Articles about all kinds of earthly things
I wonder if we will call this coming year twenty-ten or the more cumbersome two thousand and ten. I think we should have called 2001 twenty-o-one, just like they did in nineteen-o-one and eighteen-o-one. Personally I will from this day make that change, and no longer refer to twenty-o-four, as two-thousand and four. And what… Read More End of the Uh-Oh’s
By Jeffrey the Barak. At times, we wander the galleries and see pieces of art that look as if they could hurt someone, or kill someone, but in a way this has actually happened. I refer to a place commonly known as Easter Island. This is its modern name, given to the place by Christian… Read More How Art Almost Killed An Entire People
By Jeffrey the Barak. Geologists would say that the Los Angeles Basin is like a huge bowl of sand The geologic center for the Los Angeles Basin is the place where the Los Angeles River and the river known as Rio Hondo merge in South Gate. At this central point, sand, silt, clay and other… Read More Los Angeles, what are we standing on?
By Jeffrey the Barak. Nomadic tribes move independently of each other and occasionally come together to interact through trade, war, sport, cultural exchange, intermarriage, murder etc. In the dense jungles of South America and Africa and Asia, the boundaries formed by geographical features such as ridges and valleys are all it takes to keep two… Read More The hazards of imagining countries
Just a reminder that even though we all love our hours, minutes, seconds, months, weeks and centuries, none of them are real. One year is real, but it does not necessarily start on January 1st. It’s just one whole orbit around the sun. One day is real, but it does not necessarily start at midnight.… Read More Before you celebrate new year….
By Jeffrey the Barak How would you like to spread Napalm on your face while releasing questionable propellants into the ozone layer, and then put a stack of eternal plastic into a landfill? Doesn’t sound like something you’d want to do does it? And yet if you use aerosol shaving gel, it contains the very… Read More The Green Shave
By Jeffrey the Barak Nake Islet, part of Millenium Island, formerly known as Caroline Island, now in the Republic of Kiribati, is the closest point of land I could find after moving the Google Earth globe around to a spot that showed the least land. The only significant continental land visible at the edges of this hemisphere… Read More The least continental place
By Jeffrey the Barak New things are better than old things and new gadgets are better than old gadgets, right? Wrong! Sometimes the impetus for tools and gadgets to evolve is not to make them better, it’s to change the marketplace to receive more expensive goods. There is no better example of this than the… Read More Shaving – The Old Fashioned Way
By Jeffrey the Barak Far from the million dollar science grants and laboratories of Pasadena, and Los Alamos, in a village in Romania, and in the kitchen of a most unattractive apartment building, Gnelj stumbled across the secret of gravity control. Impossible you say? Isn’t the attraction of mass as inevitable as a slowing satellite… Read More We Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Gravity
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