Parties Indistinguishable from a Certain Perspective

2017-03-26 15:18:43-0400

There are a lot of people who have problems with the idea that the two major parties are interchangeable. It's easy to see that in most cases, the Republicans are a lot worse. But here's where perspective is needed: of all the abuses that the worst of the agendas of the two major parties are capable of - among them, for instance, starting and maintaining unnecessary wars, precipitating  "collateral damage" from drone strikes, not prosecuting financial criminals, and packing the supreme court with ideologues - it really pales compared with the real problems of climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, soil depletion, and nuclear contamination - ecosystemic abuses on a global scale that impact centuries of life on this planet. That is, the life we depend on and are part of, plant and animal.

  So, yes, we may have a crappy Supreme Court and lose long validated rights. We will continue to fight needless wars. But it won't matter while the substrate of life on Earth is changed faster and more permanently than life can adapt to it. In fact, life may not be able to adapt to nuclear contamination at all. Even the immortal corporations will not be able to squeeze profits from the sterile husk of a once living planet.

 It's hard to be hopeful in the face of these problems. It's hard to see how a political system can be leveraged to allocate resources toward mitigating these problems. Politics tends to run bill-to-bill, election-to-election, just as corporations see quarter-to-quarter. These institutions need to recognize that their edifices rest on a foundation of sufficient clean air, water, food, and shelter, and that their currently accepted operations and business plans are eroding these foundations, not only for themselves, but for the institutions they depend on to externalize their risks.

What is needed  is consciousness raising, and to stop denying that all these global perilous crises are now in progress. These issues need a voice, and that voice needs to be heard so as to redirect fear based politics at phenomena truly worth fearing.

 There must be a coordinated international effort, since there is only one borderless earth, sea and atmosphere. Any remediative action is beyond the legislative power of any single government, and solutions ranging from energy conservation, new sustainable energy sources, and some sort of carbon sequestering may only be the first of many coordinated international changes needed. This means that the politics to accomplish this must also be coordinated on an international level, and they must conceive and put into effect paradigm breaking actions, such as found in wartime, depressions, or other extraordinary times.

Dust and Shavings

 2014-09-29 01:56:04-0400

                                   Dust and Shavings

The weather was beautiful, but I brushed the pine cones off of the car hood and set off on the 10 hour trip to visit my father's old buddy Richard "Rivet" O'Day. O'Day wrote me a few weeks ago to say he'd found some memorabilia of my father's in the back of an old filing cabinet in his garage, and a few other things he thought I'd like to see. I felt like I needed a break from Amy anyway, so I gassed up - I always carry a few extra gallons in the trunk - and off I went.

Driving through the night is the best way to get to the middle of the desert.

I got into Rivet's at about 10AM, and I was hungry. He lived in an adobe-like dwelling with pair of Army surplus quonset huts and a few tin shacks in the back. There was a working oil rig there too - repurposed to pump water. Rivet was a clever guy with tools. He borrowed a lot of them from work and had quite a collection of precise milling and drilling machines, toolmaking equipment, tiny welding torches, and testing equipment. He was a bit of a fanatic - all his kitchen cabinets have brass labels on them describing the contents, engraved using the classic engineer's Leroy typeface.

We shared  breakfast burritos, served on turned anodized aluminum plates, which he had made out of recycled travel cases used by some missile salesmen in the early 60s.

The design of his house cleverly kept the dust and sand out, which was good, since it was downwind of some former nuclear test sites. Solar cells, recycled from some failed government project or other, and a geothermal system he had drilled himself, kept the house pretty cool. "Your car will be happier in the garage," he said, and pushed open the door and a second door, which helped keep the inside cool. I drove in while he switched on the lights.

The garage was filled with finished and unfinished projects. I'd visited here years ago, but now I could really see how densely this room was populated with all kinds of machines. I remembered the smell of oil, acetone, and metal dust. He had presses and wire-making tools. He had a small crucible with a centrifuge in it. He has a few barrels of scrap metal shavings. A few tires were dissolving in vats and the reprocessed rubber was dripping into some glass jars. Nothing was wasted.

