The Streak

I am sure to be dating myself somewhat but back in my high school days there existed a fad known as streaking. At its height it inspired a parody song by Ray Stevens and interrupted the academy awards appearance of David Niven. The point was to strip down and run naked through some large gathering of people to piss off the squares. Many of the fads of the young are about pissing off the squares, tattoos, men piercing their ears and nose rings for women to name just a few. But today I want to talk about a different kind of streak, the kind that the superstitious revel in to everyone’s detriment not the young nudes running thru the crowd that don’t hurt anything.
This is the story of a sour old man that lives in a cave kept warm by hate for the new and the love of the streak. Just another square yelling at the kids to, “get off my lawn” wrapping himself in the certitude of his beliefs with his superstition as the belt tying it all together. A grim tale indeed.
Long ago in a land of sand a man discovered the rituals. He learned them from his father and his fathers father and he learned them very well. He practiced and practiced until he knew them inside and out. As his family was friends with the ruler in the land with the sand they lived a good life and were very, very happy.
The tall young man practiced the rituals and then one day he heard about a far off land that also practiced the rituals. All I know about the land I learned in Kipling poems and pictures of poppy fields on the news. And the news was bad, very bad. Some evil men from an evil empire were attacking the land of mountains and poppies and men of the ritual. These evil men had the wrong answer to the meaning of life the universe and everything. They did not follow the ritual these evil men and that is bad indeed.
Now part of the ritual that the man followed every day in every way was to go to the aid of the fellow followers. Since the man was faithful to the ritual he felt that he must pack up his goods and go to the land of the mountains and poppies and fight the evil empire.
After many battles and many setbacks and with the help of some men from other far off lands the evil empire lost. As with many that had come before the mountains and the poppies and the barren landscape proved to much. Battered and bruised the evil men tucked their tails between their legs and slunk back to their own lands defeated by the man in the cave.
The man in the cave had been true to the ritual and become a hero in the land. The bad men were gone and the killing could stop and he married many wives and fathered many children and told all that would listen about the rituals. He was a humble man and he gave all the credit to the streak and the faithful following of the rituals. And so the pitcher wears the same undershirt unwashed for every game and the Giants win the world series for the first time in San Francisco and. Hey I am telling this tale and so I get to include my fantasy so piss off all you Cubs whiners.
Time passes and the man does the rituals everyday and convinced of he rightness of the streak the man in the cave decides he must share the good news with all the world. He took a look at his new friends, the ones that had given him the food and the guns and the money to drive out the evil ones. Did they know the answer to the big question? Did they know that the ritual and the streak would tell them the answer to the meaning of life the origin of the universe and everything?
He had tried to tell the evil men about the streak and the rituals giving them the answer to the great question, the meaning of life, the universe and everything but they had not cared. They had just wanted to get stuff that might be valuable and eventually once the man in the cave succeeded in making it cost more than the hills and poppies were worth they had split. But now the land was run by armed men that believed in the rituals and were convinced of the rightness of the streak. Part of the rituals was to embrace the enemy of my enemy as my friend but now my enemy was gone. Were they still my friend? He looked hard at the new friends and found them lacking.
They did not have the right answer and they were kind of pushy these new friends. What was this good man that lived in a cave to do? He thought and he thought and he finally had an idea. He would make a video, of course. And in the video he would explain to his new friends that thank you for giving me the guns and the money and the food. Thanks for showing us the cool new gadgets to drive out the evil men but now we have a problem. You guys have the answer to the great question wrong. You do not have the right answer to the meaning of life the universe and everything. You guys don’t know about the rituals and the streak and if you are going to hang out with us and get the stuff that has value it is imperative that you get it right.
So he made the video and he found one of those Ted Stevens tubes. I think that’s what they are called that lead to the Algorenet and all around the world people saw the video and went yawn., “Dude you live in a cave.” Time passed and the rest of the world went on with their lives while the man in the cave did the rituals and kept the streak alive and waited for everyone else to get smart.
Time passed and the man in the cave kept making videos telling his new friends, “you really should put down the Stephen King and the El Ron Hubbard for a couple of weekends and read our book and learn about the rituals and you will see that we are correct and we will all know about the streak and we will all do the rituals and we will always win and everything will be wonderful. If you can’t do that at least honor the streak and get your jinx guys away from our really cool places where the streak began back before any of us were born all the way back at the beginning. And they kept shoving them up the tubes to the Algorenet and they waited and watched and kept the streak alive and did the rituals and turned their attentions to reeducating the locals that had lost their way.
