The Invention of Smiling

Yesterday my wife asked me a question that I had been wondering about myself for quite some time: Why didn't people smile in old pictures?  Since I've never liked to be stumped by one of my wife's random questions, I took a stab at pronouncing the word "daguerreotype" and speculated that the long exposure times that were originally involved in taking a photograph necessitated keeping your face still and relatively expressionless.  I further speculated that this tradition probably persisted for a long time after taking a photograph became a much quicker affair.  A quick Google search of the matter shows that I've scored a direct hit with this answer.  Either that, or someone else came up with the same dumb idea that I did.  Nevertheless, the real question now becomes: When was the trend reversed?  When did people start smiling in old photographs?

Well, my exhaustive and notoriously thorough research led me to a man by the name of Dr. Karl Bruegger.  Dr. Bruegger was a Bavarian dentist who had immigrated to America and set up a private dental practice in the late 19th century.  One day an eager young photographer was admiring the photographs which lined the walls of Dr. Bruegger's office, portraits of the dentist's patients proudly displaying their healthy white teeth.  What struck the young photographer, however, was not the quality of the dental work, but rather the blissful expression that the teeth-baring pose lent to the subject's faces.

When the photographer asked about the oddly charming expression in the portraits, Dr. Bruegger was obligingly eager to explain his technique for obtaining the unique pose.  He began by drilling a small but precise hole in the subject's skull.  Then he would proceed to poke around in the hole with some of his surgical instruments, removing a few excess cubic inches of brain tissue.  The subject would then lapse into a state of stupefaction.  Their mouths would hang loose, showing their teeth, and the blissful expression that the photographer had observed in the photographs would settle over their faces.  It was a quite simple procedure, as the dentist kindly demonstrated for the photographer on the next patient that arrived that afternoon.

It became known as the Bruegger Technique, and it soon became popular in photo studios through-out the world.  World leaders, famous celebrities, and rich debutantes all lined up to have their "Bruegger Holes" drilled.  After undergoing the procedure, one high society lady was quoted as saying, "uhhhh..."  The procedure was a rousing success, but it seems that the word "smile" did not appear until 1914 in a book by Samuel Westabahn called Plasticity and the Human Form.  Westabahn proposed an alternative method to the Bruegger Technique, which had been showing a distinct loss of effectiveness over time.  Drilling new Bruegger holes wasn't helping.  One man had had sixteen such holes drilled and his face hung slack and loose and he was quite unresponsive.  The "Westabahn Method" dispensed with the barbaric drilling of holes in the subject's skulls.  Instead, Westabahn administered a heavy dose of arsenic to his subjects.  After a fairly uncooperative struggle, the subject's heart and breathing would eventually stop and they would settle into a state which Westabahn called "the period of plasticity."  At the this point, the features could be manipulated into the proper expression which would finally solidify once rigor mortis set in.  A special liquid solution dropped in each eye would given them the proper sparkle and the whole procedure would "achieve the desired pose known as the 'smile.'"  However, it's not clear where Westabahn first heard this term.

Eventually, sometime during the 1920's, photographers learned that the same expression could be prompted simply by asking their subjects to say "cheese" before take the photo, and the rest is history...more or less.            

The Aliens Who Already Walk Among Us

What I am about to tell you is shocking.  If you have small children then you might want them to leave the room.  Of course, then you'd have to come back here to read the rest of the post, and that would leave the little tike unattended.  There's a good chance that they could hurt themselves or start crying because you left them alone.  That would be a big distraction.  To be on the safe side you should probably wrap them up in duct-tape and shut them up in a closet until you're done reading this.  I wouldn't want them to be traumatized.

If you've seen the show Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, then you probably know by now that aliens built the Egyptian pyramids.  If you haven't seen Ancient Aliens, it's basically a show made by people who think Occam's Razor is something you use to cut up lines of coke as you spin more outrageous alien theories for you next episode.  They use aliens as a ready explanation for all the mysteries of archeology, as though they had an unlimited tube of the stuff.  Primitive stones cut with amazing precision?  Must have been aliens.  Hieroglyphic carvings found in darkened chambers?  They must have had alien light bulbs.  Impressive feats of engineering?  Here, let me squeeze a little alien on that.  There you go.  It may at first glance seem like the stupidest show ever put on TV, but Giorgio Tsoukalos (pictured on the right) passes the History Channel's "fringe theory/crazyman beard" test, so there must be some credibility to what he says.  Yep, that's pretty sane looking facial hair he's got there.  Nothing weird looking about that guy.

Okay, so I think we've pretty much established that aliens built the pyramids to everyone's satisfaction.  I mean, we've established it to everyone's satisfaction, not that the aliens built the pyramids to everyone's satisfaction, although we do seem pretty happy with them.  Thank you, aliens.  Anyway, while the aliens were hanging around, overseeing the construction of these pyramids that were having built so that they could...ummm...well, uhhhhh...so that they could...ohhhh...  Anyway, they probably had camps set up on the site, and maybe they even had their families with them.  And maybe, just maybe, they even brought some of their household pets with them.

