Poop! A Rural Enigma Revisited

Because we have lately had some rather  urgent enigmas to solve, I have been much away from this blog and wish our current conundrums could calm to the intensity of this post from June 27, 2014. Sometimes I revisit past entries to get a sense of mysteries resolved. This is one of those times.

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{All events in this story are true, only the names are unchanged to protect the guilty. Norma really does email me chores.}

Behind the peaceful facade of the bucolic countryside is a hotbed of intrigue. Consider this email I received from a rural address:

Norma to me---
POOP!
This is not supposed to be on my patio!  A new fence is     
                   needed.

Things had been slow lately and I was admittedly smitten with Norma's profile pic. --eyes that could melt a heart or electrocute  at considerable distance. I immediately made a long arm and hauled my Rural Private Eye Correspondence Course Textbook, by Famous Shamus Gumshoe, down from its shelf, opened its cover and reread what Oscar Wilde Famous Shamusly wrote, "The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

Visible and smellable. Should be an easy case. I responded by calling to the other room, " Ok, but remember, I get $25 a day plus expenses!" No answer. I took that as a yes.

I am familiar with crap and the size of bricks. This brick is a standard 3 1/2 inches, which narrowed suspects to Hoodle The Hawk, any coyote --of which we have a sufficiency in this region-- or some undetermined dastardly defecator. I gave my preliminary report: "Examination of evidence suggests presence of a wild animal of unknown genetic persuasion. Please keep me informed of unusual feral activities."

Soon another email arrived:

Norma to me--

There's something nasty in the woodshed!

When one finds a opossum nesting in a bag of Styrofoam pellets, it is prudent not to disturb the poor creature in daylight. I advised my client accordingly and suggested we discard the bag after the opossum moved to other lodgings. She asked how I could be certain the creature would move away.

"Madam, my methods are my own."

"I'm paying 25 dollars a day for that?"

"And expenses."

Her eyes amped up to electrocutive magnitude. 

"However, in the matter of my fee, it is a fixed sum which never varies lest I remit it altogether."

"In return for what?"

"Your withdrawal of the proposition and insistence that I build a new fence.

"D'accord."

Everyone, Famous Shamus Gumshoe graduate consulting detective or not, has a non-aggression pact with wild animals, against whose intrusions fences, old or new, are useless. This saves labor on both sides. It is also helpful,  to a detective, if one's client does all the detecting.
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However, along with new enigmas we must now deal with neighbor's chickens in our yard. They call me "Buck". That is not my name!

 

The Disparity Between Arithmetic and Efficiency

I have been away from posting for some days, ten days that included a new roof for this crazy old farmhouse and my recovery from all the noise such advantages furnish us --we who are too old and tired of rebuilding roofs ourselves. I hired it done. Let's begin with a Normaphoto:

The photo shows how things were left the 1st day of scraping, dynamiting and exposing all the weaknesses of my work 30 years ago. They made me park our car next door until they could haul this calamity away in trucks. I get choked up just remembering, so more Normaphotos:

Unused to asphalt shingles, Roofcat was OUTRAGED!

--which brings us to arithmetic. It is not my strongest subject but I've had ample time to think about it. 

If 5 men (roofers, carpenters, inspectors, etc.) can reroof a crazy old farmhouse in 5 days, then 25 men (5x5) could do it in one day. 

And, since there are 1440 minutes in a day (I don't show my work here but you may trust my calculations are accurate or closely approximate), 1500 men could do the job in one minute. By this line of impeccable logic, there being 86,400 seconds (1440x60) in a day, a crew of 90,000 craftspersons could have reroofed my house in one second --costing me about two dollars instead of what it did for 5 days.

However, the result is the same:

Whee....

....NEW ROOF! 

Raining in Earnest, On E(a)rnest

Last night poured wind-driven rain here, all night. We went out this morning to survey the damage. Earnest found us at the side gate.

Geo.: E(a)rnest? You ok?
Ern.: I'm wet. I'm cold. Nothing feels good. Wind knocked the chicken coop over! 

Geo.: We don't keep chickens anymore, E(a)rnest.
Ern.: I know, but I was in it.
Geo.: I thought you bunked in the eaves, downslope from Roofcat.
Ern.: Roofcat snores, Geo., out both ends!

Geo.: So you've been sleeping in the chicken coop, I see. What happened then?
Ern.: " The wind began to switch - the house to pitch and suddenly the hinges started to unhitch!"
Geo.: That's from "Wizard of Oz".
Ern.: Uh, I got flung into a ditch. Lookit me!

Geo.: Ditch...unhitch, that's very good. But yes, I see you're uncomfortable. Your poor tail!

 Ern.: Alas.

 Geo.: Can we help?
 Ern.: Do you have a little towel?

Rainy Day People Puzzle

As you may surmise by Norma's back porch photo, it is a rainy day.