They blew up some statues that some other guys that had the wrong answer to the question had spent a really long time working on and did not even have the courtesy to say, “my bad’. The loud bang woke up some of the dudes in the , “Intelligence community”. I don’t know where this community is but it probably has gates and a guard and fresh water and lots to eat and cool toys to play with so when guys that live in caves start to throw rocks they go, “Dude he lives in a cave” for the most part and went on about taking the stuff they wanted from the place that the streak began.
But even in a place called intelligence by the law of averages there had to be somebody that had some. Sure enough there were a few. They remembered some of the old ways of the , “Cold Times” and they knew some of the magic that they kept to themselves and their masters had been given to the man in the cave and they began to watch him. To look and learn and gather the mysterious ranting that came to the Algorenet from the many Stevenstubes. They heard about guys at the magical schools that taught man how to fly with the birds and not be like Icarus but these guys didn’t care about not crashing and how could that possibly be right. The only reason anyone learned the magic is to make money and people with money always want to land and not crash so that must be a mistake because, “no one could have imagined.”
Time continued to pass as it always does and the man in the cave and some of his friends got tired of waiting. Time passes really slow when you live in a cave keeping the streak alive and so they decided maybe just maybe these great Satan people with their women drivers and stupid cartoonists were never going to get to 42. So they made another video and sent it up the tubes and said if you aren’t going to do the rituals and honor the streak you must go away.
The man in the cave had been in the cave for a very long time and as any of you that have spent time living in a cave can tell you it can have its moments but dude it’s a cave. Even with the rituals and the streak, “come on people wise up and get the answer to the meaning of life the universe and everything.” “Let me go see some of those wives that I married when I was still the newest Idol winner before I moved back into the cave.”
So the man in the cave sent his friends out into the lands to call attention to the streak. Since they had been in the caves for quite a while thinking about the old days they forgot to get on the cell and call the Dolly Madison Avenue guys and ask them how they disguised disgusting chemicals as food and made them so popular that people would still eat them and think this is way better than the bowl of fruit I was eating last week so please give me more food that will give me a big belly no. They used the same tactics that they had used to drive out the other bad men. They bombed and they taught the streak in the schools and they planned and they plotted and the sat in the caves and they kept the streak alive. They shoved more of those videos into the tubes like little fishes to be caught in the nets and the few warriors that thawed out their brains in the far off land of intelligence began to look and learn.
And why didn’t the men want to learn the comedown magic? They always wanted to learn that first and so they sent up the smoke signals to warn the frozen soldiers in the community of Intelligence to watch these dudes from the land of the man in the cave. The few dudes put their pointy little heads together and wrote a PDB which should not be confused with a PDF but both are full of words and words is for reading and reading is good as the leader of the great land once said. But maybe he had eaten a little too much Rice and destroyed the integrity of his Colon and spent to much time on the thrown. So when they read the PBD with the ominous title of, “The man in the cave really, really, really wants to kick you square in the nuts so maybe we should kick him in the nuts first.” He couldn’t hear them over the sound of his own farts.
The different tribes of the national security gated communities had the old computers that couldn’t read each others smoke signals and come on the only people that put smoke into their computers are the kind of people that live in caves and believe in different kinds of streaks like get off our manifest destiny you people that have lived here for thousands of years. You obviously don’t have the right answer to the meaning of life the universe and everything so I can lie to you and peanut butter jelly dance peanut butter Jelly dance.
So the man in the cave did the rituals and cast the sooth and said to the cave guys this will get these guys to realize that they have the wrong answer to the question . And like all the guys that live in caves and cling to the streak and practice the rituals and are sure that they are right about the answer to the big question they sent out their dudes to shove their answer up the asses of the unbelievers. They never think that killing a whole bunch of the unbelievers might not have the desired effect but instead might make them come and bomb them back to the stone age. So next time dude maybe we should think this through?
It is highly possible that they did think about it and said hey we have the streak and all you guys have been going around and beating the crap out of everyone that screws up the ritual so the streak is alive and dude we are already living in a cave, how far back is the stone age anyway. So they decided to say “GFI”
So the man in the cave got a lot of people killed and made a horrible mess and made the world suffer all because he never could get the fact that your side didn’t win because you all wore the same colored socks. The streak is just a coincidence.

