Consumer Report: The Lever

I don't see what the big deal with Archimedes' lever is. So, one guy makes a prying rod and all of a sudden he's Mr. Fantastic Genius Man; his lever didn't even have hand grips on it--ouch! And what good has come since the lever? The crow bar... how impressive, another blunt object white trash can use to beat each other up with.

If I were Archimedes and I had the idea for the lever, I would have at least made it so that it did something when you pulled it. I would have made a lever that gave people drinks or scratched their backs or something. I don't understand how Archimedes was able to garner so much renown with his poor design. Did people actually say "Oh boy, thank God we have Archimedes around, now we can lift and wedge rocks into places we weren't able to before!"? Is that all people liked to do back then?

Lift and wedge.
Breath.
Lift and wedge.
Eat.
Lift and wedge.
Sleep.

The thought of that kind of life style makes me thirsty and itchy (especially since during the eating part I was picturing the food being pretzels and tortilla chips, and during the sleeping part I was picturing the bed being wet hay). I'm finding myself all but unable to disdain the horrible course Archimedes put humanity into because of his boring, pointless lever. I bet the only reason that low life made the lever was so that he could steal hubcaps--I bet he had the most successful automotive stripping operation in all of antiquity.

The whole thing makes me sick.

Archimedes really duped us, he really duped us good. People would buy one of his chintzy little levers and bring it home only to realize that it's completely worthless unless they also get a fulcrum to use with it. And do you think they had receipts back then? Because they didn't. Archimedes always failed to mention the part about the fulcrum when you were wide-eyed on the sales floor picking out your brand new lever. This of course goes without mentioning some of Archimedes' other unethical business practices. He was especially good at using his lever to jack-up prices during prime rock-lifting seasons. Oh, and his florid words! He would say things like "You'll be able to lift an elephant with a mouse," but he wouldn't elaborate on how one is to get an elephant to obediently stand on the small part of a lever.

Archimedes said he could move the world if he had a long enough lever; I say I could bear more of Archimedes' farcical promises if I had long enough patience, but I simply don't.

In Summation, Archimedes is a crook and leverage is a farce.

Commute Revitalization

I spend a lot of time on the road and I've picked up on some of the more subtle aspects of driving over the years. And through this experience, I feel like I have license to give advice on the subject. So here are five things that may help you.

1. You may find the lack of good music on the radio to be somewhat troubling; turn the radio off and just ponderously focus on your own deep thoughts. The latter is much more troubling.

2. Only buckle your seat belt on the days you want to live through. It's good for the mind to realize the looming nature of death.

3. If you enjoy sending text messages as you drive, then do so wholeheartedly. Don't be lazy and shorten them by using things like 'u' instead of 'you' or '2' instead of 'to/too/two;' that's right, even spell out numbers. It is better to die in a fiery car crash than to live with the consequences of poor diction.

4. If you like for people to be confounded by you, but you prefer for this to happen passively, litter the back of your car with bumper stickers of opposing political ideas.

5. While driving, always operate in fives. Round up and down to whatever suits you. E.g. I didn't just travel twenty-three miles, I traveled twenty-five. I didn't arrive two hours late for work, I arrived zero hours late for work. I didn't drunkenly kill four pedestrians last Friday on W. Adams ave. and you can't prove that I did, punk! So why don't we both just relax?

The Fat People's Revolution

Today I was in a political science class that I may end up dropping if I can replace it with a poetry class, but that's not the point, I learned something during the boring introduction class that only involved syllabubs assimilation and the fact that we can't call our professor Misses Bowen., but that "people who have doctorates prefer to be addressed as 'professor,' or 'doctor' because they worked really hard for their doctorate." I already knew that, I'm just not used to formally addressing my professors because most of them usually just say to call them by their first name. What I actually learned came after the syllabubs discussion.


