h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Reflections made over an Aunt Jemima egg, sausage and cheese microwave croissant sandwich, with a handful of tater tots, a handful of mixed green and black olives, a cup of grape juice and a couple o' coffee....

Top ten ways to know if an egg has gone bad:

I'm reminded of Easter, 1960. We had the Easter egg hunt on Sunday of course, but the following Thursday a strong hydrogen sulphide odor was noted coming from the garden. After a careful search, an Easter egg (it was quite a pretty Easter egg, blue on the ends with a white band in the middle and red speckles) that had been overlooked the preceding Sunday was discovered hidden in a clump of irises.

Next, of course, the question arises as to why the egg was making a bad odor:

1. Because it hadn't been found during the Easter egg hunt.

2. Because it didn't want to be eaten.

Myself, I think that the answer is obvious and unescapable, at least if one's perceptions are rooted in objective reality. I know better, though than to dispute the point with people taking an opposing viewpoint.

As Goethe remarked: "Good poetry is truthful."

"...and so is good humor..." (Myself.)

In Search of Lost Minds:

As Nikita Krushchev remarked: "If Josef Stalin wanted you to get up on the table and dance, you'd do it."

Esmeralda:

...and then she retired to Indian Wells, California, where she maintains a luxury hotel, hosting people like the Thatchers, Margaret Stewart, etc., which one of the leading Socialists in the Valley has described as reminding him of a prison.

...strange creatures...

I'm reminded of the Heavy Metal cartoon classic "Vinaks".

Philospophy on 'Sping Vinaks': They may be delectable little morsels gathered from their wild habitat... hiding under toadstools and suchlike, but if they follow one indoors, they're just one more household pest.

Reflection on the "Meaningless Random Smiley Cluster":

Reminds me of the of the collection of icons in the taskbar in the upper right hand corner of my pc screen.

Thanks for the comments.

People who search for meaning in my personal space may end up agreeing with Schopenhauer. Richard Wagner is said to have read Schopenhauer and concluded that life is meaningless. This was reflected in his subsequent Ring Cycle. I personally think that that philosophy could be extended to the Rinse cycle at my local laundromat. <tongueout)

And now for the song and dance portion of our show. Today we're featuring some lines from "Zip," a song by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart from their "Pal Joey," 1940?

"Zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last.
"Zip! And I think that Schopenhauer was right"

("Zip" is sung by a striptease artist who claims that all of her moves are done for solid intellectual reasons . Woody Allen wrote a short story about an intellectual stripper a few decades later. )

Sorry, I inadvertently left out a word in the song.
TRhe line should read

"Zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night."

On the search for "meaning", I'll take that one on two major axes:

1.) Emotive.

2.) Mental.

On the first, One finds meaning in social interaction.

On the second, I'm in the Mad Hatter school, taking it from the Mad Hatter's commentary on the 'word' from "Alice in Wonderland". "Its a question of who's to be master, that's all!"

...Korzybskian semantics is a small and warm-blooded, furry, clawing, scratching, biting, writhing thing...
> - Don't get me wrong. Korzybski made some important contributions to correspondence theory, on the principle that one needs a 'one to one' correspondence of sign or symbol with actual subjects or objects for communication to effectively convey information.

...very evocative. I think I remember that striptease routine (and a considerable number of variations on it) or at least one like it.

I didn't even notice the omission... the first time I read it.

Scratching my head over points that might be mistaken for typos:

"Esmeralda": 'Socialist' rather than 'socialite'. I meant an actual Socialist.

'Sping Vinaks' rather than "spring vinaks". I meant it that way in order to convey a tactile synesthesia.

I do make occasional real typos.

I'd rather have you give real typos than synthetic ones....

The search for meaning takes years, even decades. Maybe more than one lifetime. If Plato could have seen a few thousand years into the future, would he have had such naive notions in his "Republic" as the one about the wise elders choosing spouses for the young people? I think not!

That period of the late 6th and early 5th centuries BC was a watershed era in world history. Was Plato's political outlook really all that different from that of Confucius (Kung Fu Tze)? Both were men of their times intent on bringing order and a government of laws out of the capricious chaos engendered by the tyrants and warlords of their times, groping on a basis of the still rather scanty models they had available.

The period also marked the advent of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism (which is an an important contributing influence on the subsequent development of Chrisianity). (There was an earlier period like this in the 9th century BC marked by the first codification of the Torah and the introduction of the I Ching by King Wen.)

Other important innovations of the period, the invention of banking and the introduction of the first modern coinage. (The golden "archers" of the Persian empire.)

Gaius Julius Caesar's father worked for the mint. What did the ancients do before coins were invented? And what will we do as pennies become worth less and less?

Revalue the currency, perhaps? Long overdue. Usually when measures like that are brought to bear its in the direction of a lower value for the basic money unit in order to correct trade imbalances. With a careful regulation of the exchange rate though, there's no reason revaluation cannot be done in the opposite direction in order to maintain a constant value for the currency over time. The accounting process required would have been impossible before the age of the computer. Its feasible now.

King Stephen won by means of seizing the mint. That didn't work for Lady Jane Grey.

Seizing the mint?
That reminds me of the Altoids ad:
"God save the Queen. We'll take care of her breath."

There I go doing that again. Typos. I believe the official wording of the order was: "Take seizin of the mint."

So that was how Julius Caesar got up the ransom.

At the moment, I'm reading "Antony and Cleopatra," Colleen McCullough's latest book in her series about Julius Caesar and his family. The whole series blows my mind; it shows a world so different from the post-Christian one that we know now. When the Roman mindset merged with the Christian one after Constantine, Rome lost its lightness of being in favor of deadly Christian earnestness, and Christianity lost its desire to encourage a true search for deep meaning (for such a search might contradict Christian dogma).