Sidetracked Charley

The once new year of 2012 seems to be moving to a rapid conclusion. Well, unless the Mayans (or our translations of the Mayans) are right in which case it will end before it ends on December 21st. There are times I think that would not be such a bad thing but then I do not fear the end of days. It is the steady plodding forward that sometimes seems the most disconcerting. That an our propensity to make the passage of time into milestones. I just returned from my first ever class reunion. We were marking the 49th since graduation. I don't think we looked much worse for wear. A small sampling of the best and brightest And the day after the September 8th reunion I realized it was 27 years of sobriety, two years since my ex-husband died because he would not get sober, and ten years since 9/11 was today. They do seem to be making people better these days, even if China is turning out inferior merchandise. I was more surprised at the reunion at those that did not make it to t...

Apologies to Monet And I find myself asking what that is all about. Us humans seem to want to mark time. Measure it off in neat little blocks like weeks and months, days and hours. None of them make a lot of sense. Seven days in a week/why not 5? And we know they have the number of days in a month all screwed up. Sometimes our formula for keeping time has been so out of step with the rotations of the earth and paths of the planets that there have had to be corrections. Rioting in the streets once because the populace thought 10 days had been stolen from them. And yet we suddenly seem so very sure of not merely our measurement of time but the civilizations that came before that we are sure the world is ending on December 21st of this year per the Mayans that did not even have a December. Let alone the year 2012 CE. CE stands for Common Era incidentally and replaces AD which I always said as After Death when it meant Years of our Lord. But he was not everyone's Lord so the CE ...

I blogged on Travels with Charley about where the United States would be if there was no China suddenly. Or that at least something happened which severely limited the amount of exports it could provide. China would also be in a world of hurt if the United States could no longer provide the technology for the new products they want built for export. It brought to mind the Cargo Cults . A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth (the "cargo") of the advanced culture through magical thinking or ritual. These societies came to a head in the wake of WWII when tribes suddenly were exposed to downed aircraft or metal boats or automatic weapons. But I had one anthropology teacher that theorized that ancient Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec and Inca cultures may have been some of the original Cargo Cults as they seem t...