Being that this is a class about civil liberties, one of the activities we started off with was going around the room and introducing ourselves and saying what civil right issue we were most passionate about. Most of the people chose the three main, current event cop-out answers: abortion, gun rights and gay marriage, but one fellow, a big guy said that he supports obese rights. Until today I hadn't known this was a thing, I had heard something of it before, but I probably discounted it as something that was taken from a Saturday Night Live sketch, but it is a real thing. Apparently fat people are tired of being marginalized and criticized for their weight; so tired of it, in fact, that they copy/pasted the ideals of the NAACP into their own civil rights group that they call the NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance).

She would be a good person to have if you need to save a lot of seats (if you don't need to use the seats).

The group was actually founded in 1969 and since then they have been promoting the the furtherance of fat Americans, and apparently they've been pretty successful, because there's a lot of fat people now. Don't get me wrong, I don't have any personal problem with fat people, I love them, I used to be one. Well, I don't love them over other people, I just usually try to treat like skinny, beautiful people are treated.

The thing I don't like about this is that they treat their struggle likes it's equivalent to women's rights or even black rights. Black people had to sit in the back of buses. So what? The new struggling second class citizens can't even get fit through the doors of the bus. Now that's a true profound struggle!

Another reason I don't like it is that it completely disregards personal responsibility, if you're fat, that's your issue, not society's. I think society should help people who are downtrodden and cast off as secondary, but that's not equivalent to indulging people's vices. Obesity isn't a disability, it's an inability. There is nothing wrong with a soft body, as long a soft will isn't the reason for it.

The Life to which I Plan on Retiring.

I thought of the type of person I want to be today. I want to have a rundown house that sits in the Oregon wilderness and I want to have a faithful, well-trained beagle named Hemingway. In one of the rooms of my house, I'll keep my collection of rare middle-eastern ocarinas that I play occasionally over a humble fire that consumes the logs of my labor in my house's furnace. I'll have an old delicately engrave, double-barreled shotgun that I'd use occasionally for food, and during my hunting trips, my beagle will respond to to my whistles by bringing me all sorts of hare and fowl. I will also have an unusually keen knowledge of nautical history and general maritime practices. I'll have a 60's era Honda motorcycle that I'll use to drive into town once in a while. I'll ultimately live a simple life, when I speak, I'll be economic with words. When I listen, I'll be economic with prejudice.

Changing the Stars

If the stars can change in seasons and latitudes, then can they change in the observer? Do heavenly bodies appear as seeds and buckets of water to the sinewy farmer standing on his famine-stricken earth or as silvery coins to the bemoaning beggar. This also brings the question: can anybody perceptually alter these entities? Can people besides the poor and desperate make these transformations? If a sun-blistered farmer and a simple vagrant can do it, why couldn't a king?  Can things like stars that are so untouchable, consistent and seemingly eternal be completely mutable? I asked the one question because I don't know how to think like a king and I asked the other because I don't know how so many people are completely unable to manage or change their own lives for a better result but can effortlessly swing around the long-dying gas-giants and spin top-turning quasars of blue and green into the places they want them to be. 

The stars are personal but universal, like finger prints. Permanent, but alterable, like the human soul. When the ancients looked at the stars they saw gods and dragons and heroes, today we still see some of the same myths and stories that the ancients ascribed to the stars, but we give them names like  Dec 7° 24.426' instead of names like Betelgeuse. You can use the declination coordinates to find that star somewhat easily or you can just look for the hand of Orion, either way you'll be led to the same red giant. But you don't have to see the hand of a Zeus-ordained hunter or an alpha-numeric code, it can be whatever you see upon first sight.

The Cellar

In the cellar, the scales weigh corruptly,

The lives cease directly.

In the cellar, life can end abruptly,

for it's pardoned incorrectly.

The cellar sits beneath Winster cottage.

Its temporary flowers, like all deceptions, 

Trick the eye away from the carnage 

And casts anew false perceptions.

The old Winster home is always present,

Sitting on the green, grassy hill.

If the plaster walls were transparent,

The sights would be most shrill.

The house stands alone on the crest,

Consuming some and threatening the rest.