Esoteric Meandering Shouting Into the Void

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

The world of politics has turned into an absolute circus of idiots. Trump is getting breaks from the courts for reasons no one with a brain can figure out. The dole wagon never stops running because  someone is always on the net or the phone with their hand out telling you how it is imperative for you to donate, donate and donate.

  Then along comes someone with a story about a satanic cult in the White House. This comes from  a conservative senator and it is guess what he puts in his coffee, bet it isn’t sugar. At any rate the far right has to run up the flag of yet another evil that is putting all conservatives at risk. The rest of us are doing just fine but the bunch that is passing restrictive laws, burning books, closing libraries and attempting to turn back the clock are fearful of an imagined cult in the WH. 

  How did we get to this point where everything is upside down? We have lived for years with the apathy of society and a wish not to get involved. As a result we have had minority rule on many things that the majority would not have allowed to happen if they had taken the time to pay attention and get involved.

  Our government has been run by the minority party for years because they find ways to make it possible to get their people elected and the opposition to be kept out. Once they have the upper hand they fill the supreme court with people that have the same views as themselves. As for things in the world of everyday life it is the squeaking wheel that gets the grease, be it on a college campus or in a workplace situation. 

  Now we are hearing about MAGA Soldiers that will be at polling places to ensure that there are not problems with the voting. More likely they will be there to harass and cause problems with people that they feel are not voting the way the Man wants them to.  Will they be at the voting places in districts that are primarily Republican or Democrat, I’m guessing in the latter and the function to carry out will be to get those voters to leave before they can vote. The fact that they  show up just to intimidate should be enough to get them arrested and possibly to get their candidate removed from the ballot.

  The nation has had enough of the bully boy faction and we need to go back to being civil to one another. All the hate speech and negative attitudes along with the rise in the purchase of weapons and we don’t go a day without someone dying because someone else did not like what was said, or how they were looked at, or some other imagined slight and they reach for the gun and start shooting. 

  The days of the snake oil salesman have not passed, they are no longer working out of the back of a covered wagon. Today they are working from very fine offices located in buildings belonging to all sorts of industries and in government buildings as well. The constant stream of lies that have been fed to the public make it hard to tell the truths from the fictional information and trust becomes a problem. Big Pharm will tell you they have cure for something and yet that cure requires that you continue to buy their pill or salve to make the cure work. Cars are being built that can drive themselves, and yet that has proven to be less than true. Each of us needs to look at every situation, promise or whatever and consider if what we are being told makes sense before we jump into the pond and get eaten by whatever lives in that pond.

“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” in an effort to prove to European naysayers that the world was round, right? Not at all. In fact, Italian explorer Cristoforo Colombo (his real name), his European contemporaries, and basically all educated humans dating back to the ancient Greeks knew the Earth was a sphere. Famous mathematician Pythagoras of Samos (of a2 + b2 = c2 fame) figured out as much around 500 BCE, and 260 years later, another Greek mathematician named Eratosthenes accurately measured the Earth’s circumference. But defying the status quo and risking a deathly plunge into the vacuum of space certainly adds some dramatic tension, which is probably why Washington Irving invented this fictional flourishfor his 1828 biography The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Although he was known for his inventive works of fiction, such as Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Irving’s creative history of Colombo became one of the most persistent myths of the Age of Exploration.

Charles Dickens is known for a good ghost story. Some of his most famous works, including the 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, revolve almost entirely around the supernatural. The English author’s interest in spirits even extended beyond the written word: He was an original member of the Ghost Club in London, an exclusive group interested in dissecting all things otherworldly.

The Ghost Club claims to be the oldest society of its kind. It was formally founded in 1862, although its history dates back to informal gatherings of Cambridge University academics in the mid-1850s. Along with Dickens, the group has counted such literary luminaries as W.B. Yeats, Siegfried Sassoon, and Arthur Conan Doyle among its members. Spiritualism was a hot topic in Victorian-era England, and the curiosity and discussion around it was widespread: Physicists, philosophers, biologists, and more were found among the early Ghost Club members. The club kept minimal records, and little is known about specific investigations at the time of Dickens’ membership, but research suggests that ghostly encounters, clairvoyance, and exposing frauds working as mediums were all on the table.

