The Arrow of Time

         It happens often enough. I decide to watch something on TV that is actually edifying and educational, get half-way through it and run out of I.Q. This never happens while watching Taxi reruns, during which I identify perhaps a bit too strongly with Reverend Jim. 

        But I digress. 

        Recently I started watching some segments of a TV show called The Great Courses.  These are lectures about various things hosted by high-powered, qualified people in various fields. Previously, I watched a few on the Black Death--the plague in the 14th Century world--as it seemed relevant to our own 21st Century pandemic, but it got rather scholarly, not to say boring. But, yeah, less and less relevant, seemed to me. One take-away, though: probably if that particular plague returned, it would be less of an issue due to modern medicine, not to mention the fact that it sort of depended on humans cohabiting with rats, which--I hope, at least--is not so common nowadays.

        On to the "arrow of time." As the imminently qualified Dr. Sean Carroll tried to explain to me during the first few episodes of "The Great Courses--Mysteries of Physics--Time," physics treats time as a component of "spacetime," and it seems as though the past, present and future all exist. This, opposed to the idea that the past does not exist anymore, and the future does not exist yet. Maybe?  Nothing in physics demands that the past is not the same as the future. Instead, there is an "arrow of time," where entropy increases all the time and the universe moves forward in the way that we have come to think it does. 

        Intriguing, yes. Comprehensible, no. I don't think I'm going to try to finish the series, (especially as Amazon Prime is charging me $2 per 30 minute episode,) but I leave with a little more understanding of just how ignorant I am, which is something I've always found tends to keep me out of trouble, to some degree, even though, of course, as always, there's nothing wrong with thinking you know something as long as you don't act on it. 

Dental Entropy

         I am in a good mood because yesterday I had two teeth pulled and a temporary bridge spanning 6 teeth installed, a procedure I had been dreading for about a month now, and it all went without a hitch. So far, anyway. 

        When I was about 8 years old, I was living on Sierra Ct., in Palo Alto. I was at home, and was supposed to be licking and installing S&H Green stamps into their books, but I tired of that pretty quickly and went outside to play on my skate board. You recall that “back in the day,” a skateboard was not a sophisticated semi-flexible platform with low-rolling-resistance resin wheels and needle bearing trucks. It was as the name implied, a board with a skate nailed to it. And we were the ones, or thereabouts, who helped put a man on the moon.  Who knew? 

        I was using my skate board as a kind of sled—I had one knee on it and was pushing myself along with the free foot, both hands on a wooden cross bar nailed to the front, like low handlebars. I encountered an overly large gap in the sidewalk and the skateboard stopped abruptly but my head (and the rest of my body) continued on, arcing downward until my face hit the sidewalk. More precisely, my two front teeth, both of which broke off about half-way to the gum line. 

        Later that same day, my mother came home from work and, as I remember with crystal clarity, I was lying on the couch eating a banana as she entered the living room, and I showed her what happened to my teeth. Her reaction was violently dramatic, with lots of anger directed at me. 

        I felt horrible. It was, after all, my fault. Plus, it happened because I was shirking my duties concerning the Green Stamps. My punishment seemed to be that once root canals were performed on each front tooth (think: Theodoric of York style 1958 dentistry) each tooth was capped with a stainless steel crown. Both of them. I don’t recall being ridiculed for this, but I didn’t like it. 

        Over the years I had—a guess—maybe five sets of crowns installed on these poor broken front teeth. I always had dreams where my front teeth fell out, and I would wake from them in a very real panic, checking with my tongue and fingers that they were actually still there. 

        A few years back, the root tip of one of them became irreversibly infected and that tooth got pulled. Yesterday, for the same reason, the other one got pulled. 

        It actually feels like a relief. A 62 year-long saga has finally ended. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s the way I feel. I expected to feel depressed about having no front teeth, but, no. It’s fine. Good riddance. I now owe the universe one less thing! 

Wealth

        I was wondering why we have made a celebrity out of Bill Gates (his impending divorce being somehow deserving of headlines across the media board) because he has accumulated so much money that once belonged to all of us. 

        No, this is not a Socialism endorsement at all, but more like an observation about human behavior. I think it has something to do with the fact that all televangelists and most financial advisors wear more gold and jewelry during a single day than I have in total, or why defeated ex-president Trump's one-time success seemed to be so connected to the public perception of his wealth and power. (Something about which he was all too aware, and which he carefully cultivated.) 