Now, we also know that the legendary Egyptian gods were actually aliens.  I think I heard that on Ancient Aliens too, or maybe it was that Stargate movie.  Anyway, that's not important.  The point is that if the Egyptians considered the aliens to be gods, then it figures that they would consider the aliens' pets to be gods as well, or at least highly superior beings, objects of reverence in their own right.  So what would happen if some of these alien pets got loose and ran away, as pets are known to do?  And what if some of these pets were left behind after the aliens had departed?  And what if the Egyptians found some of these strays, and because of their reverence for them, decided to keep them as pets themselves instead of cooking them over a barbeque?

So this is what an alien looks like, right?

Okay, you ready for it?

Ready!?

BOOM!  I rest my case.

              

Stop Trying to Kill Your Grandfather

If you're familiar at all with the concept of time travel, then chances are good that you're also familiar with the concept of the temporal paradox.  This is where a time travel scenario leads to a situation which violates the rules of logic and the laws of causality.  In spite of what you may have read in books, seen in movies, or been told by a certain goofy, bearded blogger in his last post, the problem with these paradoxes is not that a time traveler might inadvertently cause one, threatening the integrity of the space-time continuum or the existence of the universe.  By its very definition, it's impossible for a temporal paradox to happen.  There's about as much danger of you causing a paradox, as there is of you eating your own head.  It just can't happen.  Paradoxes do pose a legitimate problem for time travel, however.  As long as it can be demonstrated in any conceivable way that time travel could potentially lead to a paradox, then either the issue has to be resolved, or you're forced to reach the inescapable conclusion that time travel is impossible.  The problem is solved at the source.  It would be like someone trying to build a house from an M.C. Escher drawing.  The problem isn't that the staircases that loop back on themselves or the support beams that connect this corner of the floor to the far corner of the ceiling would destroy the universe if you built the house.  The problem is simply that the house can't be built.  So, before you go packing your extra plutonium, these paradoxes have to be addressed.

There are three basic types of temporal paradoxes: the predestination paradox, the ontological paradox, and the grandfather paradox.  As the title suggests, it's primarily the grandfather paradox that I want to deal with in this post, because it's based on a very common misconception about time travel.  Once the misconception is laid to rest, it should take the grandfather paradox into the ground with it, leaving no ghost to haunt us.  Unfortunately, it's the resolution of the grandfather paradox that makes the other two paradoxes an issue.  Those two are a little trickier to deal with, and quite honestly, at this point I'm not sure that they can be resolved.  We'll just have to see where we're at when we get to them.

So anyhow, the grandfather paradox is the basically the idea that a time traveler changes the past in such a way that it negates the cause of the change.  The most famous example, and the one from which the paradox gets its name, is a scenario where a time traveler goes back in time and kills their own grandfather when he's a baby.  I'm not sure why someone would ever want to do this, but hypothetically, if they did, it would mean that the time traveler had just canceled out his own existence since without his grandfather he never would have been born.  This would mean that he would never have been around to kill his grandfather, which means he couldn't have canceled out his own existence, which means that he would have been around to kill his grandfather, which means...Well, I'm sure you can appreciate the can of worms this opens.  Although this grandfather murdering scenario is one of the more drastic versions of the paradox, it's hardly the only one.  Once you introduce the concept of changing the past, it becomes practically inevitable.  One could even make the argument that any successful journey to the past with the deliberate intention of changing anything at all, would automatically result in a grandfather paradox.  After all, why make that trip back in time to stop Kennedy from being shot if he's already alive and well this time around, thanks to you?

Some people have tried to solve this paradox by postulating the existence of separate parallel universes for every possible outcome of every event since the beginning of time.  Then they cast our grandfather murdering scenario with a couple of different actors from different universes to play the part of our time traveler and voila', paradox solved.  Yeah, nice try.  Not only does this messy idea have more holes in it than a slice of Swiss cheese, but the actual solution is so much simpler, and we don't need to resort to an absurd multiplicity of countless universes for all the infinite places where I could have set my glass on a table or all the infinite ways I could have put my socks on this morning.  To be consistent, every slightest fraction of a micrometer difference would have to be accounted for by these continuously spawning universes.  Luckily, we can ditch all of this tedious redundancy once and for all.  These parallel universes were brought into the picture to solve a problem that doesn't exist, because, you see, it would be impossible for a time traveler to change the past.

Now, I'm certainly not the first person to realize this.  I'm just here to explain it, so buckle up.  The first thing that you need to understand is for a time traveler to change even as much as the position of a blade of grass in the past, it would be necessary to assume the existence of two separate time lines: one in which the traveler visited the past, and one in which he did not; one in which he touched the blade of grass, and one in which he did not.  This concept is usually presented to us in such a way that the problem with it escapes our attention.  First, we have history running its natural course.  The cavemen draw some bison on a wall...fast forward...Julius Caesar rules over Rome...fast forward...Benjamin Franklin flies his kite...fast forward...Hitler kills a lot of people...fast forward...We land on the moon, etc.  Then one day Dr. Stumblebum builds a time machine in his basement, and he decides to go mucking around in history.  He knocks into Ben Franklin, ruining the whole moment with the lightening and the key and forever changing one of our treasured moments of history.  See, did you catch the problem?  Probably not.

