We are now an entirely gossip-based society. My old friend Mark pointed me to the latest outrage.
It is my fervent hope that Our Lord’s admonition to love our enemies does not apply to corporations. If it does, I’m sunk. There are things I hate as much as I hate the entity that calls itself Frontier Communications, but there is nothing that I despise more. I suspect that the company is corrupt; I know it is incompetent.
Climbing up the hill in 80-degree heat and impressive humidity today, I couldn’t help but think how today felt like this time 49 years ago. Most of you won’t remember it, but that was a time when the air was electric with news about Richard Nixon, and doubt whether he would be president of the United States much longer.
We do so much online now. Unless we very much limit our internet activities, we make ourselves vulnerable to crooks so clever that they would have gotten rich if they were honest. But for whatever reason they aren’t honest, so we need to take precautions. If we don’t, given the portion of our lives that takes place online, we face catastrophes not far in effect from the house burning down.
Many years ago, in junior high school and high school, I studied Latin. My reasoning at the time was water-tight, to me. It was my hope to become the world’s leading herpetologist. The most daunting obstacle, I thought, was the memorization of scientific names. But if I knew Latin, I’d just translate the common names of snakes, turtles, and lizards into that language and I wouldn’t have to memorize anything. It is funny the things that make sense when you’re 13.
A close friend of mine — we’ve never met nor heard each other’s voices, but hey, this is the twenty-first century — is devoted to cats. She has spent hundreds and hundreds of hours over the last seven years seeking the availability of a drug that would save millions of her feline friends from painful almost-certain death. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.
It’s beginning to crumble. Everything that was peddled as official fact about the “miracle” messenger RNA vaccines administered with such wild abandon all across the world, in some cases made mandatory, is being proved false.
As I write this, there is no news about the missing miniature submarine that was launched Sunday in hope of visiting the wreckage of HMS Titanic without itself adding to the rubble.
New technology and discoveries have improved our lives in many ways, but I wonder if we’ve paid for them in the things we’ve lost. The question was raised through a bit of study disguised as entertainment — how it should be — I’ve undertaken lately. The issue is why it is that when I think of New York City, my first mental image entirely contradicts my years of living and working there.
Last week I saw a short video that demonstrated an amazing new fabric. Controlled by a small “smartphone” application, this fabric changes color. It is very expensive, so the only people who will have garments made from it are teenagers.