On Hollywood Boulevard we passed two men, talking. The younger man was six feet tall, with a pale complexion and lean physique. He had long legs and stood slightly back on his hips, pelvis angled somewhat forward, his arms crossed over his chest. He had unusually blue-black hair, with a single curl down the center of his forehead. The man he was talking to was sunburned and heavy, with a shaved bullet-head, bald on top, wearing heavy glasses on his nose. His arms were thick and fuzzed, and he was holding a camera. The older, heavy-set man was wearing a Madras shirt with notches in the ends of the sleeves, and khaki Dockers. On his feet he had a new pair of tan Kobe Bryant Nike Air Force One shoes. The lanky young man was wearing red high-top boxing boots and blue tights, red briefs, a red cape and a blue body suit with the Superman logo on his chest.
"And how old are you," the heavy-set man said, with a Midwestern accent.
"Forty-four," the young man answered, with an affirmative nod of his head, that tossed the little forehead-curl a little bit.
"The Hawks," are Glap, Andy, and Tanya Ross, three kids from a small town near Munich, Germany, who moved with their mom to LA in 2005. They were born, respectively, in 1985, 1987, and 1996. Glap followed the lead-line note-for-note.
Kevin Costner.
When The Hawks started to cover Eagles' tunes I lit a cigarette and moved on. (Come on, man. I had a rough night and I hate the fuckin' Eagles, man!)
"The Bushes are winners;" she wrote, "the Clintons are winners. We know this, they've won. The Bushes are wired into the Republican money-line system; the Clintons are wired into the Democratic money-line system. For a generation, two generations now, they have had the same dynamics in play, only their friends are on the blue team, not the red, or the red, not the blue.
"It would be understandable if they were families of a most extraordinary natural distinction and self-sacrifice. But these are not the Adamses of Massachusetts we're talking about. You've noticed, right?"
Yes, we have.
Point well made, Carnac the Magnificent, and sans the gaudy turban.
The attainment of power for power's sake is not new; the achievement of notoriety purely for the purposes of notoriety seems as if indeed it is new, a product of the Media Age, when celebrity for celebrity's sake has little to do with natural beauty, extraordinary ability, creative power, incisive thought, or an all-encompassing heart. Nobility in common men and women was never rare. Arguably nobility and true strength of character for everyone is more possible, more likely, more conceivable, than at any time in history, since so many datums of the lives and accomplishments of women and men are now available, along with their perversities. "Finally," said Walt Whitman, "the morality: 'Virtue,' said Marcus Aurelius, 'what is it, only a living and enthusiastic sympathy with Nature?' Perhaps indeed the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same—to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete."
The current benightedness of American leadership is only a local phenomenon; a quark, a comet, a temporary series of quantum and evanescent events, against a firmament starred by the Jeffersonian, Lincolnesque, Wilsonian, Rooseveltian, and Trumanesque; somewhat more permanent embodiments of a greater celestial polity.
"An inertial reference frame is a collection of objects that have no net motion relative to each other. It is a coordinate system defined by the non-accelerated motion of objects with a common direction and speed.
"An event is something that happens independently of the reference frame that might be used to describe it. Turning on a light or the collision of two objects would constitute an event."
When the lights go on, they go on at certain coordinates, in one reference frame. Passing by on the street outside, what would you see, in another reference frame, moving relative to those first, certain coordinates, at a particular velocity v along the x axis?
If you are hungry, and the lights go on at a turkey dinner, do you then break in, and violently seize a drumstick? Do you pull your jacket tighter, search your pockets for a smoke, slouch down the street? Do you pass from the pool of one lighted streetlight to the next, a slow-moving cipher in the chilling night? Do you pass, relatively, from one stasis to the next along a motion parallax, opposite the stuffing and sauce, or hope to make friends later, much later, in the Trailways bus station, at the soup kitchen, toward a new understanding of independence, along a continuum of loneliness, your scrotum contracting in the chilly wind, your eyes tearing, and the pinch of broken soles creaking as you mobilate ahead, all these independent experiences affirming Hubble's constant, the redshift of galaxies, the Universe's expansion, and how long ago it was when all your family were collected around a single board, happy and in love?
Current research estimates this was approximately 13.7 billion years ago, but with significant ambiguity and founded only in faith, in various model family postulations, and studies of meerkat populations in the Kalahari.
In an experiment, microwave photons traveled "instantaneously," between two prisms separated by distances of a few millimeters to a meter. To propel an object faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second per second), Einstein posited, would require an infinite amount of energy.
Where this energy might originate, how it will be used, and where it will go afterwards, the German physicists would not, or could not say. No matter disappears; everything transforms.
The Hartman Effect predicts that time becomes independent of barrier length for thick enough barriers, ultimately resulting in unbounded velocities, so individual photons may appear to be traveling faster than the speed of light.
Once upon a time we sat in a rooftop garden in Lincoln Park. Harry was angry and hurt. Jerry was serene and unperturbed. Joe was big, sheepish and shy; he was the architect. I was the Man in the Middle.
"'Everything That Rises Must Converge,'" I quoted, apropos of nothing, to break the silence. It was a short story by Flannery O'Connor. I thought everyone had heard of it.
The Universe wastes nothing. Where, finally, will everything come to rest? At the scene of a prehistoric Mayan blood-rite? In an immanentizing and scornful séance in the court of Hammurabi? At the end of a length of dirty gold chain and hardened drops of amber flashing above the flames in a fire pit surrounded by Picts in ancient Ireland?
The Hartman Effect also predicts one might be murdered in Encino with a revolver, shot multiple times in and around the head, by a cocaine, margarita, and Zoloft-addled wife or lover, your ashes scattered over Santa Catalina Island's Emerald Bay, only to subsequently enjoy an afterlife in syndication as a Conehead.
Clearly, The United States is getting the leaders it deserves, in spades. Whether this is due to pop culture (where every truth no matter how righteous is reduced and distilled to its potential market in music, image, and idiom) or a leadership in thrall to the oil patch and Detroit, or addicted to perks of the Presidency like oral sex from the staff or payoffs from Chinese lobbyists, is unknown. Famously, Edward Gibbon said, "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Less famously, he also said "Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book."