It wasn't all antique either, he had a well organized cabinet of computer parts and breadboards, logic scopes, and a few not very out of date computers.
Over a desk on the other side of the room, where some kind of tachometer was installed, was a 1952 pinup calendar. Miss November has just dropped a wrench. Miss November was my mom.

"I'm still working on a few things," said Rivet, "That's how I found your fathers's stuff. Here you go," and he handed me a wooden box. Inside were a hat and coveralls, which I remembered seeing him wear in an old photograph. A box of index cards, a screwdriver set, some papers that looked like contracts or discharge papers.

"That's a nice car you have," he said looking back at my restored Luxia Panther. It looks like a typical car at inspection time, but the whole body is customizable, and I like to replace pieces of it with different styles and colors. Its unique propulsion design lets me cut in up to four separate engines when I need the power. "Just like your dad. He loved cars almost as much as I do. Come back here for a second." He walked to the back of the hut and let me out the back door to the other quonset hut. As we left, the lights went out automatically.

The other hut had four doors to get through. It was clearly more insulated and the last door was especially heavy. Inside, several vehicles were seen covered with drop cloths. Hanging on the walls were a lot of drive belts, bent metal tubes, glass blobs on shelves, and old cans of various oils.

"This one's 'The Shaker'," Rivet explained as he took off the cloth from the closest machine. "It has no wheels, it vibrates the bottom to move around, The top moves in the exact opposite direction, so you never feel it. It has a side effect of tamping down a pretty usable road!" I could see it also had a kind of weed-whacker device underneath to help clear a path.

Another cloth came off. "Stilts," said Rivet. Telescoping legs with a magnetic connection between them could assist your running by growing longer the faster you ran. "You don't want to trip while you're in this thing," said Rivet, rubbing his chin, which I noticed was just a bit asymmetrical.

"Look up," he said and pointed to a kite with sails that could unfurl for more power, "He made this when it was tough to get gas for the motorboat. He also used it with roller skates."

"And back here is something I always think about and I'm hoping you'll take it off my hands, since you like cars."

Under the closest tarp was a pretty snazzy looking '58 Buick Estate Wagon. "Solid," I said as I banged on the hood. It was a kind of a dull bang.  Peering through the window, I could see that it had a few extra controls on the floor. The back of the wagon was filled with something squat and cylindrical. "This thing is still ahead of its time," said Rivet, walking over to a cabinet to get its key.
It looked OK for being neglected for a few years. There were a few dead mice under the rear bumper. There was a strange sand-blasted look to the trim.

"Did Hess ever tell you about this car?" asked Rivet.

"He said he had built a car once when I was working on that Ford Fairlane in high school, but otherwise no."

"Well this is the car, then." he said, trying the key. A vigorous honk made us jump a little. "Electrical's working apparently. That's a good sign."

The door was a little stiff, but the lights came on. The dashboard lit up, and where the radio would have been was a small group of dials and switches.

"There was a problem we were working on that needed some extracurricular activity," explained Rivet. "Atoms for Peace was a dangerous failure. But we figured the main problem was that we were using atomic energy for unnatural purposes. Explosions happen when the chain reaction in not isolated in a vacuum or magnetic bubble. So we figured out what the tiniest mass could be that would sustain a reaction and then isolated it in a magnetic bubble in a vacuum. The trick was to machine permanent magnets in precise shapes that are the inverse of their 3d field structure. You have to make a lot of these shards and they are pretty small. The two geometries cancel out, leaving a magnetic bubble, with a little magnetic lens on one side. That's it in the back of the car." He pulled a release and the hood popped open and rolled back. "We replaced the V8 with these twin plasma turbines. A stream of ions spins the turbines over here, and are re-compressed on the other side.
We had to rebuild the gearbox because the speed was too high and we couldn't fine tune the plasma stream safely. So we invented this continuous ratio gear system based on hyperbolic conical gears carved in what we'd call a fractal pattern today. The rest of the car is pretty standard."

"So, are you telling my that you and my Dad built an atomic car in 1958?" I asked, picking my jaw up from the floor.

"1961. It was a used car. It was bought as the family car when you and your sister were born."

"But this is insane? How many patents did you take out?"

