Beau Elliot
So I’m sitting, because standing is not good geography if you have bad ankles, looking at a dead computer. As cold as a faraway star, if you’re interested in real geography.
Of course, even faraway stars are not a bit cold, they are hot, fusing, fusion engines much like our Sun.
For which we should be thankful but rarely are. The Sun, after all, invented bacteria on Earth 3.5 or 4 billon years ago (reports from that era are sketchy), and the bacteria invented oxygen to make the planet livable (the Great Oxygention Event) and then the rest of us. Did you know, as The New Yorker reports, that “Not only do bacteria outnumber humans but they outweigh us, too, by a factor of 100 million”?
So thanks to bacteria, we have Red Sox baseball (sometimes extremely bacteria-like), Hawkeye football (Could the real defense stand up? Otherwise, Big Ten teams are going to put up basketball scores, and I love basketball, but …), girlfriends (no comment), the green, green grass of home (don’t listen to the song if you’re diabetic), tree pollen, pollen pollen, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and texting.
Um, thanks, bacteria.
It’s quite obvious that humans had to invent texting. How else would we know we should abbreviate every word that comes down the pike? If indeed it is a pike and not just some secondary county road.
Well, actually, the U.S. military did that abbreviating thing really well before texting was a glint in the eye of the first texter (and whom did he or she text?). (And why?) (All these mysteries of life we’ll never know.)
Speaking of mysteries of life, we seem to be party to an election. Did you get your invitation? I lost mine somewhere, but the election keeps coming around anyway, sort of like that hippie who moved in to live on the couch in 1975 and was still there nine years later when we moved to France. Turns out, France has elections and hippies, too.
Somehow, I forgot about elections, which are certainly a bacterial invention (if not infection). And polls (bacteria eating bacteria).
Of course, the alternative to elections is much worse; just ask any of the people who live in non-election places on the planet that seem to thrive (for a few) like, um, well, bacteria. Hmm.
Meanwhile, back at the raunch, most of the polls say the presidential campaign has tightened, with Clinton losing some percentage points over Trump, especially in the so-called swing states.
However, FiveThirtyEight, which has a good record in this sort of thing, cautions us that the tightening could well be a result of Clinton losing a bit of her post-convention bounce, not Trump necessarily gaining ground.
Trump, by the way, can’t seem to make up his mind on immigration; he’s either running with the white supremacists, beating his substantially pudgy chest, or he’s the kinder, gentler Trumpster who lies about his meeting with Mexico’s president.
Clinton, on the other hand, has stayed out of the spotlight by releasing a War and Peace-size book of her policies. You fell asleep? Yeah, me, too. But then, War and Peace gave me plenty of good nights’ sleep.
Dead computers, elections, polls, the Trumpster, the Hillary, the Red Sox bullpen, bacteria — I gotta get out of this place.
Um, yeah. And go where, exactly?