Dickens, for all his obvious spiritual inclinations — including dabbling in hypnosis — was also healthily skeptical. “All such narratives must be received with the greatest circumspection, and sifted with the utmost care,” he wrote in an 1853 article about haunted houses. “Nothing in them must be taken for granted, and every detail proved by direct and clear evidence, before it can be received.” Dickens died in 1870 and the Ghost Club later disbanded, although not for long. It was revived in 1882, and despite fluctuations in activity, the club endured, and remains an active organization today.

Personally I do the same things I have always done, wash my hand, cover my mouth when I cough or sneeze. I worked in health care for years so having the courtesy to wear a mask when I am not feeling well was and is not an issue. All the pandemic did was alert me to the number of people who are not safe and really don’t care about the health and safety of others.

Dinosaurs probably didn’t roar.

If asked what a dinosaur sounded like, many people would likely recall the roaring T. rex of Jurassic Park. However, that earth-shaking bellow seems to be a case of Hollywood exercising some creative liberty. While we don’t know what these reptiles really sounded like, since they mostly died out some 66 million years ago, scientists at least have some reasonable ideas based on the anatomical structures of well-preserved fossils, combined with studies of the dinosaurs and their close relatives that exist today.

Yes, dinosaurs do still exist, in the form of birds, which branched off from non-avian dinosaurs around 160 million years ago. Although birds mainly produce noises via a soft-tissue organ called the syrinx, which has yet to be uncovered from a non-avian dinosaur fossil, many of our feathered friends also engage in closed-mouth vocalization, in which sounds are pushed out from a pouch in the neck area. Another modern animal that utilizes closed-mouth vocalization is the crocodile, which just so happens to share a common ancestor with dinosaurs. Given the family ties, it’s logical to conclude that some dinosaurs emitted something resembling the cooing of a dove, the booming of an ostrich, or the rumbling of a croc. Since larger animals with longer vocal cords produce lower frequency sounds, it’s also likely that enormous sauropods like Brachiosaurus delivered noises that, to our ears, would dip into an octave of infrasound — felt and not heard. On the other hand, the ear structures of the dinosaur-crocodile predecessor indicate a sensitivity to high-pitched noises, possibly the chirping of babies.

The field continues to evolve as new information comes to light; the recent discovery of the first known fossilized dinosaur larynx, from an ankylosaur, suggests these creatures were able to modify noises in a bird-like way despite the lack of a syrinx. And none of this even touches on the sound capabilities of hadrosaurs like Parasaurolophus, which almost certainly delivered a distinct call from the air passages that funneled through a conspicuous head crest. All in all, while a roar from a Jurassic-bred beast may have been the work of a Hollywood studio, there’s no movie magic needed to recognize that Earth’s prehistoric hills were alive with all sorts of reptilian sounds of music.

Ring around the rosie
A pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes
We all fall down

You may have heard the popular Black Plagueorigin story for this rhyme, with the titular “ring” representing the red rings that would appear on the skin of people with the disease. However, there are other variations of the rhyme, such as 1883’s “Ring a ring a rosie/A bottle full of posie/All the girls in our town/Ring for little Josie,” that present different theories.

When he analyzed this version, folklorist Philip Hiscock offered a less deadly translation. Religious bans on dancing in Britain and North America in the 19th century led to “play parties,” with ring games that were similar to square dancing but without music, so the events quietly flew under the radar.

“The rings referred to in the rhymes are literally the rings formed by the playing children,” explains Hiscock. “‘Ashes, ashes’ probably comes from something like ‘Husha, husha,’ another common variant which refers to stopping the ring and falling silent. And the falling down refers to the jumble of bodies in that ring when they let go of each other and throw themselves into the circle.”