"We were using the government's patents for some of the milling and refining. The shape of the core is remarkable, and is a tribute to your father's love of origami."

"So this thing works?"

"Yes and no. It doesn't have a reverse gear in the usual sense. The gear design didn't allow for it, so we just put it in neutral and pushed it where it need to go. Also, we were afraid to take it up over 150MPH."

"150!!?"

"Even that was a little suspicious. But then we had to figure out how to slow it down without causing damage to the gearbox, since the turbines spin at a constant 50,000 RPM speed. Incidentally, the gyroscopic effect of those turbines makes for an extremely stable ride. You actually have to tilt them when cornering. There's an extra pantograph welded onto the steering linkage that does this," he continued, pointing to the metal scissors-like contraption.

"So this thing works?" I repeated.

"Let's see," said Rivet, settling into the driver's seat. "Hop in. Hey, look!"
Under the front passengers seat was a plastic rattle. "This belong to you?" he chuckled. Then he turned the key and a vibration started, slowly building into a whine.

 "We scraped up enough U-238 to last 200 years. This system is very efficient because it's a closed system. When you shut it down, it really just recycles the alpha particles back in a  loop. You can't really shut it off. In a sense, it's been running since 1961. Sometimes the lens gets out of alignment and you can hear the turbine go down from a slightly sharp "B" to something like a "G flat". When that happens, you have to refocus it, with this red knob here."

"OK, into neutral so we can back it out." I noticed that handles had thoughtfully been added to the trim. I grabbed one and pushed it back. For such a heavy vehicle, it was surprisingly easy to move. Rivet opened the back of the hut with an old TV remote.

"How can this be safe? I mean, in an accident, wouldn't there be some concern about, oh, ground zero on Route 66?"

"It's been in accidents. Not bad ones. There's a cage you can see right here and we put in seat belts taken from an old DC-3. There were no radiation leaks, you can check with the Geiger counter dial."

The dial was pointing to a green segment.

By this time we were out in the open. We pointed the car toward a distant box canyon. The fins and tail lights really put me in a space-age mood.

"OK, ready to roll!" said Rivet, adjusting the rearview mirror and pulling my door shut with a back scratcher. From the mirror hung two fuzzy mushrooms. "Your Mom made these," he said.

"Did she ever ride in this?"

"Oh yeah. She drove it in a friendly little race we had. A bunch of dragsters wanted to prove something. You'll see, the way the car accelerates is pretty unusual. It was kind of a surprise to them."

He stepped on the clutch and pulled back on a gear lever. The car inched forward, accelerating slowly. Very slowly.

"It takes about 30 seconds for the gear to build up to speed if you don't want to tear it apart."

Since the hood was off, I could see the twin turbine block starting to glow. Sand blowing onto the block was melting on contact.  I wondered if this was a bad sign. Rivet seemed unconcerned.

I was pushed back in my seat as the car continuously accelerated.
Rivet eased back and we could see that we were cruising at 125 MPH.

"These tires are special too, they spread out for better grip at high speeds. Also, the rubber is like memory metal, it grows and shrinks when we want it to."

A puddle of molten glass was building up on the exposed engine block. Rivet saw this and turned on something like a windshield wiper that scraped the glass into a metal bucket on the side of the engine.

Rivet took the car on a wide turn to point back to the hut. The car heeled over to correct for the terrific speed.  Gearing down the engine, he glided back to the quonset hut. He turned it off, and the turbines wound down.

He dangled the keys in front of me. In my mind, I was redesigning the gear system to add in the reverse my father had left out. I took them.

I took it out for a spin myself. It took some getting used to. There's also no way you can't feel like a space age rocket jockey knowing you are going that fast in a heavy car with fins on it. I felt like honking the horn.  But when I pushed the horn button, I found out, what it really did was tilt the turbine up and immediately the car left the ground. Crazy with fear, I tried unhonking the horn, whatever that is. Something I did got me back down, and decided quickly I had had enough for the day.

I'm happy to say, the brakes were in great shape after all this time.

"Rivet, how am I going to get this thing out of here with no license plate and no trailer?"

"Now that you know about it, get that stuff together and come and get it."

