It’s too soon to start breaking out the champagne and Nobel Prizes.  We should put a bottle on to chill, just in case.

Problem is, I can’t figure out why we’d ever need to notify the entire nation of anything.  Emergencies only engage one locality at a time, and any hypothetical ones that affected more than one place would be so terrifying that paying attention to the feds would be the least of our concerns.  It’d not likely be very helpful, anyway.  So what is it actually for?

One theory about why people are so fascinated by conspiracy theories, perceiving hidden agency behind anything and everything, is that it’s comforting — the world at large is chaotic and uncontrolled, and we fear what we cannot anticipate.  Believing that a shadowy conspiracy – which nonetheless has well-defined properties, motivations, methods, and goals – is responsible for things makes us feel more secure than acknowledging that no one is in control.

With that in mind, I sometimes like to play a game in which I declare a given event to be the result of some conspiracy, and then make up stories about ‘who’ and ‘why’.  In this case, ‘who’ is defined – the federal authories – so the only degrees of freedom offered to our fancy consist of ‘why’.

Perhaps a secret terrorist cabal has come up with a true ‘basilisk’ image and is slowly setting the stage to drive most of the nation to madness and death, hmmm?

Do you have any suggestions?  Leave them in the comments.

Now it’s gotten worse.

The sexual abuse scandal involving a former assistant coach, the charity he founded for at-risk children, and the school administrators who didn’t report everything they knew to the police, has spilled over.  And now the local beloved football coach has retired, possibly to avoid being thrown out of his position by the board of directors.  Last I’d heard, the police were not considering him to be involved in the semi-coverup failure to report that resulted in charges being leveled against several of his underlings, but his tenure as coach might have been threatened anyway.

To give you an idea of how significant the locals consider this to be:  last night, somewhere around five hundred students (not hyperbole, that’s an actual estimate) were rioting around the coach’s residence after news of his imminent retirement broke.   Whether they were showing support or condemnation I don’t know, but  they so disrupted traffic patterns that my bus home from work was late and the police had to redirect traffic.  It’s all people are discussing this morning.  I can’t turn on a radio or a television without hearing something about the case.

And I don’t give a tinker’s dam about any of it.

While I’d like to be sympathetic with their complaints, I find their analysis lacking.  There doesn’t seem to be any sense in which they blame the unholy alliance of Big Business and government, just BB.  There’s no criticism of members of the public who bought homes they couldn’t afford.  And much of their protests deal with the standard young-lefty complaints such as the lack of universal health care.

But what actually gets my goat is nonsense like the following (taken from the Miami Herald’s coverage):

“First Amendment rights, First Amendment rights,” one woman shouted as she was handcuffed and led away to nearby police vans.

Don’t these people know what the First Amendment actually guarantees?  For that matter, doesn’t it occur to any of them that monopolizing public spaces, in ways that permanently damage them, while soaking the surroundings in urine, isn’t all that great a way to make people sympathetic to their cause?  (The hygienic concerns surrounding the protests are quite real and increasingly serious, according to my sources.)  Not to mention better at not getting them arrested.  It’s just not that hard to craft a protest that doesn’t unfairly inconvenience people working at the target – those sorts of placard-holding and chanting are tolerated.  It’s not the speech that people are objecting to, it’s the blockading and gross discourtesy of the Occupy movement.

When I compare them to, say, the Civil Rights Movement of the US, I feel sick.

Well, for some time I received warning messages, telling me to remove the weeds from my plot.  Only problem:  there weren’t any.  Well, there were some plants that are often considered weeds, like Oxalis stricta, the yellow-flowered common wood sorrel.  I let it grow in the boundary spaces between different types of plants to retain moisture and prevent soil from washing away in the rain.  So I send some replies explaining what the plants were and why I’d left them.  No responses, but I did get more warnings.

Eventually I got one saying that my plot would be taken away from me.  Why?  I’m not sure, but perhaps the Jerusalem artichokes I was growing at one end were the problem.  They’re not weeds – far from it – but as they don’t bloom into very late in autumn maybe they were being confused with weeds.

I contacted the garden president, and she spoke to the reviewer – who then resigned in what I presume to be disgust.  So… will I still have my plot next year?  We’ll see.

In other news:  our local library misplaced three of the books I returned on a day the library closed early for a staff workshop.  One was later found on the library’s shelves, the other two have never been found, despite two searches by library staff.

So, as I was informed by the people behind the counter, the library will only charge me half the late fee for the found book.  How generous!  I intend to pay them nothing – nothing – but I suspect they’re going to see things differently.

Plus, the frame of my only remaining pair of glasses snapped due to metal fatigue.

So, I’m just having a great old time.

I’m sure it tastes delicious.  It’s bacon, after all.  But it seems like cheating – practically anything would be delicious wrapped in bacon.  Even sticks and mud would taste good that way.  Shouldn’t attempts to get people to cook well involve more than wrapping their offerings in overpoweringly-esculent meat products?

Various real-life factors came together to make it not worthwhile for me to try to keep this blog up for several months, but I’m pleased to announce that they’ve ended.

Now I just need to find something worth saying… and let this blog’s readers know it’s active again. (Both of them. :c) )