        

Bark Worse Than Bite

        I went to the dentist's office yesterday to discuss my "treatment options," otherwise known as "What's your credit score?"  I'm not going to say the cost of my upcoming dental work is the same as buying a new car, but maybe a good, used car. A Honda Accord, though; not a Ford Focus.*  The (only) good news is that I won't have to go around with three front teeth missing for any length of time. After a marathon session in the (somewhat less than ergonomic) dentist chair** lasting over half a day, I will have temporary fake teeth that we hope will last long enough to bridge that gap, so to speak, until the permanent fake teeth are ready to be installed. 

        Also, to sort of condition my psyche in advance, before that I will be going to the DMV,  so getting two teeth pulled won't seem so bad. 

*Of course my dental insurance will cough up its customary $37.

** A description of my visit to a chiropractor will be posted subsequently.

Gearhead Aside

        I am much enjoying Paula's James Bond themed April A-Z exercise. In today's post, she writes about the movie, Diamonds are Forever. I admit I have all but forgotten these stories, seen at the movies years and years ago, sometimes seen again on TV. In this case, I even read the paperback. 

       A favorite aside of this story is when it introduces the Studillac, the car belonging to Felix Leiter, the American CIA agent, and friend of Bond's. The Studillac is so named because it was a Studebaker with a Cadillac engine in it. The Cadillac engine, in those days, was a real hot-rod powerplant, and through a fluke, it fit exactly into the Studebaker's engine compartment. 

        The reason for this is that about that time Studebaker acquired an engineer from General Motors who had been previously assigned to GM's Cadillac division. To make his new job a little easier, he designed the Studebaker so the engine would have the exact same mounting points as the Cadillac. Hence, a Cadillac engine would bolt right in with minimal modifications otherwise.  To do so made the Studillac obscenely over-powered and, in fact, a good match for the DB4. 

        As a side note, I once had a '55 Chevy with a Cadillac engine in it. It was, shall we say, NOT elegant, but it did, as we used to say, haul ass. I didn't put it together, myself, but traded for it with cash and a '49 Ford that I had. 

        It broke down a lot, mostly due to being overpowered, and I happily got rid of it by partaking in a Byzantine three-way trade choregraphed by a high school buddy who wanted another guy's motorcycle, who wanted the '55, and I wound up with a '57 Chevy 4-wheel drive pickup truck. It also broke down occasionally, and really didn't get around all that great, for a 4-wheel drive vehicle. 

        Good times. Truly. I wish I was that stupid again, because it was fun. 

A Draft of an Unsubmitted Post

 I don't remember when I wrote this draft. Apparently I got something in my head and started writing until (very shortly thereafter) I ran out of steam. It's all true, though . . . 

Pedestrianism

I started walking as a pastime around the year 2000 when I began working downtown.  We were in a building erected some 30 years earlier, and we speculated that it was erected on an Indian burial ground (OMG YOU ONLY MOVED THE HEADSTONES) and cunningly designed to be not only downtown’s ugliest building but, for you Feng Shui aficionados, a veritable negative C’hi generator. Because of this, all the buildings in a one block radius have subsequently either melted or fallen down or were converted into lofts with exposed brick and concrete floors and windows affording brief, unsatisfying glimpses of what is inarguably North America’s second muddiest river.

As a bonus for the employees, the building was so constructed as to not allow any air in from outside except what might accidentally swirl in through the doorway when someone either entered or left the building. This means, for example, that when in the elevator, which by the way creaked and groaned like a WWII movie submarine taken below its maximum certified depth, one can still smell the cafeteria lunch special from opening day in 1972. (Which I believe was tuna-based.) 

The place made my soul hurt, and the reason I started taking walks outside was just to get out of there. 

A Return to Normalcy

        Since I've been vaccinated and no longer think I'm going to die every time I step foot outside the house, I began taking care of a bunch of delayed things, like my dental appointment (wow, and that was just in time, thanks,) and doctor's appointment, and . . . ugh . . . have to call and set up an appointment with an oral surgeon, plus get the oil changed in my car! We went to two restaurants, now, in a flurry of self-indulgence, one lunch place, and one breakfast place, wherein I consumed a week's worth of carbohydrates. Place called The Homesteader, by the way, with a sort of pioneer theme, all the good eats just like the pioneers had, like lots of eggs and lots of butter, and fatty meats, thick slices of wholesome toast, 'taters, you know, like back-to-basics, good ol' real 'merican food, which explains why the life expectancy in the old days was about thirty.  

        So the question is more like, die of what? 

        The doctor reports that I am alive. I may even outlive my car, especially if I don't get the oil changed pretty soon.