"There's no way anyone will let this on the road!"

"Don't drive it on a road."

"Rivet, this technology - it could have completely powered civilization for the past 50 years!"

"There were already a lot of companies powering civilization for the last 50 years! They liked to talk about 'too cheap to meter,' but where's the profit in that?"

"Can't you just use it to run your house or something?"

"I've already got a little generator like this running the house. It has enough dust and shavings for 60 years or so."

"Maybe you can tell me how to convert it - I don't need to be driving a cruise missile down to the grocery store."

"I guess I could help with that. I'll draw up some plans for next time."

"That'd be great!"

I'm still waiting for those plans.


[repost: edited from sept 16 2012]

Licked

2012-07-29 16:17:47-0400

Is this the last stamp that I shall ever lick?

After all, it is a first day cover, and I am sending it under cover of darkness. I wrote the letter undercover under the covers. It is being sent to an old cove, a member of a coven, living in a house by a cove.

I posted the letter at the post office. I postulate that I will post about posting the letter. Post posting the post, it will be a past post. 

Debt to the Earth

2012-07-16 22:09:19-0400

Somehow, the most important motivation for activity in the world has become to service debt. It is not to build the infrastructure for a more efficient future, to repair and improve housing and transportation options, or otherwise create a basis for sustaining a productive balance between living things and the resources they consume.

Of all the laws to be broken -  a state of war, say , is an example of sanctioned law breaking, defaulting on a financial debt is taken to be unquestionable.

But there are greater debts: they are the debts we owe the earth, the air, the water, and the living things of the earth,  and these debts we pass on to our progeny more tangibly than the wholly statutory debts of the economic system. 

With this in mind, we now are free to declare a war on financial debt, similar to the war on another abstraction,  terrorism. Once it is defeated, we can go on to the more pressing business of securing a sustainable future. Indeed, securing that future would mean the end of financial debt, and go a long way toward paying back the more substantial physical debts previously mentioned. 

Home Improvements

2012-04-13 10:26:18-0400

The way I'm building the new house is really interesting. First of all, the land was donated by the town because it's a brownfield in a flood plain. So the first thing I did was dig down to the bedrock, about 12 feet down, and soaked all that soil in a big heavy-metal-digesting algae tank. Since I work at C6, the carbon nanotech materials company, I had access to some experimental carbon fab equipment. There's this new device which takes a carbon source (the algae in this case) , purifies it (actually resulting in some little grains of those aforementioned heavy metals), and builds it into fibers that are about as strong as anything can be. The device makes a 1x1cm rod about 10 meters long. This rod is so light and stiff that it doesn't bend at all, ever. I modded the device, so that it build a cross bar bud every meter or so.

The base of the structure is a kind of mesh that actually bonds directly to the bedrock at the molecular level - no other adhesives are necessary. I'm also building a kind of swale/dike, anchored the same way, that will direct the water around the house and back to the river in case of a flood. It will actually create a wall of hydrodynamically stable water in that case. This is only possible because of the unimaginable strength of these materials.

I intend to build a super strong shell with integrated triple pane diamond windows in it. Inside the shell will be a shelter, which can be as fanciful and flimsy as I wish, since the shell completely protects it from the elements, a series of green house plots and water purification stations (boiled by black graphite heated by diamond fresnel lenses), and other sustainable amenities. Heat radiation is also directed at a large slab of exposed bedrock, which retains the heat overnight.

I'm going a little nuts with the fab machine, making a kind of diamond bubble substrate, on which I can spray some photocell material that self organizes into redundant micro electric cells. The cells squeeze all the sunlight that normally would be reflected off into the cavities of micro-bubbles, making them highly efficient and profoundly flat black colored. The electricity is channeled into a system of microwave laser transmitters and directly broadcast into my battery/inverter system.

This house will be a kind of showcase for C6, so it's being documented as I build it. Stay tuned!