Again, we have two versions of the time line.  We have the original version, where Franklin flies his kite in peace.  Then we have the "new" version where Dr. Stumblebum shows up and ruins the whole thing.  Here's the question, though: When was this new version created?  Well, that's easy enough to answer, right?  It was created the day Dr. Stumblebum decided to load his clumsy ass into his time machine and travel to the past.  It makes sense, or at least it seems to as long as we keep looking at everything from Dr. Stumblebum's point of view. 

Let's try instead to look at from Ben Franklin's point of view.  It's a cloudy day, somewhere in the middle of the 18th century.  Storm clouds are rolling in, and Ben decides this would be a great time to fly his kite.  From his point of view, the day is today.  What else would he ever consider it?  Anyway, he grabs his kite and heads out.  Lightening hits the key, Ben craps his pants, and all is right with the world.  But, wait a minute?  Where was Dr. Stumblebum?  Well, that was a different time line, and it doesn't get created for another 200 years or so.  Oh, okay then.  Wait, hold on.  I've got another question.  Exactly when is that day he flew his kite ever going to be 200 years in the past from Franklin's point of view?  I guess Dr. Stumblebum can't show up from the future until the future happens.  When's that going to be?  I don't know, but I have a feeling Ben's going to be waiting for a long time.

Still not seeing it, huh?  What does Ben Franklin know, right?  He's too stupid to even know that it's really 2011 and he's been dead for hundreds of years.  So, let's try a different example.  Let's say that there's a knock at your door right now.  You can go get it.  I'll wait.  You open the door and a guy in a shiny silver jumpsuit gives you the Vulcan hand sign and tells you he's from the year 2598.  What the hell?  I guess that must mean it's really 2598, because this new time line couldn't have existed until then, right?  But then, where were you when it was really 2011?  How did you miss it?  Did you oversleep?  I tell you, you have one extra White Russian and you wake up and find that it's six hundred years in the future and you're living six hundred years in the past.  Ain't that a bitch?

If all this seems just a little too confusing, don't worry.  It's not supposed to make the slightest bit of sense.  That's the point.  You see, once you put time travel on the table, the "present" is no longer a privileged, objective position.  It becomes entirely a matter of perspective.  To Ben Franklin, the day he flew his kite is the present.  To you, as you're reading this and rubbing your temples it's the present.  To our silver jumpsuit guy, 2598 is the present.  None of us are in a position to prove the others wrong.  So, when the silver jumpsuit guy shows up at your door, it's not a new version of today, six hundred years in the making.  It's just the same old today it always was and everything's going to turn out the same way it always did.  On Feb. 2, 2011 a man from the 26th century showed up at your door.  It may be ancient history to him.  It may be the present for you.  It may be the future for Ben Franklin.  But no matter who's point of view you look at it from, it's still the one and only version of this day that it's ever going to be.   

There is no new time line.  There is only one time line, and it happened the same way it always did, and it can not be changed.  If Dr. Stumblebum gets into his time machine and travels back to the day when Benjamin Franklin flew his kite, then he was always there that day.  He can't ruin Franklin's experiment, because he didn't ruin it.  The kite flew just like it was supposed to, and we all read about it when we were kids.  For some kind of change to take place in the time line, it would have to happen from some point in time that the universe itself considers the present, and I get the feeling that the universe is staying out of this one.

So does that mean that this isn't really, really the present?  Not necessarily, and in fact, we'll be considering that very thing in the next post.  For the moment, what this means is that once you grant the premise that someone can move around in time, backwards and forwards, then time has to be viewed as a line that one can travel on, and the position that we call the present is only one possible point on that line.  If you can land in the 18th century and meet a man that thinks the date is today, or land in the 26th century and meet another man that thinks that date is today, then the mere fact that you're the one with the time machine hardly puts you in a position to argue with them.  When in Rome, it's today in Rome.  As for your grandfather, you can't kill him because you didn't kill him.  The day you tried only happened once, and you clearly failed.  If you can figure out when you'll ever be able to make a new version of that day, be sure to let me know. 

(This post is also available in extra cheesy version.)                                    

How I Wish Mood Rings Worked

Rachel Hoyt over at Rhyme Me a Smile is conducting some sort of Smiley Sociology Study which involves getting a broad cross-section of bloggers to write posts about mood rings.  It's like Gorillas in the Mist, but instead of gorillas and mist you have bloggers writing about novelty jewelery.  Afterwards, I imagine she'll tabulate her findings with lots of charts and graphs in her secret lab.  Then she'll take the results to the pentagon in a sealed envelope, so that they can figure out effective ways to use mood ring technology with soldiers in the field.  In other words, I don't have the slightest clue what any of this about.  However, I've always found mood rings to be somewhat interesting, so I figured I was up for the challenge.  I looked up some information to learn how mood rings work, and I was disappointed to learn that they work by nothing more mysterious than skin temperature.  Basically, it's like someone took that thermometer sticker off the side of your fish tank and made a ring out of it.  No, this just wasn't going to cut it for me.  So I bring you my explanation of how mood rings ought to work, if the world were truly a place of magic and wonder. 

