Are you here yet, AI?

Guess not. Starting early tonight. Feeling relaxed for first time in long time. Started day by taking mom on her errands: hairdo, stamps, grocery, Home Depot for window cleaner, bank, visit sister-in-law (my aunt) at convalescence home, then home again.

Had contact yesterday and today from a friend at SJ School. Got me to thinking about the transfer of knowledge from individual to individual, generation to generation, past to present. So I decided to pick some video stuff in my virtual library. These are video programs I think everybody should see. (All available on Netflix)

How To Grow a Planet -- reveals how plants, not humans, are the most crucial living things on Earth. Two or 3 episodes. Absolutely mind-bending. Totally, completely fascinating.

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey -- need to put your problems into perspective? Try this series. It will stretch your mind. In the stretching,  you start to get a feel for man's insignificance. The dinosaurs ruled for 160 MILLION years; then they disappeared. From pants-shitting terror to old bones. Nothing guaranteed regarding survival still. But, although we may still be slime on a cosmic scale, we are at least a slime who conceives of a cosmic scale.

Particle Fever -- Documentary about the search for the Higgs Boson with the Large Hadron Collider. Enjoyable to watch some really brilliant people interact with the reality that is ours. They built the most sophisticated machine ever made by human beings to crack open reality and peer inside. It is a joy to meet so many super intelligent people who pool talents to ask the universe some questions. Makes you proud to be human.

The news did relatively little to upset me today. The usual cacophony of politics, crime, wars, kidnappings, etc. Oops! One thing did tee me off: Some pastor named George Hunley of Louisa, VA was at a Jerry Falwell's Liberty University conference pretending to be a Navy Seal. Glad some Army vet noticed discrepancies in the uniform the punk wore. Nabbed his ass. (Not implying that military personnel are sacrosanct, but nobody I know would call military service easy and we take pride in successful accomplishment of that service. Pisses us off when fakes pretend to be part of a service in which many of its members have lost their lives.