Behind the Glasses

2012-02-16 21:40:37-0500

Every morning, it was a struggle for him to choose which glasses were the right glasses. Yes, the prescriptions had long expired for most of them, some were bent and cracked, some were tinted, or had ultra-violet protective coatings of some sort. So his choice of glasses was heavily influenced by environmental factors. For example: the sunglasses. Some were graded, some very dark, others, a light pink tint, others amber. Beyond the lenses, the frame styles presented another wide array of choices. Many were designed by designers, while others seemed to have been taken from the dollar store reading glasses display. There was not just the choice of glasses - there was as well the choice of lighting: incandescent, natural, fluorescent, LED? Which pair was exactly right for that day - to match the object of the male gaze with an ability to gaze in the first place?

Sacrificial Trees

2018-06-04 08:03:34-0400

It's that time of year when the Christmas trees go out. Buying, displaying, and disposing of Christmas trees is practically the only practice remaining of the religious ritual of sacrifice. Acres are given over to the growth of Christmas trees, nurtured for years until they are cut down, carted to parking lots, selected and bought, driven off, decorated for a few weeks, and then, usually without ceremony, stripped of finery and placed on the sidewalk.

In ancient times, the quality of the sacrificial goods was carefully evaluated to match the amount of godly appeasement with one's budget. It was a public ritual, and in many cases, a beneficent gesture from the gods in response to the sacrifice, say, a good growing season, benefitted the whole community. But American Christmas trees get no such ritual, and their sacrifice is not attended by requests for divine intervention. Yet here they sit, in rows in death as in life, out by the street: brittle, flammable, naked, and unsanctified. But what if we were to take these trees and collect them in a public square, and ignite them as in the old days, with praying, singing, and joy?

Community Chemistry

2011-11-28 22:58:51-0500

We spent the morning washing out the tannins. And tannins were everywhere. Buckwheat. Avocado pits. Hemlock bark. We washed it out and processed it, and placed it in little baby food jars. When we had a dozen of them, packed in an egg case, we put it in a cardboard box addressed to the Gilbert Chemical Company. That's how you'd get the bottle of tannic acid in your chemistry sets. 

Our neighbor next door does all the sulfur bottles. The crossing guard makes the gum arabic. Mr. Berlin at the candy store works nights on the copper sulfate. Mrs. Fishbein grinds out the sodium bisulfate and her husband does the sodium bisulfite. And my friend Danny's mother's cub scout den makes the litmus paper.

In our town, Chemistry is a cottage industry. Being up in the mountains, surrounded by exploitable natural resources, it's been part of the town culture for years. There's a natural gas "spring" that we tap to run the town's bunsen burners and gaslights. The library stocks old lab reports and educational films. We even have an abandoned radon spa.

Around here, politicians don't mention superfund sites, nuclear waste dumps, Bhopal, or other chemical disasters. That's no way to get elected.

Garden Report

2011-10-24 10:22:17-0400

"Land sakes!" she was heard exclaiming, as the far corner of the garden's raised bed boxes split open, sliding the topsoil on the ground, complete with tomato plants. The nails had rusted through, and although it was still morning, it would take all day for the garden to be cleaned up and put back in order. I helped a little with that. 

The roof over the shed wasn't looking too good either: the tin patch was useless, shingles were cracked, lichens were holding together large patches of it. And inside the shed, bird nests, yellow jacket nests and unspooling spools of wire fence made for a cautious entry. Under a tarp, the old boat was still in good shape, but the trailer's tires were flat. The tools on the wall were blocked off by piles of wood scraps. 

So it was no surprise when, a week later, the whole thing went up in flames when the wildfires breached the retaining walls next door. Hattie managed to wet down a kind of moat that protected the front part of the garden, but the back part was a loss. The dogs were fascinated with the fire, as they approached barking, and then retreated from the heat. Horrid smells from burst cans of garden chemicals lay in the air. Afterward, Hec raked up a pile of the remains, picking out things that seems salvageable.

Bandanas

2011-10-12 23:22:48-0400

Next to the belts were many piles of bandanas. There was a small collection of miniature log cabins by them, welcome postcards, and other souvenirs. Which should I choose? True - the mouse droppings by the cabins made them an easy item to put off the list. Many of the welcome postcards were water damaged and warped, or foxed. So: bandanas. Some were fairly plain, but others had recipes printed on them, maps, smiling cowboys and horses, crossed guns and branding irons.