In Ancient Egypt around 1438 B.C. some workers were digging in a rock quarry in the Nile basin when they discovered an odd looking rock crystal, a crystal which we know today as "morphite".  As it lay, the rock was black, but when the worker picked it up, he found that it turned a bright green.  The worker stood there mystified, staring at it, until another worker snatched it from his hand.  To the surprise of both men, the rock now turned blue.  Yet another worker came up and grabbed the rock from the other two men.  In his hand the rock now turned red.  The three men hurried to show their discovery to the slave master who was supervising the work at the quarry.  The slave master was quite impressed with the rock.  He quickly had the three workers executed, and then he posted guards around the spot where the rock crystal had been discovered.  At night the rocks were mined in secret, and taken by the cart load back to the Pharaoh's palace.

These rock crystals became known as "telling stones", and they were originally used primarily in court proceedings.  The accused would be brought before the Pharaoh and questioned with the telling stone in his right hand and his left hand raised.  If the stone turned a certain color at any time during the trial, the accused would immediately be taken away for execution.  It is from this ancient practice that the practice in modern court rooms of "swearing in" descended.  The telling stones long outlasted the ancient Egyptian dynasties.  In the middle ages, they were used by knights to locate the lair of dragons.  It was believed that the stone would turn a certain color in the proximity of a dragon, but in reality it was only registering the knight's increasing fear as he thought he was approaching a dragon's lair.  Finally, in 1884 H.M. Clausterfield had the idea of making jewelery out of the crystals and he coined the term "mood ring".  He placed a few dozen in the display window of his Manhattan shop, and they quickly became a sensation.   

But how do these "telling stones" work?  To answer this question requires a certain basic knowledge of brain bio-chemistry.  You see, the brain operates by generating a Neurological Electrical Resonance Field, or NERF for short.  It is this field which gives us the experience of consciousness or the mind.  Think of the brain as being like a television.  By itself it is just a solid piece of hardware, but when you apply electricity it becomes able to display sounds and images on the screen.  The sounds and images are not a part of the TV.  They are an ethereal construct who's existence is supported by the TV.  Likewise, the NERF is not a part of the brain and it can be no more found by the dissection of tissue than your favorite show can be found by disassembling the circuits and transistors of a TV.  The mind is just an electrical field, generated and maintained by the brain.

This field pulses at a variable frequency, depending on the mood and mental activity of the subject.  When the subject is in an agitated or distressed state, the field pulses at a very high frequency.  This is part of the body's natural defense mechanism.  The brain increases the energy output to the field in response to a sense of danger.  In this manner it compensates for the sense of danger by heightening mental acuity and alertness.  When the subject is in a relaxed and pacified stated, the field pulses at a much lower frequency, allowing the brain to preserve the chemicals it uses to generate the electrical energy for when it is needed. 

Naturally, these variations of frequency affect nerve impulses through-out the body.  There is an almost imperceptible vibration to the body that it is perfectly attenuated to this frequency.  The molecules of the body make tiny oscillations similar to the way a wine glass responds to sound waves.  Since this is a constant fact of our existence, we don't really notice it, but there is nowhere that this phenomenon is more acute than the epidermis.  As a result, the skin generates a separate field which is in tune with the NERF, known as the aura.  To certain highly sensitive individuals, this field is actually visible.  The light rays that pass near to the subject's body get distorted by this field, disrupting certain bands of the spectrum while accentuating others.  To our sensitive observer, it appears that there is a certain colored glow emanating from the subject.

This brings us to our mood ring.  You see, the color changing properties of the crystal, which captivated the fascination of people as far back as Ancient Egypt, are actually nothing more than an illusion.  In it's natural state, morphite is black in color.  In fact, morphite is always black in color.  It just has a coating on it's surface that is sensitive to the brain's electrical field in the same way as the human epidermis.  Actually, it's far more sensitive.  While the aura is only visible to certain people, the same effect can be seen by anyone who looks at a mood ring.  However, although the effect differs in degree, it is the same by nature.  The oscillation of the morphite's surface coating is simply distorting the spectrum of light rays in close proximity to the ring, making it appear as if it's turning different colors.  Often the effect lingers on the ring after the wearer has removed it, because the oscillation takes time to relax back into its normal equilibrium and return the ring to its normal black appearance.

Well, there you have it.  I realize now that I could have perhaps looked deeper into how brain chemistry actually affects skin temperature.  I suppose that could have been interesting.  But hey, what's done is done, and it is what is, and whatever.  I hope it brightened up your Sunday a little, at least.                         

The Not-So-True History of Superstitions

I was thinking about superstitions yesterday, and how nonsensical and random they seem.  I figured that they must all have origin stories behind them.  Someone just doesn't wake up one morning and decide that opening umbrellas in the house is bad luck.  There has to be a historical event that set the precedent for these things.  One bad umbrella experience, and everyone from then on is forewarned that it's a bad idea.  So I thought it might be interesting, and might provide material for a post, if I looked up some of these stories.  Unfortunately, I found that most of these stories are actually pretty dull.  So I decided the hell with it; I would just make up some stories of my own.  I'm not sure what the point is, and anyone looking for actual information and enlightenment, should probably look somewhere else.    

