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I notice that, occasionally, bread twisties are twisted the other way. So, when I try to untwist the twistie, I just twist it tighter. This leads me to believe that there are people down at the bakery, real people, whose task it is to twist the twisties onto the bread bag. And some of these real people are left-handed.

It’s not my job to disparage anybody else’s job, but, jesus, that’s a shitty job.

Every so often, I come across a nugget of information that is so basic that it fills me with dismay that I’ve never run across it before.

Take air conditioners, for example. Your basic central home air conditioner works by pumping freon back and forth between the outside compressor unit and the inside blower. Warm freon goes to the compressor, where the heat is dissipated (and consequently the freon gets cold), then returns to the blower inside the house where it cools off the inside air, which is distributed throughout the house.

I like to think I’m mechanically knowledgeable. Somehow, though, I missed the fact that it’s freon going back and forth from the compressor. I’d frankly assumed that it was air that made this journey. That is, the compressor cooled air at the compressor, and then this cooled air was pumped into the house. I now see this is a ridiculously naive assumption. I see this because, today, I was standing outside, next to the compressor, idly gazing at an anole climbing the wooden fence, when I noticed that there was no giant ductwork snaking from the compressor to a hole in my house. There were just these little copper/metallic tubes. “That’s odd,” I said to myself. “Why would they make such little tubes to carry air back and forth from the house?”

Then it struck me that I was being ridiculously naive.

Another example of a basic informational nugget that somehow passed me by is the little fact that Vicki Lawrence—”Mama”— is the same person who sang “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” back in ‘72 or so. I was vaguely aware that a person named Vicki Lawrence had sung that song, and I was also aware that a Vicki Lawrence played “Mama” and other characters on the Carol Burnett Show (and that fantastically heinous spinoff). Never did I think that she was one and the same person, until last week when I was reading some little piece in the Casino section of the paper, announcing that this person was coming to the Grand in Biloxi (or the Beau Rivage, or the Magic, or wherever she’s going).

I get blindsided by these little nuggets every few months. Just as I’m getting comfortable, thinking that, while I don’t know everything, at least I know everything any idiot knows, along comes something any idiot is well aware of, but I am not.

I’d think I’d be used to it by now. I mean, it happens every few months. But, like the carnival rube that I can be, it happens again, and again I am filled with dismay.

Vicki Lawrence’s website can be found at Vicki Lawrence’s Website. Apparently she is a down-to-earth woman whose main hobby is yacht racing.

To prepare for my hike with Dave in Yo, I took out my planisphere. Turns out the Duck’s Foot is part of Scorpio, with a couple stars that are unrelated.

The Ancients obviously made a colossal mistake in not incorporating those extra stars and calling the resultant thing “The Duck’s Foot.”

So much for spanglemaking this one.

Here’s something that I would be happy to have but I wouldn’t pay good money for: a device that could tell me exactly where to look to see a thing, if other things weren’t in the way.

An example of the sort of thing I’d like to know is which direction to look to see a friend in California from here. By inputting my exact location and my friend’s exact location, this device that I want would illuminate a spot in the middle distance that, if I could dig a straight and true hole, my friend would be on the other end of it. So this device takes into consideration the curvature of the earth. If I wanted to know where to look in the direction of the Taj Mahal, my device would illuminate a spot in the close foreground. Maybe a spot on my sofa, or the carpet. If I dug a hole straight and true through the ground in a conforming line from my eyes into the ground at that spot, eventually I’d end up in an ornate mausoleum in India.

There’s nothing hard about this desire; all it would take is a few extra lines of code in a handheld GPS device, the ability to input the Taj’s exact coordinates, and some kind of light emitter built into the machine.

What I really want is to be able to answer my son truthfully and precisely when he asks me “Dad, where is Hawaii?” I’d fire up the machine, get a fix, and say, “There, son,” while pointing at a spot on the kitchen floor.

There’s a constellation in the sky now, about 120 degrees or so from the Big Dipper, to the south around midnight. I call it “The Duck’s Foot.” It’s obviously a real constellation, with a real name that I don’t know. A century or two ago, I’d go to the town expert and ask him what it was and he’d tell me, and he’d be happy to tell me. Nowadays, I can’t do that, because there are so many people that no one’s an expert on anything anymore unless there’s some percentage in being an expert on it.

So now we have the net: the new town expert. It’s a pretty poor expert. I know if I had a burning desire to call the Duck’s Foot by its actual name, I could research it on the web and find my answer— eventually. I’m not going to. I’m going to spanglemake it.

If I didn’t spanglemake it— that is, if I did decide to research it on the web— I’d find the answer. Not immediately, though, and not nearly as quickly as if I could just ask the town expert. The web is not set up to easily answer my question about the Duck’s Foot. It’ll tell me about all the constellations there are in minute detail, but it can’t accompany me to my backyard and look where I point and say “Oh, that’s the XXXXXX constellation,” like the town expert could.

What I want, since I no longer have experts to call in, is a star program in which I can make a crude drawing of what I see, and then the program will churn out one or three likely candidates for it. No star program I know of does this yet. I want it.

It looks exactly like a duck’s foot.

Confessions

This should be required reading for anyone who gets within 200 yards of a car dealership.

“The other boxes on the 4-square are for the price of the trade-in, the amount of the customer’s down payment, and the amount of the customer’s monthly payment.

‘When you negotiate, this sheet should be covered with numbers,’ Michael said. ‘It should be like a battleground. And I don’t want to see the price dropping five hundred dollars at a pop. Come down slowly, slowly. Here I’ll show you how.’”