I was interested in the branding irons.

When I was a kid I used one at the Lazy 8 ranch, which, as the name implies, has an infinite pasture shaped like a Klein bottle. We lost a lot of cattle, but we found a lot too. Different shapes and colors. Not always edible. Not always what you would call cattle, if you looked at them for more than a second. It was complicated and disturbing, so calling them "cattle" made things a lot easier. We would take turns branding the critters, but sometimes, we couldn't find a place to brand them. We thought maybe taking pictures of them would do, but many were kind of radioactive and didn't show up on film too well. Anyway, it was hard to leave the farm, since it was an infinite mono-surface 3d space with a negative curvature when you came at it one way and a positive one coming the other way. Sometimes, it was all you could do to keep from running into yourself, if you travelled up to the neck. 

I chased a dog up there one day and I haven't found my way back. I hope my folks don't miss me too much. I don't know how time flows out here, but in there, you can fix things like that. You get as many chances as you like. Out here, one mistake and Pfft!.

Creature Solidarity

2011-09-29 10:06:56-0400

Lizards were scampering away from the path to the doorway. They were not large, they had only a few spots, and some could climb away on the stucco walls around the door. All around, the sound of birds and insects made a distracting noise. I felt around under the ivy, and found the bell pull. The chain was rusted and covered with vines. Pulling it, petals, dead leaves and nests fell to the earth, while the tolling of the doorbell sounded deep within the house. With the bell, the animals, birds and insects raised a chorus in response. The crickets, black, hard, and shiny, started lining up in phalanxes behind me, in order of their size, while the geckos and iguanas moved in on the sides. Above in the trees, crows started murdering, squirrels formed ordered ranks and raccoons marched confidently out of the woods. In one voice, choral, with each animals sounds carefully modulated to blend in with the others to make a human voice, I heard: "We have come. Let us work together. Join us."

Egg Repair

2011-09-26 11:37:50-0400

She took the egg mold out of the steamer and, cracking it, she replaced the missing plastic gasket in the sink. "Egg white can be cast to almost any shape, is edible, and consequently, bio-degradable." Stella is one of a growing movement of homemakers who use food and other easily available materials to fix up their homes, do household chores, landscaping and auto repair. "These ceramics are made of fused eggshells, and these nails, I just made out of iron I picked out of the caldera over there after throwing in some of these rocks."

Stone chips

2011-09-25 08:39:20-0400

In the trench are little piles of white stones. It's clear that the stones were once parts of a laudatory statue set up by the previous administration. It's a pity that with every new election, icons are dragged off to be dismantled, since the changing winds of politics means that new statues need to be carved constantly.
The stone chips, being marble, can be heated and dissolved into a kind of lime, which we use for covering out walkways, gardening, and as ballast.

Religious food

2011-09-22 22:51:19-0400

Unleavened bread is cheaper immediately after Pesach. It loses its mystic powers and becomes like a simple communion wafer, which needs extra magic to transubstantiate. Without the specific prayers enabling this, you may accidentally be eating the body of Naphthali or other lesser Biblical characters. Make sure you carefully read the "Nutrition Facts," that will give you a clue as to the efficacy and digestibility of the wafer. Pay close attention to the sodium content.

In the Kitchen

2011-09-21 12:04:40-0400

Only the worst kind of vermicelli tends to clump. All problems can be avoided by about 15cc of olive oil. So, I went out in the backyard, plucked some olives, crushed them in my nutcracker, spun them in the centrifuge, precisely toasted them in the autoclave, and dripped it into the pot with an IV. But you cannot cook with the radio on, I've found, nor when the smoke alarm is alarming. And under the stove, there's rustling that I don't want to investigate.

Cuticles

2011-09-20 15:10:07-0400

Jealous of her tiny cuticles, Glinda observed, then flipped her turn signal, waited for the truck to pass, and wandered, slowly, into the left lane. Pumpkins were growing on the left , and some has piled up at the intersection to cross. A vinyl covered couch was waiting on the other side for the light to change. Impatient, it began inching across the street against the light. The pumpkins hopped up and down with glee. Meanwhile, Glinda's fingernails continued growing. The sun was on its second transit, and yet the light hadn't changed. It was a moral dilemma : should she attempt to drive around the couch, scaring the pumpkins while her nails grew to a frightening length, or wait for the light to change?