 

                                                               WALKING UNDER A LADDER

In 1935 a shopkeeper named Henry Ferguson was on a ladder working on repairing a broken letter in his shop's sign.  As he was pounding in a nail, his hammer slipped and he smashed his thumb with it.  Preoccupied with the sudden pain, he dropped the hammer.  At that exact moment, Walter Montgomery, the manager of the local bank, was passing under the ladder.  Walter was late for an appointment, and he was in too much of a hurry to navigate around the ladder.  Just as he was checking his watch, the falling hammer hit him in the head.  He collapsed against the brick wall of the shop.  Seeing what had happened, Henry quickly climbed down from the ladder.  He stood panicking over the crumpled bank manager.  He was sure he had killed the man.  He looked about nervously.  It was early morning, and the street was deserted at that hour.  He had to act quickly.  He hoisted Mr. Montgomery's body up, and dragged it into the back of his shop.  He then locked up, and flipped the "open" sign to "closed".  He loaded Mr. Montgomery's body into the trunk of his car and drove far out into the countryside of a neighboring town, where he dropped the body deep in the woods.

As it turns out, Walter Montgomery had only been knocked out by the hammer, not killed.  Henry had just been in too much of a panic to confirm the man's vitality.  Walter regained consciousness hours later, long after it had grown dark out.  The nuzzling of a large grizzly bear brought him around.  His groggy eyes fluttered, but when he became aware of the bear standing over him, he shot up, wide awake.  Naturally this startled the bear, who began to viciously attack Mr. Montgomery.  It's a genuine miracle that he was able to escape with his life, but also a fairly fruitless one, as he died a few hours later.  He was spotted by a local farmer crawling out of the woods and taken to a nearby hospital.  In his dying delirium, he kept rambling on about how he had walked under a ladder and he had been transported across time and space to another dark land of ravaging monsters.  Although these were the lunatic ravings of a dying man, the legend grew from there.  The space beneath ladders came to  be considered inter-dimensional portals to unthinkable fates, and people avoided them with dread.     

                                                     
                                                      A BLACK CAT CROSSING YOUR PATH

Martha Price loved her black cat Midnight.  She was an elderly spinster and the cat was the sole companion of her twilight years.  One night she needed to fetch a jar of tomatoes from her cellar to prepare her dinner.  Pulling the chain for the light at the top of the stairs, she was dismayed to discover that the bulb had burned out.  She was forced to navigate the stairs in the dark.  Unfortunately, Midnight had made himself quite comfortable on the cellar stairs, three steps down from the landing.  Not being able to see the dark cat in the darkness of the cellar Miss Price's foot caught on the cat's flank and she tripped and tumbled down the remaining stairs.  She broke her neck and she lay dead on the cellar floor.  Midnight, momentarily perturbed by Miss Price tripping over him, simply settled back into a comfortable position and retained his post on the third step of the cellar stairs.

Three days later, Miss Price's neighbor Hiram Muller grew concerned that he hadn't seen the old woman leave her house at all, and he came by to check on her.  He searched the house, calling her name, but of course, no one answered.  Passing through the kitchen, he heard a soft meowing coming from behind the cellar door.  He opened the door and called for out for Miss Price into the darkness.  He tried the light chain, and he too found the bulb burned out.  He crept cautiously down the stairs, but his foot also caught on Midnight, who was still perched on the third step, evidently his favorite spot.  Hiram lay dead beside Miss Price with his neck broken as well.

In the end six bodies with broken necks lay in a heap at the bottom of Miss Price's cellar stairs before the feline impediment was finally removed.  Midnight let out an irritated meow at being disturbed from his spot, but he was soon pacified with a warm saucer of milk. and a can of tuna fish  From that day forward it was considered bad luck to have a black cat cross your path, especially on a dark set of stairs.  Midnight, of course, returned to his favorite spot on the third step as soon as he was done eating.

                                                                     
                                                                        BREAKING A MIRROR

There was a golden-framed mirror which had been a priceless heirloom in the Romanov family for eight generations.  Although the Romanov fortune had dwindled to a meager subsistence, they had still managed to hold onto the mirror.  In 1867, the current Romanov family lived in a simple hovel, but the mirror was still hanging on the wall in the main hallway.  The elegant mirror seemed grossly out of place in the modest home, but Elliot Romanov paused before it every day with pride as he considered his reflection and straightened his hair.  In the most darkest and humble times of his life, the mirror served to remind him of his elevated heritage.  It was the one thing that kept him from feeling like a mere commoner.    

One night Elliot's boss, Mr. Sterns, came by for dinner.  The man had actually insinuated his own invitation and insisted on coming.  He was a large, obnoxious, and imposing man who treated Elliot like a worm.  Elliot hated the man and he suffered his company all through dinner.  Mr. Sterns got uproariously drunk and he behaved worse that usual.  He grabbed Mrs. Romanov inappropriately and he hollered at the Romanov children.  But the worst affront came as he was leaving for the evening.  He stumbled as he was putting on his coat and smashed head first into the Romanov's priceless mirror, shattering it into a million pieces.  He grumbled irritably as though the Romanovs had done him a disservice in the placement of their mirror, and then he left without offering an apology.  Elliot stared at the shattered mirror, mortified. 

He vowed revenge on Mr. Sterns, but it had to be a covert and secret revenge, as he couldn't risk losing the job that provided for his family.  He proceeded to conduct a campaign of small annoyances and inconveniences in Mr. Sterns' life.  He placed a nail in Mr. Sterns' shoe when he wasn't wearing them.  He loosened the wheel of his carriage so that it came off on a muddy road.  He broke his fountain pen, causing Mr. Sterns to get an ink stain on his shirt.  Mr. Sterns never suspected that Elliot was the source of these minor grievances.  Elliot just smiled placidly at his boss's suffering.  This went on for seven years until one night when Elliot was trying to procure a wasp's nest to leave in Mr. Sterns' desk.  As Elliot dislodged the nest, a couple of the bees stung him.  Elliot didn't know until that moment that he was highly allergic to bees.  He was found dead the next morning.  Soon after, Mr. Sterns was greatly relieved when he found that his string of bad luck had finally broken.       