I like to sit at the table under this window and write rainy day questions in hopes of finding an enigma. They often look like this:

This second photo was taken when the sun was out, but the idea is sound. "If we lived in a just world, more people would be jailed for crimes against themselves." This premise was questioned 2 days earlier, and over it, in shadow: "Accident or belligerent reality?"--(Trap, pg 41)refers to a play I wrote (performed in 1966) --not sure what the heron has to do with anything (or am I? --parentheses are fun!). 

Other lines emerge --as when one falls in the dark:
She: I found you on the bedroom floor!
Geo.: And here I always thought we met in a        library. 
Much as I would like to follow my inner voice and say she is wrong, I concede my inner voice is wrong far oftener.

Rain resumes and all enigmas seek the same shelter --the human mind-- towel each other off and huddle for warmth. 

(Gordon Lightfoot, "Rainy Day People")

Stay warm. 

10-Year-Old Repost. Why?

In 2009, when I was a boy of 59, I wrote a blog post that got NO comments. It was about the universe and time and I figured nobody cared very much --but I got to thinking, which sometimes helps. I thought the post hadn't enough visual aids to depict the birth and contraction of the universe. So, after a decade of research, I came up this evening with a highly detailed scientific graphic of reality: 

From 2009: Presque Vu

Deja Vu and Jamais Vu are words brought to us originally by cultural anthropologists who ventured into into places like darkest England to study temporal lore of tribes frequenting Ley Lines and menhirs like Stonehenge, then, for reasons unknown but on the tips of their tongues, report back exclusively in French. Their data was then seized by psychologists, who were seized in turn by physicists and astronomers, drugged, danced to exhaustion and a new tribe was formed.

Between the Big Bang and Big Crunch the universe goes thru cycles of expansion and contraction. During expansion, we remember a real past attending a variable and unseeable future. In contraction, because time is reversed, we remember a virtual past which, contrary to the entropic arrow of time, hasn't really happened yet. We percieve it as a normal, causal unfolding but accompanied by a crunchy noise and it just looks crinkly.

We don't remember the future in this direction either --backward from its beginning at the end of universal expansion-- for two reasons. Light is traveling backwards, out of our eyes and assembling all observables. Second reason is nobody liked the future very much and forgot it.

Because universe doesn't expand or contract quite evenly --less like a star-studded balloon than other stuff I shouldn't have machine-washed-- Bang and Crunch can coincide. Neither is time uniform --uniforms are dry-clean only. Time can constrict on an expanding field, which is how an acrylic sock can melt your turtleneck head hole shut in the dryer--creating an irreducible singularity. Thus do time and anti-time collide in brains and make deja vu.

Because the cycles throw us together from opposing ends of time, we get glimpses of ourselves coming back. Effect is more or less pronounced by what cycle predominates locally. My last planetarium visit suggests we are on spin. This also accounts for the disorienting experience of Jamais Vu.

Jamais Vu is the opposite of Deja Vu and consists of waking up in your pajamas --Jamais=french for jammies-- without knowing where or why. Sometimes Jamais Vu is inaccurately applied to waking up naked and painted jammy-like colors in the middle of a jungle with no clue where you are or how it happened. This is not Jamais Vu. It means you are a cultural anthropologist.

The Enigma of Randomization

I am sitting at my new computer. Someone who I will not name ( it was Norma), knew I was shortly headed to the post office and thrust three letters across the table at me, which knocked over a goblet of pinot noir. Its contents splashed across the laptop keyboard. I briefly watched the wine sink among the keys into the computer works. Then I looked up at the culprit,...

...into her eyes, and, exactly as I did 52 years ago, fell into them.
"Let's go shopping," I said. And, as so often happens after random events, we did. I bought a new computer. It is red, like pinot noir.

She bought stemless wine glasses with real heavy bottoms. Random things meeting amid limitless events. Consider: a star is a luminous projection of  hydrogen and helium held together by its own gravity. Two atoms coming together to light a universe. In the photo above you may see results of the same process in a crazy old farmhouse.

Two Silhouettes On The Shade

When the Rays began climbing the charts with a song about love, misperception and pareidolia, I was just a kid --but understood the pivot-point of their romantic ballad perfectly. The song is about a guy taking an evening walk down a street on which his girlfriend lives. He sees a window shade and silhouette tableau of what he believes is his beloved kissing a stranger. He bangs on the door and is politely informed that he's on the wrong block. Ooops.

(1957, The Rays, "Silhouette" --click)

Pareidolia needn't always be distressing or embarrassing, as I hope to demonstrate by my own experience and recreation. I too have often seen two silhouettes on the shade in the bedroom --the lampshade (what do you think I meant? --oh how could you?). Observe:

It is caused by two tassels (as things often are) hung from the upper shade-hem. Sometimes, while reading in bed --especially Louisa May Alcott-- I will look up and see two little women in earnest discussion on a stairway, a nudge :

All it takes is a bit of imagination. Then that old song starts doo-wopping in the background and I forget about the waking world and its incessant awful news. I stop thinking about politicians I don't like --and other proofs of rat-human interbreeding. I quit searching, like a hapless horse for hay in a needlestack. Silhouettes are there for a good reason: they help us imagine and dream. 
Imagine.
Dream.