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$1 Says Martians By 2020

AS OUR EYES GET BETTER adjusted to the eternal night sky (read: as we build bigger and more specific telescopes) we are beginning to discover that planets are more common than we thought — and now, life may be as well.

Yesterday’s Wired News carries the story about Gliese 581g, the first exoplanet found within a star’s habitable zone — meaning the orbital zone favorable to liquid water and, at least as we know it, life.

So I’m creating a Martian Pool. $1 says we find exoplanetary life, or compelling evidence favoring the discovery of same, within 10 years. Who’s in?

Life

Neal’s Hero: Arroyo Vet Hospital

Q: WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN you lose your wallet, the roommate’s got the car all day, and the cat has a mysterious slash on his tail which he won’t stop licking and leaves bloody smears on the chaise-longue???

A: What I did was call Arroyo Veterinary Hospital, who told me to sit tight while they sent someone over to pick him up, fix him up and hang on to him until this afternoon. These are the same people who oohed and awwed over our little woojums last time and who put him up during the week we got flooded in February.

That’s ARROYO VETERINARY HOSPITAL, who have no idea they’ve been so lauded. Local heroes: people who do their job well and graciously. Thank you.

Life

Pithyism #1:100

IT IS DIFFICULT TO BE a friend to people and be a friend to their Institution (whether school, religious body, ideology, non-profit or dinner arrangements) when the Institution distracts from its intended focus: people.

Torah

Biblical Note: No Idiots Need Apply

IT HAS COME TO THE attention of Metaphorager.Net that certain hatebrained wink-and-gigglers are selectively quoting vv. 8-9 of Psalm 109 to express their disdain for the President With The Suspicious Middle Name (simply paraphrased, they’re calling for his death). While I’m not one to upset the otherwise noble Lower North American art of president-disdaining, I really hate to see some of my favorite books hijacked by idiots. So it appeals to the Cosmic Jokester in me to discover that Psalm 109’s second and third verses say this (in the Artscroll translation):

2. For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful have opened against me, they have spoken to me the language of falsehood,
3. And with words of hatred they have encircled me, and attacked me without cause.

(“God?” Please. Save us from those who think they know You. The rest of us are tiring of the irony.)

Life

Pithyism #23

ALL GREAT TRUTHS WERE ONCE heresies, but not all heresies become Great Truths.

N.B. I might have inadvertently nicked this from someone else, but ISTR specifically coining it after some New Age sweetness-and-lightster tried to convince Sputnik and I to junk our cars and levitate instead

Life

We’re All Clones (Except Me)

A RECENT FACEBOOK POLL (OF which I generally conduct one daily) revealed that few people have experienced the mindbreaking awe of encountering their own body double.

Let me assure you: No matter how often it happens, it is a very weird feeling, as it undoubtedly was for one such Other Me I spotted across the BART tracks late one night in the Walnut Creek station (we kept looking at each other nervously; he in sports jacket and briefcase, me in long hair and T-shirt). It likewise may be or have been weird for those other Other Mes I’ve seen in newspaper and book photos (mostly Afghanis, Pashtun and Russians, but once of a forced-smiling Jew in a Nazi-overseen road crew).

To date I have yet to converse with myself, although I once got into an argument with a fast-food cashier who swore I was the beverage guy “making fun” of her.

Perhaps an ancient ancestor was emphatically fecund, or otherwise genetically impressive. But I tend to think this communal physiology is more construction than consanguinity (a fine word, but of too-little conversational relevance, meaning “relation” ). My DNA was crafted among the Eastern Europeans on my mom’s side and Russia and Austria on my dad’s; on my dad’s side I’m also a Levite, those touchy servants of the ancestral Temple, and I sometimes wonder if the Other Mes are too.

But my bigger questions concern the fluidity of identity: How much of who “I” am depends on what I look like? Where I came from? And just how unique are we all, anyway? If someone looks like me and acts like me, I might be tempted, a la the mad monk Nasrudin, to tie a balloon to my leg to tell us apart, were it not for my inner sense that I’m the one wondering about him. But what if he thinks he’s me? Well sir, I should hope my friends would know the real me (the one who’s writing this now, or did before you read it) well enough to help me do the same when needed — especially in that waking fuzz when I don’t know who I am, only that it’s time to feed the cat.

As I say, few people have experienced this phenomenon, but those who know, know — as do, of course, those who only look like them. Everyone else will just have to take our word for it.