So there it is.  You learn something new every day. 

Jack the Ripper

The other night they aired this show on The Science Channel about Jack the Ripper which purported to have "new evidence" concerning the century-and-a-half old mystery of the serial killer's identity.  I tuned in to watch it with a fair amount of skepticism.  Most Jack the Ripper theories seem to revolve around the idea that there's some Earth-shattering revelation or twist behind the identity itself.  They generally assume that Jack the Ripper was someone important or famous who's name pops up elsewhere in the historical record.  The only real justification for this assumption is the fact that it would be extremely anti-climactic to find out that Jack the Ripper was just "some guy."  But yet, that's probably just what he was.  Who, really, were David Berkowitz or Jeffrey Dahmer or Ed Gein or any other known serial killers aside from the horrible things they've done?  We expect intriguing mysteries to have intriguing answers, but that isn't necessarily always the case.  This is just yet another instance where people fall for the most irrational fallacies in their quest to believe in something exciting, and they ignore more level-headed approaches at the truth.   

Unfortunately, level heads are usually in short supply in these sort of documentaries.  The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, and other cable networks run these shows from time to time, where some so-called expert with questionable credentials pursues some personal theory.  Sometimes, such as the recent Apocalypse Island, these documentaries can be a complete disaster.  This one on Jack the Ripper was more modest in its scope and its failures.  The problem isn't always with the theories themselves, and this guy's Jack the Ripper theory was at least within the realm of plausibility.  No, the problem is usually with the way they approach the theories.  There's always something, that one fatal touch, that undermines their image as the professional scholar and puts them firmly in the category of a crack-pot.  I've engaged in plenty of my own crack-pot theorizing, of course, so I can't really throw stones.  But then again, The History Channel isn't supplying me with a camera crew and financing my expedition to the ends of the Earth.  These shows always leave me feeling a little outraged when I think that there are people out there working on genuine research projects which are probably grossly underfunded, while these jack-asses are grandstanding on cable TV.  

This Jack the Ripper documentary followed this same familiar pattern.  The theory was that  Jack the Ripper was a mortician named Robert Mann who worked in the Whitechapel area where the Ripper murders were committed.  As I said, it's a plausible theory, more plausible than most of the ones I've heard and I'm not going to completely dismiss it.  The problem here is the logic behind most of the guy's "new evidence."  If you were to follow this guy's line of thought, then any mortician on the planet would look like a murder suspect.  He pointed out such gems as the fact that Mann had access to the bodies after the murders.  Well...yeah, he was the mortician.  He pointed out the fact that Mann spent a lot of time around dead bodies.  Well...yeah, he's a mortician.  He pointed out the fact that the murders all happened in the area surrounding Mann's mortuary.  Well...yeah, he was the mortician for that area.  Starting to see a pattern here?  The term "circumstantial evidence" would be an understatement if the term "evidence" wasn't already a ludicrous exaggeration.  Why not point the finger at the investigating police officer?  Why was he so interested in the murders?  Wasn't he at all the crimes scenes?  Hmm, sounds suspicious to me. 

It wasn't all a complete wash.  He did point out the Ripper's surgical skill with the knife.  But this only suggests the possibility of a medical background and is hardly conclusive.  The only really solid fact that he had that could possibly link Mann to the murders was that Mann had gotten tuberculosis and died around the same time the murders stopped.  Now, that's pretty good, but since I don't know more about the murders and the time frame they covered, and since people were probably dropping like flies from tuberculosis every other day, I can't really draw any firm conclusions from this.

And there was one interesting statement made by a criminal profiler that the guy consulted.  He said that Jack the Ripper didn't cut to kill; he killed in order to cut.  The excessive nature of the incisions showed that the killer really relished the use of the knife.  This was considered as a further consistency with Mann's occupation as a mortician.  The only thing I could think was, "Geez, doesn't the guy get enough of that at work?"                                     

When Did Thomas Edison Become the Bad Guy?

Sometimes I feel like there's a meeting I missed, like there's some committee that gets together in the middle of the night and makes changes to the culture.  Everyone else seems to be instantly on board with these changes.  No one else seems thrown or confused by them.  In fact, sometimes I wonder if anyone else even notices that a change has happened.  I never hear anyone ever mention it.  There just seems to be this unspoken understanding that the thing is different now.  If I were living in the world of 1984, I'd be the bewildered guy wandering through the crowd asking, "But weren't we just at war with Eurasia?", that is until the Thought Police hauled me away and put a rat cage on my head and showed me the error of my ways.