The Last Least Past Path

Ralph tossed the roast towel off and sloughed the rough toast, kissed the fast plaster post and the glass master coaster, mashed flashy, fishy four-poster toaster tasters' gaskets in the basket. "You're wasted worsted vested oysters, pestered blisters, and crested twisted threshers, crushed and pressed in slashed washed patches of blanched pits."

Quickly, Stapely whisked the sticky licorice swizzle sticks, picking lists and pesky disks amidst risky pickled dishes.

A skewered annuity and a prudent stewed suety cruet of humus ruined two blue ewes in suede shoed and shaved glued shades. Whose raisin rosin raised racist reasons? Racine.

Read by a robot:

https://www.jhhl.net/Mp3/Otherness/The%20Last%20Least%20Past%20Path.mp3

Fable (1973 again?)

Once in the land of cotton candy there was a boy named Aluminum. Now, there were not many boys at that time named Aluminum, at least not as many as are called that now. Anyway, Alu, as people began to call him, has a deep affinity for poached robin eggs. The robins he stole from liked not this unruly, and in their point of view, cannibalistic behavior. So they held a meeting to see what would be done.
 "I move we peck his eyes out!", volunteered a violent radical member of the flock. "May all who commit such acts be so punished!" Most of the members heartily applauded this direct and effective measure.
 They snuck up on Alu in the middle of the night, but the robin who proposed the action crept silently back to his nest. Before they could peck out both eyes, Alu awoke, and chased them off except for a few, which he held for questioning. After grilling them under a 60-watt bulb for almost an hour, one of the robins became a stool-pigeon. The location of the nest where the plans were made was disclosed, and also the very nest of the culprit was pointed out. Alu came over to his friend Dysprosium, and asked him to assist him. Before the day was over, there were no raw robins' eggs left in the forest.

Moral:

Fable (1973?)

Harvey was a contented lightbulb. His best friend was a pair of scissors named Mannheim and Mathilda.

They sat together on a low table in someone's house. In this harsh world it is hard to find a pair of scissors and a lightbulb being such good friends. But even so, they were, and often discussed politics, theology, entomology, and nuclear astrophysics with each other.

But, alas, the mind of the scissors is only as sharp as its blades, and the mind of the lightbulb is only as bright as its tungsten. So this relationship was doomed from the start. Harvey got dimmer daily, and Mannheim and Mathilda weren't getting any younger. On a cold February morning, Harvey died. His friends couldn't bear teh prospect of a Harveyless life, so they were locked in eternal embrace and never let go until they were incinerated.

And when they all reached Metal Heaven, all the stars were dim at Harvey's glow and all the mountains dull by Mannheim and Mathilda's comparison.

Moral: Love Conquers All.

Pressure

I took a look at myself the other day and saw that there were impressions on my skin from sitting in a wicker chair for a few hours. I found that if I were to dust these impressions with paprika, I could press a tortilla on my skin and create a kind of reproduction of the chair pattern. 

Eager to monetize this discovery, I sat in many chairs and on many impressionable objects. I sat on combs, coins, origami, miscellaneous hardware and on nuts and seeds. each produced a satisfying edible print. After documenting the imagery, these tortillas were packaged in plastic and carefully tucked into the deep freeze for eventual sale. 

I found that I was running out of skin to impress. I had to impress my friends and family in order to press their skins into service. The deep freeze was starting to fill up.

After a while, I started to get press about my impressions. I pressed on with creating them. My technique was becoming refined, choosing patches of skin and angles most suited for the particular imagery. I branched out into other colors of edible powder: chlorella, turmeric, carob, and white pepper were among the new flavors for my palette. 

When I started sitting on a series of devotional medals, business started to pick up. I found that, with care, I could get several copies out of a single impression. My skin itself was taking on the appearance of a tattoo parlor's sample poster. 

I eventually branched out into gluten free imagery. I found that in this market, I could charge up to 30% more.