The Visual Thesaurus is a pretty nice little software toy, and it used to be free. I visited the site for the first time in months (in order to waste time), and after a few clicks was asked for money.

I don’t begrudge anyone a chance at making a buck, but for me to spend that buck, the service has to somehow rise above the category of “adequate time-waster.”

At the $3 a month they’ve decided to charge, I’ve decided to fritter my time away in some less expensive manner.

“Wasn’t the Online Version of the Visual Thesaurus free?

While we used to offer the Visual Thesaurus for free on the Internet, we have found that in order to continue to provide the Visual Thesaurus and make improvements, we must ask our users to pay a small charge for full access to the product. We hope you’ll agree that the Visual Thesaurus is a fantastic product, and that the price is reasonable.”

Incarnation is improbable, but it happens. Therefore, reincarnation is a possibility. And something like a billion people believe it happens, which means nothing more than that it’s an imagined good thing.

So reincarnation, though improbable, is a possibility, in the way that almost anything is a possibility. Therefore, if it turns out to be a real thing, there must be a specific manner in which it is brought about. It’s possible that it’s a dumb thing, in that it just happens and there is no rhyme or reason for it. On the other hand, it’s possible that there is some higher power that facilitates the process.

If a higher power does act as a facilitator, there is some mechanism by which it is done. My guess is that, whatever it is, it’s a bureaucratic nightmare.

For instance, suppose that the reason one is reincarnated is to fix a specific thing or trait that was broken in the previous life. Say you were a bad father. Your mission in this life is to be a good father. That’s all; in a multitude of previous lives, you have proven that you are brave, or can sing, or can run quickly, so these things aren’t being graded. You have a mission: to be a good father. If you do become a good father, you get to come back and improve something else (maybe humility, or how you swing a baseball bat). If you fuck it up, you will come back as a slug.

In the possible realm that we happen to inhabit, most people have fucked up their previous lives, therefore there are a lot of slugs underfoot.

Reality would be like a job interview, or endlessly filling out a government form. If you don’t use a number 2 pencil, you come back as a slug. If you fill in a circle incompletely—- slug.

In this possible universe—which may or may not be the one we find ourselves in— suddenly the filling out of forms becomes deadly serious practice for the bureaucratic realities of reincarnation. The SAT and the GRE and the MCAT become religious models.

Who knows? Could be.

It may be, because no one really knows, that when one dies, s/he is presented with some kind of puzzle or quiz. How one does on the puzzle or quiz determines whether one spends eternity in heaven or hell.

It’s possible. Many other ludicrous things have really happened; why not this? Pretend that ‘the wheel of fortune’ is a working model of metaphysical reality. If you are wily, and shrewd, and guess correctly, you will be rewarded with life everlasting. If you are an ignoramus, or unlucky enough to get a really hard answer with no common letters in it, you will be everlastingly screwed.

This is what watching ‘wheel of fortune’ can teach us: how to cope with the ultimate gameshow.

There are echos of this from ancient times. For instance, the sphinx and her riddles, where a correct answer meant life, and an incorrect one death.

When someone says “Anything’s possible,” this is the sort of thing he should mean.

By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) insisted Tuesday he must have assurances Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) will stay in jail and not return to power before releasing him to Iraq (news - web sites)’s interim government, refusing to commit to the June 30 timetable envisioned by Iraq’s new prime minister.

Some liberals are ridiculing the administration’s hesitance to return Hussein to the custody of the Iraqi people, pointing to it as just another sign of how evil and pointless are the policies of those in charge.

This is either a knee-jerk reaction—”Everything Bush does is stupid or cynical or evil, therefore this is stupid or cynical or evil”— or …nothing. It’s a knee-jerk reaction.

Practically the only good thing that came of this whole sorry fiasco is that Hussein was eventually caught. To give him up to a weak, untested Iraqi government is foolhardy. Who knows what the Iraqi people will make of their new government? Now, many hate it, feeling (correctly) that it exists at the sufferance of the occupying US forces. It may eventually gain credibility over time. Maybe; strange things have happened. When it is credible, when it does have the backing of its people, when it can send a police force into a street riot and expect that riot to be quelled—that’s when Hussein should be handed over. Not before.

Here’s a little prediction: if we hand over Hussein to the new Iraqi government within the next year, within the next ten years Hussein will rule Iraq again.

I don’t want that. You don’t want that.

There are a lot of errors and displays of hubris for which Bush should be ridiculed; this isn’t one of them.

What if hamburgers were hot dogs?

What if reincarnation is the way it really is? What if there’s a finite amount of this fluff we call ‘awareness’ lying about, and every so often a particular awareness re-awares? Would that be great or awful?

What if ducks were cows?

What if you could feel wonderful continuously? If moving from one wonderful event to the next were the way of things? Why doesn’t that happen anyway, philosophically speaking? We’ve had thousands of years to work on it.

What if now were a billion years ago? What makes me so special that I’m alive in the present? In fact, I’m far more special than Thomas Jefferson, or Ronald Reagan, or Einstein, or Socrates, because I’m alive, and they’re dead. Should I feel pressured that I’m so special? Those poor dead fuckers!

What if the cow really could jump over the moon? Would that elevate the cow, or denigrate the moon?

What if God came to you tonight? Would your first reaction be one of fear? Subservience? Awe? Ennui? Mine would be a feeling of indescribable panic. I hope I’d get over it quickly.

Now will be a billion years ago, eventually.