For instance, I can't remember the first time I went into a restaurant and  a "server" took my order, but I definitely remember that they used to be called "waiters" and "waitresses."  I understand the reason for the change in terminology, obviously, the whole politically correct agenda behind it all.  I just don't know when this was decided or by whom.  There was never any big announcement on TV or in the town square where someone got up on stage and declared, "Henceforth, they shall be called 'servers.'  Woe be unto them who use the gender specific job title....Oh yeah, and by the way, we're getting rid of 'actress' altogether."  No, it all just seemed to happen overnight, and everyone fell right in step with it as though the job had never been called anything other than 'server'.

Another odd example I've noticed is "they" changed the "B.C/A.D." dating standard to "B.C.E/C.E.", which means "Before the Common Era" and "The Common Era" respectively.  What the heck is the "Common Era"?  Common to what?  The years haven't changed.  We're still dating everything from the same moment in history.  Isn't it disingenuous to discard the religious references in name but to keep them in number? At least when the French Revolution threw God out the window they started over with year one.  So far, I've only heard this one on TV and it seems confined to academic circles, but what do I know?  When the date comes up in casual conversation, people rarely feel the need to specify, "that's 2010 Anno Domini...in the year of our blessed Lord.  Amen."  So for all I know, the change might already be widespread in the public consciousness.  But I doubt it.  Even the world of historical TV documentaries seems to be struggling with this one.  I think I caught one of them using good old "B.C." the other day.  Maybe the secret midnight committee got together and decided, "This one just isn't catching on." 

Even the news often makes me feel like I've been left in the dust.  It used to be that the anchorman would come on at six, tell you what was happening in the world, and leave it to you and your friends to scratch your head over the human condition.  Now, with the proliferation of the 24 hour news channels, I constantly feel like I've walked into a room in the middle of a conversation.  They've already moved on to speculating about the meaning and the impact of such & such, and I still have no idea what they're talking about.  A few years back, I heard people gossiping and grumbling about Rev. Jeremiah Wright for a month before I even had the slightest idea who the man was and what he had said to get people so worked up.

The process sometimes even extends to history itself, and there they even have a name for it.  They call it "Revisionist History."  The problem with this term is that it's used indiscriminately.  On the one hand, it's used as a pejorative term, meaning someone who distorts or misrepresents the facts of history in order to promote a specific agenda.  On the other hand, it's used again as a pejorative term, but this time meaning someone who has brought new facts to light that challenge a common, established, and traditional view of a historical subject.  People are rarely willingly to admit that they're using the term in this second sense, but I have actually seen a few cases.  Mostly the term just gets thrown around as a vague accusation in cases of historical disagreement.  The problem is, watching these arguments from the sidelines, the double meaning makes it easy to get confused and awfully hard to keep score.

I remember Christopher Columbus was an early target.  Some time in the early 1990's some nebulous powers-that-be seemed dead set on burying this man's reputation.  Some people objected to this, calling it "revisionist history."  But the nature of the objection wasn't always clear.  Some people meant, "They're making stuff up to make Columbus sound bad."  Then there were other people who meant, "Columbus is a revered American icon and you're ruining his image by bringing up facts that make him look bad.  I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears so that I don't have to hear about it...la-la-la-la."  Then, of course, there was a lot of grey area between these two viewpoints, where people we're just pissed off about the whole thing, but they really hadn't thought out why.

But somewhere in all this crossfire, I get to feeling like I can't keep track of what the truth is.  You grow up hearing one thing about history and then the secret midnight committee has another one of their damn meetings, and the next day everyone's saying, "Nope, it actually happened like this."  What are you supposed to believe?  Is this new information any more reliable than the old information?  You certainly can't dig up Christopher Columbus and ask him if he really chopped off an Indian's hand. 

For instance, not to sound like some lunatic fringe, holocaust denier, but until about 8 years ago I had never heard about these Japanese Internment Camps that they had in America during World War II.  I never learned about it in school.  I never heard anyone talk about it.  This information just seemed like it popped up out of nowhere, and everyone acted like it had been common knowledge forever.  I'm not saying it didn't happen; I'm just wondering why I never heard of it.  Then, of course, there's Thomas Edison.  When I grew up, he was the symbol of the American dream, a genius and a great man.  Now, it appears he stole all of his ideas, destroyed brilliant careers, engaged in all kinds of illegal acts, and probably strangled puppies because he didn't like the way they wagged their tails.  

There are two possibilities, and sometimes it's hard to tell which side of the line Occam's Razor falls on.  One, people of the past were ignorant, unenlightened, bigoted, and apparently willing to credit Paul Revere with feats of daring and bravery solely because of the rhyming potential of his name.  Or two, someone is fabricating a bunch of elaborate smear campaigns to push an agenda or cause trouble or just to let people know they're too original and clever to be impressed by the conventional image of Thomas Edison.  I guess it all comes down to the real question:  Who are these people, and where are they holding their damn meetings?    

                          

Welcome to Earth....Why Are You Here?

Many of the people who have speculated about the existence of extraterrestrials have always just assumed that if there were aliens, they would just naturally be visiting Earth.  The hubris and the subjective sense of self-importance behind this assumption is incredible.  It doesn't even seem to occur to these people that the question of whether there's sentient life somewhere out there in the galaxy and the question of whether that life has visited Earth are two separate matters entirely.  They treat them as if they're one in the same; if there are aliens, they must have visited Earth.  Really!?  How could we be sure they even know we exist?  Why would they even come here in the first place?  If there's life out there on at least one other planet, then you almost have to figure that there's life out there on millions more besides that one.  So out of all those millions, why would they pick Earth? 

