I would have used this space to soapbox how excellent the Song of Ice and Fire book series is if HBO hadn’t made an impressive tribute of their own. Oh, and apparently “The Walking Dead” has yet to be canceled.
That’s right. They’re words. “Bad” words. Why are they “bad”? What did they do to deserve this status, this separation from the accepted, the norm? I have no idea, but I know how they taste. They taste like soap.
“Hi. I’m not going to hurt you. I didn’t mean to startle you. My wife is 3 months pregnant and we wanted to know if you can spare anything. Anything at all.”
What am I expected to say to that? Being approached as I step into my vehicle at night in front of a Half Price Books (notorious for big spenders) is jarring to say the least. But how am I supposed to respond? I respond in the negative, that I don’t carry cash.
I’ve had a fair number of accomplishments in my life. When thinking of them, however, It’s funny that learning to solve those colorfully-gridded cubes is one of the first things that comes to mind in contrast to maybe thinking about my education, my art, things I’ve built, places I’ve seen, trials I’ve endured and so forth. Rubik’s Cubes are simple “childrens’ toys”, a psychological assessment, and a pain in the ass rolled into one. They sell variations of the device that have up to 7 rows and you can even find cubes in the form of 50 cent key-chains at many, many stores. For the standard 3x3x3 six-color cube, there are 43 quintillion (43,252,003,274,489,856,000) possible combinations and how even the math to find this number is calculated is far beyond my means.
So I end up on YouTube, not knowing really how I got there or why I’m browsing. Maybe I followed a link or maybe I browsed for Pangaea Timelapse Maps or something. I come across a video. It’s expertly made and fairly slick. In essence, it shows a CG globe turning while the sphere grows and shrinks in size, the continents and landmasses shuffling around visibly and forming an airtight, though smaller, planet roughly half the Earth’s size. The land seems to interlock East, West, and at both poles to form an unbroken solid landmass, no oceans. It then expands, the whole earth expanding, the continents remaining the same size, the various features falling into familiar shapes and patterns. The video continues this way: expanding, shrinking, expanding, shrinking, as a man’s voice explains his theory. Well he doesn’t much explain as he does ridicule any thoughts that this ISN’T the way it happened, and the man sounds an awful lot like the Hades character from Disney’s ‘Hercules’ movies.