Let’s see if everybody still likes interesting statistics after this. First think through the problem. You parents were two unrelated who met, married, and you were born. All four of your grandparents were also unrelated, as were all eight of your great-grandparents. But if you take this process back just 64 generations (around the time of the Roman Empire) you would need a thousand times more people than existed in the entire world for everybody to be unrelated. Conclusion: most people are a product of incest at some point in history. And a fairly recent point, at that.
Trivia. Most of us have heard of the Nobel Prize, but what caused old Alfred to set up the foundation? It was not the goodness of his heart; remember he lived in an age when rich people considered the poor as sub-humans. (Much along the way I consider stupid people, you know, God gave humans a brain, but if you don’t use it . . . .) The real tale is that Nobel had mistakenly been reported dead and he read his own obituaries which branded him “The Merchant of Death”. He did it all to improve his reputation.
It wasn’t until later that his money holdings became so enormous the prize was split into categories other than world peace. (In fact, most nations have laws against perpetuities to prevent one man from eventually owning all the money). Another facet of Nobel’s age was that invention was one of the few ways that “failed” people could hope to make any money. One of those failures was Tesla, who refused to share a Nobel Prize with his former employer, Thomas Edison. (Nobel withdrew Tesla’s candidacy.)
If Nobel’s intention was to promote peace, his aim was off. The only peace this world will ever see is when all politicians of any stripe are lined up against the wall. Along with their diplomatic corps. What would Nobel think if he was alive to learn that in 2008, one of his prizes went to a Japanese who invented a gadget that analyzed a dog’s bark and reported the dog’s mood back to the owner. It’s call a “Bow-lingual”. Makes you want to reach for a stick of dynamite.It is hard to believe, but today I was criticized for the first time in my life for purchasing a necessary tool for my business. Worse, the person who berated me knows that I’ve worked extra and saved up the money. I have no idea what this was all about, unless they think I should give them the $40 or something equally crazy. Mind you, I’ve seen this attitude before, the small-minded concept that music and entertainment are useless hobbies, or worse, a waste of time that should be spent doing nothing instead.
So now I have a sofa you can’t sit on, a kitchen you can’t cook in, a fridge you cannot keep vegetables in, and business you cannot buy supplies for. Am I the only one thinking of Elizabeth Jean Brooks? There’s a woman who spent her entire life criticizing everything. I doubt there was ever a thing she couldn’t find wrong. She used to go shopping to scout what other people were buying. She would go to the Laundromat to spy on what other people were washing, even grumbling over their brand of detergent and knocking how they parked and what time they showed up.
Well, I hope everyone concerned knows that I have one single tactic to prevent undue criticism from getting out of hand. Cut off the supply source. I will no longer tell anyone when I do something as innocent as buy a volume foot pedal. If they will harp on something so personal to me that is truly none of their business, it means they are purposely fault-finding and picking a needless fight. All information drops to a need-to-know basis. Nobody wants to live like that, but I am quite used to it and have all the mechanisms in place, ready to turn off the tap.
The strangest part, is that I recovered the cost of the pedal the first time I used it. The net effect is zero, except for the hard feelings now generated. Strange, some people’s idea of how things are supposed to operate. Well, I know how things work, and I’m not about to go bankrupt pleasing other people. The show tonight went fantastic thanks to that pedal, and I have not yet begun to get fancy with it. I am already two months behind schedule from helping others who have no intention of appreciating it.
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