Graves

Burying dead bodies has been a sacred act for centuries. The Bible describes Abraham making the first ever recorded land deal for the purpose of burying his wife. It was a nice little field with a cave near Hebron and a steal at four-hundred shekels. The Hittites were astonished at this price. Even Abraham's wife, Sarah who was not yet dead at the time of the purchase, had a strong reaction to the deal. She claimed that her eternal resting place should cost a great deal more, and for Abraham to bargain on the price proved that he didn't love her so much. Sarah went so far as to insist that Abraham pay more. She was buried shortly afterward.

Years later, the tradition of placing a headstone at the grave site came into practice. Its purpose was to keep the dead body in the ground. Family members worried that the deceased would rise up to take care of unfinished business. While walking the earth, the dead would create much mischief and scare the crap out of those whom had not made their peace with the deceased. Back then, companies that manufactured headstones had slogans like, "Keep your loved ones in their holes."

Today, headstones can be beautiful. My friend Alan collects pictures of unusual and finely crafted monuments to the dead. Except, when he snaps the photos he stands right on the grave. I feel that this was disrespectful and, once when I went with Alan to a cemetery, I asked him not to do that. To show me how silly my request was Alan started to dance on top of someone with the last name Milloy. I felt deep down that this was way out of line, but Alan is such a good dancer I just relaxed and enjoyed it.

Blue Skies

Man once believed that the sky overhead was blue because everything beyond our atmosphere was blue. Space was showing through, man thought, and just by nature was a pretty shade of blue. As we learned later, however, space is simply nothing and has no color. There had to be another explanation for the blue sky above our heads.

As Galileo discovered more about optics, he taught us that light emitted from the sun is all colors at once. But some of the light is refracted by molecules of air, dust, moisture and other stuff as the sun streams through our atmosphere. The blue and violet rays are scattered easily because of their short wave lengths. Red rays are longer and pass through without being refracted. That's why we see the sky as blue.

To this day, blue skies possess strong meaning for man. It's a popular notion that blue skies mean good fortune and no worries. Life is good when skies are blue. On the other hand, clouds mean doom is near and that we should worry and wring our hands. We wish clouds would never darken our skies. But that’s just not realistic; if the skies were blue all the time the earth would never receive any rain. Food and flowers wouldn't grow and then we'd starve.

Farmers must think that television weather people are nuts. And not just because of their goofiness and forced familiarity. It's that they are so excited by good weather. They're just bursting to tell us that it's going to be clear and fair. "Yet another beautiful day out there," they might say with pride during an especially long sunny spell. Meanwhile all the crops are parched and dying. Imagine how a farmer must feel as his crops fail from drought while he sits alone and watches a suspiciously friendly weather girl chirp about how lucky we are to have yet another beautiful day.

Some sunny day a TV weather guy will be giggling with excitement in front of his map while the top story is about rioting at the supermarkets because there's no food. Starving and rioting all on yet another beautiful day. Most regular people are excited to meet television personalities. But I bet a farmer would punch a weatherman if they met. Probably knock him on his ass.

Reflections

Most full-length mirrors are about five feet in length which is longer than necessary for people of average height. That's because when you look into a mirror, the angle your eyes can see is equal to the angle of reflection. So if you are six feet tall and you hang your mirror with the top edge at six feet high on your wall, your mirror only needs to be three feet long to see your shoes. No matter how close or far away you stand from the mirror, your shoes will always be showing.

This is the mirror industry's dirty little secret. For years now they have been selling us more mirror than we need, except for the abnormally tall, of course. Think of all the wasted mirror footage hanging uselessly on walls across this great proud land built on thrift. Even the most parsimonious Americans own way more mirror than they need.

It's ironic that mirrors are esteemed for always reflecting the truth; mirror manufacturers have lied to us for centuries simply to line their own well-tailored trouser pockets.

My friend Alan did some heroic work to expose this corporate charade. Through intense lobbying he was able to involve the National Basketball Association in his campaign called "Not So Much Mirror." As part of the NSMM campaign Alan convinced several of the tallest basketball stars to do public service announcements informing the public that even a five-feet tall mirror is too much for a man of seven feet. NSMM initially made great headway until all the lawsuits.

Misguided activists inspired by Alan's crusade against mirror waste were entering homes and smashing full-length mirrors. They smashed every mirror they could find until several of the more radical mirror-smashers began to experience periods of extremely bad luck. They had shattered so many mirrors that the seven-years of bad luck for each began accumulating until their lives were shattered, too.

Alan’s organization was sued out from under him by mirror-smashers claiming to have been turned into zealots by the Not So Much Mirror campaign. Alan was so dejected that he took down all the mirrors in his house because they made him sad. As a result his hair is always badly combed and occasionally he has spinach in his teeth.

Reality

How we perceive our world has a lot to do with how the world actually is. That may seem to be an unnecessary statement of the obvious, but not if you consider separately the two components of the statement. There's our perception of the world and then there's the world itself. Which is the real thing?

The first and most famous philosopher to work at understanding the question of reality was Aristotle. He beleived that our perception of the world was the world. In other words, because we can see things around us, they exist.

This approach has its limits, of course. Take for instance the tree falling in the forest question; Eastern thinkers question Aristotle's point of view by asking the supposedly unanswerable proposition, “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well of course it does, we think. But how can we ever know for certain? Budhdists have pondered this for centuries.

My friend Alan believes he knows. He was camping alone a few weekends ago in a very secluded area and a tree fell about 20 yards away from his campsite. He quickly looked around and there was no one there to hear the tree at all. But according to Alan the tree not only made a sound it scared the crap out of him. He was so excited by this that he packed up all his new Coleman gear and rushed back to town.

We met for a drink downtown. Alan was behaving smugly; he believed that because of his great luck in the forest he had answered the age-old question that had stymied eastern philosophers for centuries. Our waitress was Asian and every time she visited our table Alan smiled slyly up at her and chuckled in a very self-satisfied way. She left our table confused so I told Alan that just because she was Asian didn't mean she knew about the tree falling in the forest question. He didn’t care, though.

Flight

Airplanes weigh a lot, yet they still fly. The trick is to get more air underneath the plane than above it. This is accomplished by creating lift; the speed of forward motion combined with the shape of wings shoves air downward. In turn, the wing and the plane it’s attached to are shoved upward. Complex calculations on speed, weight and aerodynamics are required in aircraft design and, in most cases, have been done long in advance of your commercial flight.

You can see what happens when this calculation goes wrong in those old grainy black and white movies that show the maiden flights of curious flying machines at the turn of the 20th century. After the machine flops to the ground, the pilot wrestles his way out of the wreck and looks at the smoking heap as if he's already trying to work on a solution. Actually he is using every bit of his concentration to pretend that he isn't hurt because he knows that the camera is still running. So he stands there scratching his head as if recalculating while the compound fracture in his leg fills his boot with blood.

It's the same way in everyday life when someone trips and falls down in public; others rush to their aid and the first thing the fallen person says with exasperated insistence is that they are okay, even if they are not.

Once, my friend Alan and I were at a street fair in the summertime. There was calliope music and popcorn and food. Kids ran through the crowd with their faces painted and balloons bobbing along behind. I stepped on a bratwurst and slipped, fell hard on the cement and twisted my ankle badly. Over and over again I just screamed as loudly as I could, "Oh my God! Jesus Christ, my ankle is broken! Ahhhhh Jesus!" Because I don't think its right to lie about your feelings.