reply to ninguem

 I was delighted to find a post from the past few years that had started thinking in the direction I was going.  Here was my "original"* comment:

I have been thinking of this since reading Adam Becker's What is Real?

My thought is this: What if it is the exact same specific flaw (or oddity) in Human Consciousness that doesn't allow us to perceive time as 'just another dimension' (as the math of General Relativity demands) as a very similar [or related] flaw in Human Consciousness that doesn't allow us to perceive the multiverse as a similar [fifth] dimension?

what if human consciousness is limited by sense of time (NOW) one spot on the timeline, always moving steadily in one direction (the fourth dimension)

same with (HERE) in multiverse (not to be confused with (here) in our regular space, which is just where you are now) where it's one point on a line, but we are perpetually stuck in place (unlike time, where we are perpetually moving)

(that's the end of the comment... i was going to cut & paste it here and continue expanding it... but then i realized i'd LOST IT!!!! @*#&^@*&#^%*& when I cut & paste my own blog address into the comment questionnaire and tried to recreate it above with I think moderate success... ((@#%(&@%*(#^&)

Lesson Learned: "Don't Be Greedy!  Share your Thoughts"

[some more thoughts SOME MORE THOUGHTS some more thoughts]

- one directional) 

a smattering

 

soooooo..... this is is short list of some ideas I had been working on from the last post (in March 2025) until around late May 2025.

It is now just the end of June 2025, and I KNOW that I will not be coming back to this post and "gettin' UR done" as it were, so i think i'll just let it fly as is.  (as a bonus, for regular readers, if you'd like me to actually expand on any of the ideas here, I'll accept as poll voting any comments to this post and let me know what you want to hear about, and I'll do a full post about it in July 2025!)
also - keep an eye out for ANOTHER BIGGER POLL!!! coming to Roman Numeral J in July, upon which may hang the fate of the very universe itself...

abundance - the need for government to seed progress in areas that are inherently non-capitalist / anti-capitalist at a certain moment in time (Moon Shot / Operation Warp Speed / penicillin)

grit v. 80/20 - smart & hardworking vs. smart & lazy... 

Bill Maher's White House visit - radical grace (plus acknowledgement of performative politics)

Hakuna Regatta

 As a middle-age, white bumpkin, I have encountered a few (less than five) regattas in my day.  Today, we bumbled in to what has to be the most unusual one I'll likely encounter - the Pumpkin Regatta.

What looked to be 4 competitors first carved out and decorated over the course of (i think) about 90 minutes (we didn't directly witness this part, just saw it from across the creek).  Then, at 2:00pm they were off, and paddling like hell (I'm unsure as to whether a regatta is technically supposed to be a sail-based boat race, but these pumpkins were paddled).  The second-place racer had (seemingly almost immediately) fallen out of his pumpkin and was dragging it along behind him as it filled up with more and more water,  

The racer in last place throughout the entirety of the heat tried to sink the first-place racer's pumpkin by paddling water in their general direction while approaching the turnaround (an old tire secured in place a little ways upstream from the waterfall {or whatever a stream-wide, man-made drop of 5 feet or so is called when created for urban [or ex-urban] planning purposes}).

Like many Midwestern Gen-X boys, my first regatta I'd ever was the Raingutter Regatta (which my child's ears always heard as the "ranguddaregada" - exactly none parts of the words made any sense to me whatsoever). Even when I competed in this event for the proto-fascist organization I had been encouraged to join by my friends' parents (my parents never discouraged me from it, but certainly weren't going to actively support me in my taking part), it didn't occur to me that the mini-sailboats we had constructed* were racing down rain gutters.  I just saw them as a flattened version of the racetracks we used for the Pinewood Derby** filled with water...

I'm not sure exactly of the other regattas (I feel like one was a Red Bull sponsored event... I know I went to a Red Bull FlugTag at Miami Beach when I was living there, but I think there was a boating event put on by them maybe in Minneapolis? {this was before they started sponsoring all those soccer teams, and needed to keep themselves in the public consciousness through other means}), but I know there've been a few.

A gathering of angels
Appeared above my head
They sang to me this song of hope
And this is what they said
They said, come sail away, come sail away
Come sail away with me (lads)
Come sail away, come sail away
Come sail away with me
Come sail away, come sail away
Come sail away with me (baby)
Come sail away, come sail away
Come sail away with me

Imagine if you encountered a gathering of fracking angels, and that was all they said... really disappointing. 

