In the Hall of Knowledge

There is a common misconception afoot in America that we, Homo sapiens, are descended from the apes.  We are not.  It is actually much worse than that.  We are, in fact, descended from the rats.  Any tenth grade biology student, and now me, could tell you that, while we share a common ancestor with the apes, we are not directly descended from the simian family.  We are, however, directly descended from the rat ancestor known as Megazostrodon, which was the first prehistoric mammal.  Our great civilization basically started out as a group of dinosaur egg stealing, bark chewing, nocturnal rodents.  I am sorry if this offends you.  But science is science, unless of course you are running for president of the United States on the Republican ticket.  In that case science is innuendo.  An inconvenience that gets in the way of our egos.

But the story gets worse.  It is even more shocking than you might imagine.  I learned of our primordial ancestor in the Hall of Mammals at the Smithsonian Institute Museum of Natural History.  In Washington DC.  And it didn’t cost me a dime!  (At the time of admission anyway).  That’s right.  Public money, aka your  tax dollars, paid for this bit of conjectural information.  It is not quite clear to me where the Smithsonian gets its endowment, but I smell a rat, pardon the pun.  For five hours I wandered around the halls of this great repository of American natural history and I never paid an admission price, nor was I solicited to make a voluntary contribution.  There was the Hall of Ocean Life.  The Hall of Precambrian Fossils and the Hall of Postcambrian Fossils.  The Hall of Mammals and the Hall of Reptiles.  And of course the Hall of Man, with its focus on hominid (us) evolution.  But no where, no where, was there a Hall of Intelligent Design!  At any moment in my wanderings I expected to enter an awesome hall where, instead of a giant blue whale hanging from the ceiling, there would be a giant bearded man pointing down to Earth. And before his outstretched index finger would stand a naked hominid with no resemblance what so ever to Alley Oop our prototypical cave man.  Walk a few steps further and there, behind the glass, would stand the apple tree with the snake himself in a jar of formaldehyde, forked tongue extended, mocking us for the stupid choices humans make.  

This being the Natural  History Museum, the centerpiece of the Hall of Intelligent Design would have to be a splinter of wood from Noah’s Ark.  Displayed prominently in a 360 degree glass case with little interactive buttons to press.  Push one and learn how the great diversity of life on Earth was preserved on a boat during the Great Flood.  Push another and see how the boat might possibly have been built with slave labor providing the necessary man power.  And finally, as a tie in to the Hall of Marine Mammals, you would actually walk thru the belly of a ginormous  latex whale, like Jonah, on your way to the museum gift shop.  It would only be fair.

To compound this imbalance in portraying our American culture, the American History Museum, across the way, had entire galleries devoted to the frivolities of television and Hollywood.  There, ensconced in his very own case, was the original Kermit the Frog.  He wasn’t green by the way.  More of a shit brindle brown.   And from the moment one entered the museum you were bombarded by signs crowing about the newly acquired ruby slippers that magically teleported Dorothy back to Kansas in the Wizard of Oz. There was even a purple Dumbo car from the Dumbo Whirl-a gig ride in Disneyland.  Thank Providence that our founding fathers knew the difference between fun and faith. 

Life in the Green Zone

It was during the last half of the eighteenth century when Ben Franklin first posited about the false economy in removing all the trees around one's property.  He mused about the as yet unknown oxygen cycle whereby trees replenish the bad air expelled by animals, with more refreshed air for us to breathe.  He came up with this idea because of an experiment conducted by Joesph Priestly which involved a candle, a mint sprig, a bell jar and a mouse. His postulate preceded ecosystem science by 200 years. True story.

The Priestly Experiment

So it is with the blessings of one of our greatest founding forefathers that Tammy and I always felt it necessary to live amongst the trees.  We never even considered living in a subdivision built on an old farm where one Bradford Pear per quarter acre is considered woodland living.  True, Kentucky Bluegrass conducts photosynthesis on a regular basis but due to our active lifestyle and the abundance of hot air I produce we need enough oxygen that only a forest of 200 year old oaks can generate.  And I always felt a few back breaking days of raking leaves every year is a small price to pay for all that recycled air. 

But a series of recent events have led me to rethink my position.    Actually a series of events over the course of the last 25 years.  No, a tree did not fall on our house, though the daily barrage of acorns raining down on our roof has led me to believe Chicken Little may have been on to something.  I did not think acorns hitting a roof could make such a racket.  It's as if the squirrels are the German Luftwaffe and our home the British House of Commons.  Nor is the stick (pardon the pun) that broke the camel's back the drudgery of bending over and picking up the 50 gallon trash can's worth of branches every week.  A large limb did fall and dent the hood of Tammy's car a few years back but that is when I still valued the friendship of the foliage.

Over the course of the years I have tried to take a preemptive approach to removing the dangerous trees before they can inflict damage on our property.  Much like Bush's War on Terror.  I don't hate all the Ents.  Just the arborofascists that want to destroy our way of life by suicide bombing my house by crashing down on the roof.  And also like the war on terror, my preemptive pruning just seems to make them angrier and more prolific.  Every time I remove one, three more seem to grow in its place.  But in any case, the twig that finally convinced me to want to move to a gated, over 55 community with no trees, was a thirty inch diameter Beech that fell into the lake behind our house.  No property damage, fortunately, but my sources tell me we may need to bring in a crane to remove it.  True story.  I will post the pics when the crane rolls in.

In the mean time I will continue to advocate for better understanding between the  autotrophs and heterotrophs because we all have to share the same Earth.

She Bang

It has often been noted that political women have a twofold burden when in the public eye.  Not only must they be quick witted, but they have to look good doing it.  Men, it is often lamented, do not have to live up to this double standard.  Well even the most apathetic student of evolutionary psychology will come to learn the fallacy of this argument in the first year of his studies.  It is a well known paradigm that women are attracted to virile behaviors [in men] such as an ability to kill and skin a bear in the wild or the resources to make a lot of money during a bear market on Wall Street.  Men, on the other hand, are attracted to physical attributes such as nice skin and large breasts.  It is a self evident truth [in light of advances in dermatology, plastic surgery, and Lasix] that it may indeed be more convenient to change one's superficial looks than to reconfigure one's masculinity.  You will therefore forgive me for limiting my remarks to Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin as I see no hope for Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman.  Rick Perry and Mitt Romney can obviously kick the shit out of them so all they have to do is have a rutting match to lock up the female Republican vote.  No one seriously doubts that the Ann Coulter Pod People care for much else.

So what does Sarah have that Michele does not?  Bangs of course.  If you have a forehead that only an extraterrestrial could love then I suggest it should be hidden behind some hair.  A very facile and effective grooming approach that I am quite certain will soften Michele up a bit.  Her inscience won't play too well outside of Iowa so perhaps her coiffure can.  Conservative women, after all, are more pretty than pedantic.  If you don't believe me I suggest you compare and contrast the women of Fox News to the lineup over at PBS or MSNBC.  OK, perhaps Rachel Maddow is sensual in a sexy butchy sort of way but Fox has the 18-55 male demographic tied up with Jenna Lee and Courtney Friel. 

We should not apologize for our licentious feelings as they are just that, feelings.  Both men and women have them.  But we can rise above them.