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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

RANDOM THOUGHTS #28

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself.

1. Why do auctioneers have to include all of those extra syllables (jabber) when asking for bids? I have conducted auctions and "I have $20. Does anyone bid $25?" works just fine and is a whole lot less annoying.


2. I see on a lot of cop shows the idea of witness protection. I'm told a lot of these people are criminals who rated on their buddies, while some are innocent people who just happened to witness a crime committed by some extremely violent group of people. I always wonder just how much good it does. Sure, if you relocated me to Portland, the Amarillo mob won't be able to kill me, but there are a lot of people (relatives and friends) who could be kidnapped or killed to bully me into not testifying. Is the government going to relocate everyone I know? Is my cousin going to be happy giving up his farm because I saw a murder committed? But the subject does raise another question, one we might all want to ponder. If you were put into witness protection for some reason, you have to get a job, and it cannot be in your old field. What job would you want? (Steven Petrick wants to be a firearms instructor. Leanna wants to run a wildlife sanctuary, but that might make her too easy to find. I want a job doing military intel analysis on a military base.)

3. Speaker of the House Boehner says that the last two years of spending were "beyond control." Wrong, dude! The four years before THAT were "beyond control." The last two were "beyond absurd."

4. Why do we have 3d movies? They're just annoyingly stupid. I am not going to wear those idiotic glasses. They can make a non-3d DVD and I'll rent it, or better yet wait until it shows up on the Tivo.

5. I saw a television program a while ago about how Australia became populated by the aborigines. It was very interesting. Here's what we know. To populate a new land, you need a minimum of ten married couples. (That sounds so much better than "breeding pairs" now doesn't it?) The sea level was lower back then, but you still could not see Australia from the last island in the chain that started back in Malaya. (You could see another island from all of those, so whenever you got bored or ran out of something, you could paddle your family to the next island.) So how did they know it was there? The paleontologists and anthropologists were full of "the adventurous spirit of man" theories about somebody just padded out there and dumb lucked into it. I personally doubt that. While I agree that the idea of "one boatload of fishermen got lost in a storm and all aborigines are descended from them" doesn't work. However, I still think that one boatload got lost in a storm. (Maybe, over a decade or two, more than one boat did, and most of them died.) One boatload arrived on the Australian beach exhausted and thirsty. They found water (then food) and survived. They rested, thanked their luck they weren't dead, and maybe they looked around a little. Sooner or later, however, they decided that they missed the friends and relatives (spouses, mostly) back on the last island. So, they loaded up five or six days of food and water (they knew how far it was, now that they found it) and set out to get home. Once they got home, they told the story of the new land. Everybody now knew where it was and how far it was. Somebody thought it might be fun to go check it out (or maybe they ran out of tapioca roots on the island they were on). They got two or three boats, loaded up lots of water, some food, and some fishing gear, plus maybe a tent and some cooking tools. Arriving back in Australia (it's pretty big and hard to miss) they set up housekeeping and explored. Maybe they stayed. Maybe now and then, somebody went home to visit, and others from home arrived to join the new colony or set up another colony. Anyway, I just don't think anybody launched a Columbus-style voyage of exploration.

I often do "ten thoughts" but since some of the above are pretty long, I'll just stop here.