"Uh, we were just in the neighborhood, and we figured we stop by for a visit."

Of course, as human beings, we think we're pretty special.  We occupy a central place in our view of the universe, and understandably we have a hard time stepping outside that view.  But if the matter is to be given any serious consideration, then that's what we have to do.  We have to look at it from the aliens point of view.  To them Earth is just another planet out of millions with life on it.  They would have to have a reason to cross the vast expanse of space to come here.  They would have to have an objective reason to think we're special.  I think the people involved in genuine extraterrestrial research projects like S.E.T.I. understand this.  I'm speaking more, of course, of some of the stranger conspiracy theorists out there as well as people in general that you find yourself having these kind of weird conversations with. 

"Ah Earthlings!  We've heard so much about you from the Klagnars.  You walk upright and eat with utensils?  Fascinating!"

I got into a conversation like this with a friend of mine once.  When I pointed that they would need a reason to bother coming here, he speculated that maybe they were interested in our researches in atomic energy and our creation of nuclear weapons.  At first this idea seemed to fit.  The whole "Roswell" siting seemed to coincide perfectly in time and place with the bomb testing at Los Alamos just a few years earlier.  However, in the end, I think the whole thing kind of falls apart.  It seems to me that nuclear technology would be an inevitable step on the road to developing the means of intergalactic travel.  You can't break the light barrier and miss fission entirely.  On the other hand, maybe they already know all about nuclear weapons, and they know how dangerous they are, and they're here to make sure we're not a threat or we don't annihilate ourselves.  Again, I seriously doubt this.  As awesomely powerful as our weapons seem, they're like firecrackers on a galactic scale.  As far as them being concerned with our safety...a nice idea, but I'm sure the universe is far too big a place and much too populated for these aliens to concern themselves over the beings of a tiny blue planet destroying themselves.

"You split the atom!?  Wow!!  Our ships are powered with noodle technology."

So am I making a definitive statement that the aliens have not been here?  Of course not.  Who knows?  Who even knows if there are any aliens out there?  I'm just saying that they wouldn't come here without a reason.  We've outgrown the literal notion that the universe revolves around us, but we still sometimes fall back into that frame of mind.  Maybe in all the universe we're the only other planet that the aliens have found with life on it.  Maybe it's just the two of us.  Unlikely.  Maybe they just planted life here, like some cosmic zoo, and they stop by to watch us swing on the rope and throw feces at each other.  Uhhhh.  Maybe they got lost and decided to stop and ask for directions.  Maybe we're like the hillbilly gas station of the galaxy.  Yeah, that sounds about right.      

     

Apocalypse Island

A few months ago I caught this special on The History Channel, Apocalypse Island.  It was about this Archeologist who claimed to have found a Mayan Monument on an island several miles off the coast of Chile.  It was thousands of miles from where any known Mayan civilization had ever existed.  The documentary centered around his efforts to return to the Island with a colleague who was supposed to verify his findings.  This was inter-cut with interesting details about Mayan history, and of course, the usual business about 2012 doomsday prophesies. 

It started out fairly compelling.  Hand-held video footage documented the archeologists' efforts to charter a boat and stock up on supplies.  There was much made of the fact that the island was very hard to get to and that they only had a brief window of opportunity to view the monument before the monsoon season hit.  The video documented their trip on the boat, their arrival on the island, and the fact that they had to take a smaller boat to land on shore because there was no open coast where the main craft could land.

This is where things started to fall apart.  They had hammered the point over and over and over again that this was a dangerous undertaking, that the location was extremely remote and inaccessible, and that the two men would be making the trek completely alone.  Yet, the moment they landed on the island, there were constant panoramic shots and aerial shots of the two men hiking across the island.  This was supposed to be real documentary footage, not a re-enactment.  But who was filming this footage?  It was all very clear and cinematic.  There were distant wide shots of the two tiny figures navigating through the mountains.  There had to be an entire crew working on this; a crew with a helicopter and trucks filled with production equipment.  As I noticed this problem, the implications of this elaborate footage completely undercut the image of these two men braving treacherous obstacles to reach a mysterious and remote location.  It turned the whole thing into a joke.

I actually started to feel like an idiot that I had wasted any of my time watching this.  It was the most obviously staged thing I'd ever seen on television, and that's really saying something.  When they finally reached the so-called "monument", it didn't look like anything more than a natural out-cropping of rock to me.  Oh, there were a lot of expressions of amazement on the part of the archeologists.  They were clearly impressed and convinced that they were looking at a piece of ancient Mayan construction.  I guess we were just supposed assume that they knew what they were talking about.  It might look like rocks to us, but they were experts.  Whatever.  Then came the final piece of insultingly obvious staging.  One of the men had to make the "dangerous" climb to the top of the monument, risking his life to confirm its authenticity.  One problem though.  The man's assent up the face of the monument was shot from the top of the monument looking down.  I guess a camera man risking his life to climb that thing doesn't count.

I can't believe the History Channel would put this sort this sort of thing on the air.  I know they're not always a paragon of integrity, but this was ridiculous.  The whole thing was aimed at people who buy into the whole 2012 doomsday prophesy.  I suppose they figure those people will believe anything.  They might be right.