Tuesday, August 31, 2010

dear stephen hawking

for every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction. what if, in the context of ideas, there is an equal and opposite idea? further, what if there is a conservation of brilliance. throw this on a bell curve. subsequently, for every pickin brilliant idea you come up with, someone is fishing with dynamite - chucking them in the air upwind - or worse, chasing good ole nessy with nukes. with this, i petition that you produce more mediocre work to avoid plaguing the world with inversely equivalently inane ideas. exhibit a. thank you.

- village idiot

Monday, August 30, 2010

boogie scapegoat

the more i think about it as i lay in bed rather sleepless, tony hayward almost got away with the bp incident. it wasn't his fault...per se.

we haven't sat around blaming the toyota maelstrom on watanabe or leaded toys on eckert, but we certainly glared at brown for hurricane katrina and glowered at davis, eventually leading to the second recall in history. of course, ford's nasser got shat on as well for sitting around willing tires to explode, right?

anyway, this makes me wonder why some get the boot, and others get lavish compensation in light of some seriously questionable offenses (ahem, mozilo). bp certainly wasn't looking to kick hayward out, but due to delayed and inadequate response, people were becoming furious and demanding accountability. while it's easy to hate a large corporation (i.e. walmart), you just can't derive any joy from hating an inanimate object. so of course the hate started piling onto hayward. and then the bloke decided to go sailing. i'm not saying he didn't deserve a day off, but couldn't he have absconded elsewhere? well, i've gotta say that was the straw that broke the camel's back. while bp didn't intend to give hayward the boot, the opportunity rapidly hit a haitus with the last act. so in saving face for the corporation, they kicked out the face of the company, who had drawn all the anger. the kleenex was covered in boogies, so why not just toss it out?

Thursday, August 26, 2010

gomboc mind cuss

fate is a rather curious thing. it's a multidimensional collision of serendipity and murphy's law possibly extending beyond the space-time continuum. the improbable alignment of events in such a way that results in a rather statistically improbable outcome. all in all, it's quite the mind cuss for me. i'd consider myself a scientist - loosely, if you will - whether physical, social, or other. so to believe in the concept of fate is a bit of a leap of faith, something i don't prefer to rely on. yet we could say i was fated to believe in fate. roll your eyes, here it goes.

but really, there must be some formula that quantifies the whole shebang, or we can promote or relegate it to nature's design. pi? gomboc? fibonacci? nautilus? fractals? tessellations?

so every once in a while, ask yourself how you got where you are. how events have played out given that you chose this path in the last fork you came across. why you came across the people you came across. people enter your life for a season, a reason, or a lifetime. there is reason even in that season.

next time you hit that snooze button, think of how the rest of your day will change and the ripple effect it will have on person x displaced y degrees from you in 50 years. maybe you narrowly dodge a ridiculously gnarly accident on the freeway, bump into someone you spend the rest of your life with, or come across someone who can use your help. a certain commercial bores you at a particular moment and you change the channel and see something you later end up discussing with someone. the fortune cookie you chose from the dish - the fact that you're at the restaurant at that day at that time and asked for the check at that particular moment.

of course we can toy with the concepts of karma, optimism, pessimism, and the like - dragging them into a perfect tessellation of an equation - in the sense that we have become beings with endless predilections that tend us towards some events more than others, resulting in predictable outcomes. what comes around goes around?