Tagged: Hmmm RSS

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  A new theory of time travel 

  I was at Madison's Union Terrace yesterday when I spied a woman that looked as if she was dropped onto her Union sunburst chair directly from 1985. She had that 80s hairstyle where you curl the front of your hair, but leave the back straight and stringy and she was sporting a pair of long, tight-at-the-knee jorts.
  I wondered how anyone could be so oblivious to the fashion of the last 30 odd years. It's not that she wasn't trendy, it's that she was so dated. It was as if she was a...time traveler! With that thought I realized I had made a huge discovery. Maybe unfashionable people are really time travelers from the past or future. Rather than being the targets of our bitchy comments, they should be the targets of our jealousy!
  Think about it, if you were traveling here from 1985, would you care about your clothes? Of course not, you'd just unthinkingly wear the most normal thing you could think of - in this case jorts & a t-shirt, thinking that of course you'd fit in. I mean, you wouldn't even imagine an America sans feathered hair and denim shorts, right?
  It kind of explains why fashion is so ultimately cyclical. Looks like this aren't the work of visionary designers, they're the work of time travelers from the late 80s and early 90s who walked the streets of New York in pinch rolled jeans.
  One of the disturbing things about these time travelers is that it's not as easy to spot time travelers from the future. Maybe it's because when you travel into the past you know how to look to fit in or maybe it's because there is no future. Maybe bums are future time travelers riding out the last days of civilization the best way they know how: drunk.
  My take on time travel might seem a little shallow, but if shows like Star Trek and the Twilight Zone have taught me anything it's that you can't change anything major via time travel. You can't go kill baby Hitler, but maybe, just maybe, you could kill acid-washed jeans. More »

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  Is it morally defensible to destroy an entire species? 

  I was at a party last night and as the sun set, the backyard turned into a kill zone. The mosquitoes were killing me. Like everyone else there, I was quickly driven inside. Even there, the mosquitoes quickly regrouped, hovering on the ceiling and waiting for their next victim. Mosquitoes suck, and it's only June. It's only going to get worse.
  I have a horrible bat phobia. Yet even so, I understand the value of bats. They eat mosquitoes. But what is the value of mosquitoes? Do they contribute anything to the world besides disease, pain, misery and annoyance? If it ever became possible, would it be okay for mankind to wipe them off the face of the earth?
  While I had a hearty knee jerk "YES!" to that question, is that the right answer? Don't most religions and philosophies believe that everything has a value and a purpose? Even mosquitoes. I mean, sure, we kill and eat other plants and animals, but so many cultures are taught to truly value that animal or plant for what it gives us. If we made mosquitoes extinct, it would just be out of spite.
  Or maybe it's not even our right to decide that another species has no value. Who are we to judge? That might be just the kind of hubris that actually would speed up The Rapture.
  Hmmm, or maybe The Rapture happened years and years ago, mosquitoes are part of the whole "hell on earth" thing and the Second Coming is just in the form of my personal savior, DEET.More »

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