*assembled
**Now Pinewood Derby cars - that is some true function v. form designs there, I tell ya'.  In my day, I constructed 2 of them, the first was all about form.  My buddy Choett helped me paint it (that is, probably, he did it all, because he was a damn good artist, and I routinely got made fun of in Art Class by Mr. Wescott in front of the whole class).  It was all pink with black racing stripes, and had its name "Pink Panther" painted on the front.  I think I added the number, which was wonky.  My second was all function, with the help of Corbin and some random guy he knew who had a drill press in his garage.  We drilled right down the middle, and curved the front so there was a hole straight through from front to back, and awesomely aerodynamic.  Then that guy melted the ball bearings I was supposed to add for weighting the car, and put it in the middle hole, all flat.  It was perfect (except, when I got to race day their scale measured it differently than ours at home had, and the race organizers had to reach into my car with pliers, and pull out some of the metal that had melted in their, thus messing up the weight distribution we had designed, and plugging up the hole at the front and ruining the aerodynamic design.  It's totally fine, though, I'm not bitter or anything...)

EPIC (bad) Game Day

Few things in day to day life are worthy of being described as "epic".

Hangovers - to be sure.  A few times I've gone to a good man's home in Waukesha for Epic Game Day (and sometimes have played board games that fit the epic description).  There's a company that calls itself "Epic", but I don't think that it really is all that epic...

Today was an epic sports day for me, and it went so so badly...  Almost all of my selected sports teams were playing today - and they all failed to win.

My night ended with the end of this season's road for Minnesota FC, who a short time ago lost their first ever playoff game.  The Loons are in only their 3rd year of existence as an MLS team.  I started following them closely during the summer of 2018, when I started following a number of European Clubs closely - checking fixtures and watching games when they are available for tv consumption.

A few hours earlier, my Chicago Bears played a craptastic game and lost badly to fall to 3-3 for the season.  In a classic Bear's move, the team suddenly came to life and scored 2 TDs in the final 2 and a half minutes (and even appeared to grab a second onside kick) even though the game was fully out of reach at that point...

I've written of my Bears fandom, but never I think, specifically, about how completely they are the absolute worst fucking team to be a fan of ever with the way they give and take and seem like they're something and then pull a rug out from under and then totally suck, but show signs.  The Double Doink was pretty much the moment my entire Bear fandom had been leading up to for most of my life... and now this.

Prior to the Bears barf-fest, my Liverpudlians failed to win.  They did tie, but meh - now that we win so often, it's a bit of a let-down (though we were somewhat lucky to equalize...).  And, although it was available on ESPN+, I missed the earlier Nottingham Forest match - which we lost to fall out of the top spot on the table.

I'm sailing away...

Saturday morning arrived sunny, hot and lovely in Omaha and while we weighed various options i thought i could come up with nothing better than sitting in a car for 5+ hours en route to Minneapolis.

So it was that i was able to attend the 2nd bienniel (is that the word for every two years?) Luau, hosted by Nate & Lissa. The party was once again, a success, though i did miss portions due to "seasickness". Nathan allegedly drove a moped through his yard & the cops showed up at 3:45 AM... a good party by any standard. The cops came to the door, alleging they had just seen the front door wide open and were checking in. They warned that thieves often see a party going on, walk in, swipe a few purses and leave... not a bad idea, in fact. Their scenario reminded me of the first luau, two summers ago, at the Longfellow house. Some stranger was wandering around the party and at some point in the evening we approached him. He said he couldn't find the people he was looking for (we hadn't heard of them). We eventually realized he was at the wrong luau. He'd actually been going to a different luau on Longfellow Avenue (which in retrospect seems unlikely).

Nate's small sunfish was again in the backyard, beached and filled with ice and beer with a christmas light sail. There were several pitchers of tropical drinks, of all shades - a blue, a red, a pink, and a yellow - mostly terrible and terribly fruity.

The next day, miserable and hungover, i decided against the Twin's game, and we went down to Lake Nokomis and sailed the very same sailboat. I got the chance to take complete control of the boat for the first time ever (almost flipping us over twice), we played a game of wiffle ball (which i think i won) and then drove our sorry asses back to Omaha.

Overall it was a fun, fleeting weekend. The Twins took two of three and gained a game in the Wild Card hunt & we made a quick stop at Crate & Barrel to pick up some stuff off the registry that we really wanted.