Loads of Bon Mots

Welcome to a special non-topical version of these Adventures! Take this one internally and let it work globally!

There are a couple of reasons for going the non-topical route this week. One of them, which also may apply next week, is the little fact that even editors are human (!) and want Christmases and New Yearses off. So I have to turn this in several days before Christmas so that somebody else can have a Wonderful Life.

The other reason that this column is going to be utterly non-topical is that six days ago I fell off a rolling platform and got a significant “owie” involving pain in multiple places. I don’t know about you, but for me pain induces an impatience for the minutiae of the daily news, and turns my thoughts to the universal and timeless. And, where my thoughts go, there I must Adventure also, or my thoughts and I would become separated. (Get it? Advent; advent-ure.)

So what I thought I’d do today is share some little sayings that I either have lived by for years, or just made up recently out of crushing boredom.

“The essence of humor is clown squeezings.” A lot of people misread this one as saying we should go squeeze a clown for jollies. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying hurt begets humor. Some of these are metaphoric, damn it!

“A baby is nothing to sneeze at.” I think that can’t be said often enough.

“When life gives you lemons, pucker up.” I know, it doesn’t quite work, but the meaning comes across anyway, doesn’t it?

“Honesty is the best front.” This is one of my all time favorites. Remember kids; don’t waste your lies getting dimes and candies, cigarettes and kisses. Save your fibs for the big stuff, like escaping the death penalty, or truly worthwhile wide-awake debauchery that you’ll be able to remember when you’re in the rest home while being “tidied up” by the nurse after your daily business.

“Politics is never a dirty word.” Sometimes politicians will counter critics by saying, “You’re just playing politics.” They want to make it a dirty word so they can have it all for themselves. They know that all politics is about the exercise of power, that’s why they want to alienate you from the very word, so you can’t exercise power that you are entitled to. So whenever someone, even be they on your own side, says someone else is just playing politics, you should make vigorous expressions of disapproval.

“If you let a wild pig eat off your ass, it's your fault when he bites it.” That was the cleaned up version. At the moment I’m imagining Karl Rove as the pig, but it could be anybody. “Codependence kills,” is another one in the same vein.

“Never do anything you would be ashamed of. First, stop feeling you should be ashamed of it. Then do it.” Some of these are just plain obvious.

“When a 250 pound man gives the seat next to me to a 90 pound woman, and the bus slams to a halt, the 250 pound man will collide with my face.” I learned this one long before Homelessness Czar Philip Mangano cooked up the whole “house the chronically homeless first” line he’s been selling. I still would add to it though: “Better yet, buy bigger busses, seat everybody.”

“Beating your neighbor’s spouse doesn’t show how much you love your own.” These days what passes for patriotism is really national chauvinism. No one loves any one country that doesn’t first love humanity, as a whole.

“Language matters.” Sticks and stones may break my bones, but the constant abuse of language, especially by authorities, is making slaves out of us all.

This one’s just for me: “My mind is like a Border Collie, it needs to drive sheep.” While you think about that, I’ll get next week’s column ready.
Have a Happy, and may Bono be pleased with the New Year.

Neural Folia Bloom at Movie

Here's something I bet you didn't know! Most people think consciousness is a continuous process. That's wrong! Scientists now know that human consciousness, like yours, results from the sporadic "flipping" of neural folia in the brain. In normal people, this "flipping" occurs roughly as often as movie frames. This is why humans like movies. Deep down we recognize ourselves in them.

So when I saw the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2) movie, my first reaction was to greet it. My second reaction was to look for other things that the H2G2 movie and I shared, aside from discontinuity. Hobbies? Signs?

Before going there I'll review the movie really fast.

Douglas Adams mostly wrote it. Douglas Adams mostly wrote H2G2's other incarnations. So objections that it differs from the book are irrelevant. Leave it. Anyway, it's more faithful to the book than you'd expect, given that Adams would hardly have wanted to merely repeat himself. Some jokes are missing, but new ones replace them. You want the old jokes? Read the book again. My main complaint about the movie is that the costume designers who created Marvin took the "brain the size of a planet" line far too literally. Also a movie should be over when the credits roll. No fair inserting content two minutes after the end, so impatient Americans like me never get to see it. Also, Questular Rontok's relationship to Zaphod Beeblebrox sorely needed fleshing out, as they say.

SPOILER ALERT: I will soon give away portions of plot.

What I really want to talk about is how, gosh, did any of you ever notice how Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is all about issues we constantly harp on here at Real Change? In case you haven't noticed this, I will list just some of the ways.

1) We at Real Change constantly bitch and moan about homelessness. Likewise, Arthur Dent, the central character of H2G2, perpetually bitches and moans about planetlessness.

2) We complain about bureaucrats and their callous disregard for human needs. The H2G2 movie makes the Vogons primary antagonists. The Vogons are an entire alien species with callous disregard for human needs. Or even Vogonic needs, really. Arthur Dent can prevail against the Vogons largely because, being British, he knows how to queue. Likewise, having been homeless, I know how to wait at a DSHS office.

3) Vogons detest hitchhiking, a practice that involves getting an unauthorized ride. Many Earthlings detest panhandling. At Real Change we provide an authorized alternative, work.

4) In one scene Arthur Dent and company are trying to rescue Trillian (another human) and every time any one of them gets any idea he is whacked in the face by presumptuous entities to whom they had not been previously introduced. Likewise whenever homeless people get ideas for solving their own problems, it turns out that presumptuous politicians, NIMBYs, and radicals who are more-radical-than-thou (but not themselves actually helping in any way) whack them. Figuratively.

5) To the Vogons, who have no imaginations, Trillian can't establish her identity unless she can legitimately claim a currently existing home planet. To the US Postal Service in Seattle it is unimaginable that Seattle residents who don't have street addresses might require a post office box in the same vicinity as the social services they need. No, none of us has a space ship that can get us to a suburban branch office that provides PO boxes to homeless people and back downtown in time to line up for food and shelter. Yes we all need to get mail. It is no longer a luxury. The 18^th century is over.

6) In the movie, the bowl of petunias thinks "Oh no, not again," just before colliding with a medium-sized planet at several hundred kilometers per hour. Here at Real Change, that's our reaction to most every state budget announcement, and every election. "Oh no, not again." Splat.