Samoa All Bike Weekend

Windows Live Spaces
Went on a nice ride to the Pacific side of the bay and the all bike weekend at the dragstrip. The show was pretty good for this area lots of bikes a few impressive hot rods. They had a bike race a helicopter, the bike won but it was kind of a bs kind of start. The weather was cold and foggy with a bit of breeze but I had a good time.

The Redwoods

Windows Live Spaces In honor of the new list of wonders of the world I have put together a little slide show of the wonders of Redwood State and National Parks.

Economy Rant

As part of my efforts to become a new media douche bag I have entered the realm of podcasting. My Virtual midlife crisis first episode is up here a rant about economic deception.

Indepenence thought

Independence day in a nation devoid of independent thought. I should actually say critical thought in that none of us take the time to examine our beliefs and biases. As I ride the highways and byways of the north coast I find that the ass with the control the boarder bumper sticker is the same moron rolling down the road at 20 miles an hour over the speed limit. This is just an example of what I wish to explore in this ramble that was inspired by an episode of Blogging heads TV.
I am not a libertarian even though I agree with some of their ideas the idea that a complex society can run effectively without strong governments is ludicrous to me but that is my bias. I like to think my bias is based on data, something the objectivist capitalists don’t seem to believe in. The right is not the only group guilty of belief in that for which there is no evidence, they are just the most destructive. The left and their insistence on spiritualism as a valid excuse for some of their nonsense are just as guilty. I listened to Arianna Huffington today claim that life after death had evidence to support it based on her spiritual experience. Sorry this is first order bullshit. No testable evidence exists for life after death period. Near death experiences are not death as much as the spiritualist want to claim they are, (When someone has one in a PET scanner showing zero activity, the only device we have that can detect all biological activity in a brain and comes back with an out of body description that is verified by recorded video tape describing a unique event that they could not possibly have seen on TV I will be willing to reassess this claim. ) If you need this idea to get up and live by all means cling to your nonsense but don’t preach about living in the fact based world and then put that crap out. It makes a lie of your claim and undermines the larger more important issues that effect real peoples lives.
Life has no meaning other than what you as an individual impart to it. We all seem to need external validation, hell I wouldn’t be blogging if I didn’t want others to know what I am thinking but it will not give my life meaning one way or the other. Again I have drifted off topic, but bias is the topic and the trap.
Most of us will not spend any time assessing our views based on the proposition that we might be wrong. I have tried to look at the idea of assigning a probability to my beliefs recently from the angle of my blog commenting activity and here are a few thoughts to ponder. I have a tendency to be a smart ass, “Snarky“ in the vernacular. I am too quick to be dismissive and will lay waste to someone else’s idea with a sarcastic retort rather than educating and that is probably counter productive to my aims. I am not in the minority in this form of discourse just better at it than many, bias will out. Insert your favorite laugh out loud emoticon here.
There is one difference that jumps out at me from my behavior as opposed to the general behavior of the sphere and as the blogs tend to be echo chambers I find this disturbing. I am willing to asses the argument of the other individual based on their evidence and am open to being convinced by evidence. When someone says the reason they want the immigrants rounded up and sent back is because they are breaking the law while flying down the highway as a scofflaw I will call it for the hypocrisy that it is. When someone catches me in the same type of sophistry and calls me on it I will at least think about their point before I continue the same line of argument, I hope that crisis followers will consider doing the same.

Foggy Fourth

Have been feeling decidedly horrible since the Grizzly Creek ride with sore throat and burnt lungs so not much to report. The 4th of July was rather uneventful, it is one of the holidays that I enjoy as it is secular in nature and is supposed to be about freedom. "When in the course of HUMAN EVENTS", and all that. Also I love to blow things up and watch fireworks. I know it is a horrible waste but I still enjoy the big shows even when the fog blots out most of the patterns. The waterfront show was almost canceled for lack of a sponsor and the weather screwed with the show that did happen. It was loud and wet and the sky blurred with vibrant colors to the mixed oohs and ahhs of the crowd. It reminded me of the shock and awe videos from CNN as I shot some video. Of course the result was much more pleasant and as far as I know we all got home just fine unlike that other disaster we call the Iraq war. Hope you enjoyed your freedom day celebrations whatever the form.