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Hipness

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There are two keys to hipness, inextricably woven together: image and timing.  Image has a lot to do with the proper air of disdain, not so much that you just look sour, but not so little that it’s invisible.  This is often accomplished linguistically, and that’s where timing comes in.

There are seven stages to the rise and decline of a hip word or turn of phrase:

  1. Someone comes up with a clever neologism.
  2. Her immediate cohort, seeing this, starts using it among themselves.
  3. Eventually, they use it in social media, and it catches on.
  4. It appears in Urban Dictionary.
  5. There are articles in Time or some similar rag on its proper use.
  6. Suddenly, it’s everywhere.
  7. Suddenly, it’s nowhere.

Consider the word ‘mansplain.’  If you used it during the first three phases, you were hip; if it was during the first two you were very hip, but only retroactively.  In phases 4 and 5, you were probably an older person ‘in tune’ with the younger generation.  After that, you’re dead to the younger generation, and in phase 7, you’re either completely out of it, or just being a smart ass.

Unless you use it in a blog, in an eye-rolling sort of way.  Then you’re extremely cool.  You might call that ‘blog-rolling.’

Feel free to use use that.

Saving daylight

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Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a conspiracy nut, but there’s something fishy in this DST business. We do it, presumably, in order to save an hour of daylight during, well, most of the year, it turns out.

So how did it all begin? Not really with old Ben Franklin, as some people will tell you. Some people will tell you he invented the weekend, or the iPhone, too, but you don’t believe that, do you?

In the US, it started with the Standard Time Act of 1918, which established the time zones across the country, and threw in DST as a kind of bonus (Act now, and get Daylight Savings! Limited time only!). It was the standard summer DST, although why we call it that, since it lasted seven months, is beyond me. At any rate, it was wildly unpopular, and was repealed a year later. Congress used to have good sense, once upon a time.

We thought we were done with it, then. But no. Roosevelt snuck it back in in 1942, called it War Time, and made it last all year, to boot.

Actually, year round sounds fine, kind of like an invisible dog fence, doing its job, unnoticed but eternally vigilant. Whatever its job is, anyway. Something to do with petroleum, apparently. Most evil things are linked to petroleum one way or another.

After the war, it was dropped, and summer DST was optional until the Uniform Time Act of 1966, when congress got fed up with never being able to figure out what time it was where they were going for a big rally, and made it apply to the whole country. States could opt out if the whole state did it. Indiana, where I mostly grew up, would have no part of it, for instance, although wicked conservatives recently forced it on the citizenry there. GW tacked on another five weeks in 2007, and here we are.

I tell you all this history, gleaned from painstaking research (a couple of minutes on Wikipedia), so that you’ll believe me when I tell you that when you add up all the hours saved since 1918, not even counting the 20 years after WWII when it was optional, it comes to 13,170. That’s roughly 550 days, or 78 weeks, which comes to 19 months.

That’s right, just over a year and a half of constant daylight, 24/7, night and day!

So, where did all that daylight go? Is it in some kind of federal light bank somewhere?

Why can’t we draw it out, a couple of hours at a time in the middle of winter, when we need it?

From the OPI

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Office of Perpetual Investigation
Popular Music Division

Memorandum: Purple Berries?

Here are the facts as we know them:

An unspecified number of people are leaving, because they are not needed. They are leaving by sea, on ships made of wood (very free, apparently). We don’t know how many ships, but at least two, as the plural is specified, we don‘t know the size of the ships or the crew, although both seem small, and we don’t know of a destination, although aimless roaming is strongly suggested.

We also know that at least one person has subsisted on purple berries for 6 or 7 weeks, or the better part of 2 months, and we know that a second person has requested some of the same berries, and that the request has been granted. Some questions immediately arise:

1. Where were the ships procured, and how? Were they bought, built, or stolen?
2. Where were the purple berried procured?
3. What kind of berries, purple or otherwise, were nutritious enough to sustain someone for that long, especially without “getting sick once?”
4. How were enough of them to eat for the better part of 2 months stored on what certainly appear to be small vessels?
5. How were they stored in such a way as to keep them from spoiling for such a long time?
6. What was everyone else eating, since it appears to be the first request for the berries to be shared since the departure of the ships?

Unless and until these mysteries are cleared up, I’m afraid there will be serious doubt as to the veracity of the account.

Courage, America, s’il vous plait

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At this writing, the governors of 24 states, all but one of them Republican, have announced they will block the settlement of refugees in their states. It seems clear they don’t have the authority to do that under the constitution they are always on about revering, but it makes for political fodder in a year leading up to a major election. Conservatives contrast themselves from liberals by claiming they respect loyalty and duty above all. Such generalizations mean nothing if you can change the particulars any time a risk is involved.

I don’t generally bandy about words like courage and cowardice; God knows I’ve fallen short too many times in the past. But the bar for the settlement of refugees seems low enough even for someone like me. Yes, there is some risk involved, but relatively little. Only one of the attackers in Paris was identified as a possible refugee, the rest were either French or Belgian citizens. Even that one case is far from clear. The fact that the Syrian passport survived the suicide bomber’s destruction suggests it was meant to be found. French police are looking at the validity of the passport as a result.

In spite of your favorite movie or video game, courage is not a matter of acting without fear; it is acting in spite of fear, because a greater good will result. Surely we Americans, so proud of our toughness, can accept the small risk involved with the settlement of refugees from the very people we are so afraid of.

Actually, it would be comforting, in a weird way, to think all of these governors were simply cowards, but I think their real motivation lies in the realm of politics. The Republican party’s lifeblood is fear. They miss no opportunity to exploit it to their advantage, and this latest move falls right into place alongside their rhetoric about Mexican immigrants. This, to me, is far more despicable than mere cowardice, over which one may have little control.

I’ll keep this short. Do you remember all those veterans you were falling all over yourselves to thank last week? Well, this is your opportunity to step up and accept a small amount of risk, and show what you’re made of. That will make all that gratitude so much more meaningful; it won’t look so much like you were just glad to be off the hook for courage.

The Vegan occupation

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Something has been happening under our very noses: colonists from the Vegan star system some 25 light years away have been slowly infiltrating our planet.  They kept a low profile at first, but now they openly self-identify.  There are more and more of them; they even have their own restaurants, and even establishments specializing in normal human food now offer Vegan dishes.  The great mystery is how they have managed such a successful migration from such a great distance.

One possibility is that they began their journey thousands of years ago, and are only now arriving, but I don’t favor that.  Vega is a massive star which is only about a tenth as old as the sun.  They’re not that smart.  Besides, immigrants generally are assimilated by the second or third generation, and these have held on to their ethnic cuisine much longer than that.

The only answer is quantum entanglement.  Which means that somewhere on their home planet orbiting Vega, there is a box in which is an identical group of people, living in identical houses, and eating the same gluten-free unfried falafel wraps, drinking the same double venti no-whip soy lattes. 

You can figure out for yourself the implications of that.  For their environment at home to be identical to the one here on Earth, there must be identical humans there.  Which means they have cloned us.  Or are we the clones?  How would we know?

Why, you may ask, would they do this?  Because Vega will last only a tenth as long as the sun, that’s why.  Vegans are apparently quite prudent, and are slowly replacing us with themselves, so as not to be left without a home.

I am posting this on my blog, because I don’t believe they know I’m on to them yet.  But just in case I’m too late, they’ll find they’re not the only prudent ones.  I have appended a copy of this post to the end of the iTunes EULA agreement.

They’ll never find it there.