What time is it? What day is it? I have no idea.

It is exactly some- thing o'clock. Yes, I'm sure!

Of all the changes in our lives these past months-- self isolation, working and/or schooling at home, virtual this and virtual that, wearing a mask (You are, aren't you?), changing world--I really don't always know what day it is by date or name and often lose concept of time.

Those skills are leaving us because time itself is lost. We do seek comfort recalling what used to be and being reminded of what we still have.

For comfort, we look to the Arts. The arts are timeless and offer keys to our salvation. Paintings, like 'Melting Watch' by Salvador Dali, shows the vagueness of time itself.

We only have to look at Norman
Rockwell's "Happy Birthday Miss Jones" to reminisce and wonder when, if ever, something like this will happen again.

(God bless our teachers!)

We know that the world is a very strange and different place now, we see it and feel it in Hieronymus Bosh's work, 'The Garden of Earthly Delights." (showing one of three panels which is enough to show 'very strange and different.' in this expansive and graphic work made small on purpose.

Seeing Rock- well's vaccin- ating doctor, we take comfort in the realization that we too may soon have a 'get out of jail' card up our sleeve... but not real, real soon. (A shot in the arm though, right?) When we have that, it is anyone's guess as to how long it will take for all those who desire, to be vaccinated, ("a-one and a-two and a doodly doodly do...) and will that be enough?

Meanwhile, much is also happening on medical treatments that could lessen the effects and provide a covid-19 recipe for recovery. The catch is, you have to get it in the first place.

Will you be in line to aggressively fight this monster?


As reality sets in, we must take comfort where we find it. For many, that is a warm cup of soup on a cold day... or a cold cup of soup on a warm day, though that does sound less appealing, but bear with me so I can use Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Tomato Soup" art which is valued at $11.7 million... no cheapskate me.

Finally, we seek comfort that our President is "cognitively there" when we need him... and he assured us that he is. Repeating for us what he just said is Sarah Cooper.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself. God help us!

Grouch Marx once observed, "Time flies like a bullet... fruit flies like a banana."

... but of course, that was Groucho.  He also said, "I refuse to join any club that will have me as a member." He prophetically told us, "I intend to live forever... or die trying," which he did.

About how time flies though, doesn't it? How long is a minute? Does your week ever fly by? Ever watch a flower grow in a slow motion documentary... or a dog lapping water by curling the tongue under as it scoops? (Check it out on YouTube.) It's really neat how events happen so fast that our brain can't capture them... or so slow that they seem to go on forever.

"Honey... I'll be ready to go in a minute."

"Is it our anniversary again?" Slap!

"Can dinner wait just a sec., hon, there is only a minute left in the football game? "

"Is it Sunday night already?"

Funny thing about time... it never seems to be what it is. It is either too slow... or too fast. Never just right. That's why time in the dentist's chair seems like it will never end, but time doing something fun is over before you know it.

I used to drive my kids 15 miles to school on some days.  When I was running late, I sped (not really officer) the back roads and could make it in 18-20 minutes. When we left early and had time to spare, I drove the same route, leisurely enjoying the scenery and conversation, at a much less-nervous pace. I usually made it in... 18-20 minutes. I never could figure that one out... and was never smart enough to become a same-speed wonder. Yet, the only difference seemed to be my anxiety and stress level.

There have been several studies trying to understand how real time sometimes seems to pass in slow motion. A pitched baseball reaches the batter at a specific speed, yet to a good batter--say Ted Williams--the ball almost moves in slow motion and becomes clearer. Some tennis players have made the same observation. Williams used to say he could actually see the stitches on the ball and note its rotation.

So is that how Keanu Reeves (who's first name means 'cool over the mountains' in Hawaiian... in case you wondered) dodged those slow motion bullets as Neo in the Matrix movies?

It has been speculated that real time and perceived time are seen differently by the brain. Could it be that we have a "capture speed" as the brain takes it in and an almost instantaneous "playback speed" that we digest with?

A later study seems to indicate that when we perceive we have to take action, we deem the durations to be longer than if we were not required to move. The conclusion drawn was that time only seemed to pass more slowly because the test subjects remembered it doing so... kind of like in a dream, I guess.

Might that explain how a drowning man's life could flash before him in an instant... or would that just reveal that the drowning man didn't have that much to remember?

So much for today's not very interesting post.

Things that amaze me most.... Part II

As I told you before, there are a number of things/events/emotions that absolutely blow-my-mind because they are so introspectively amazing and give me a deeper sense of awe. So I made a list of the things that amaze me most... some big, some small, some acts, some things... but all, in my mind, amazing. So far:


Part I:  THE PACIFIC OCEAN
Part II: BIG NUMBERS


I don't know about you but my mind can only absorb so much before the wheels start to spin like the numbers on a hot Las Vegas slot machine. Maybe it was a blessing that I never got rich because now I can count what I have on my fingers and toes (metaphorically). But how do you put your arms around
5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (reads 5 million trillion trillion).

       

That is the scientific best guess of the number of bacteria alive on this earth at this time.

Add that to the 10 quintillion (10 followed by 18 zeros) individual insects. Doesn't that worry you just a little bit? If all of those little buggers got together, us 6.9 billion people wouldn't have much of a chance. Let's just hope that there isn't an insect Winston Churchill or George Washington or FDR to organize the charge.

Then of course, you have space. How much is 6 billion light years--the estimated breadth of our universe... which is constantly expanding? One light second is how long it takes light to travel 7 times around the Earth. One light year is 32 million light seconds... a lot farther than the out house on a frigid winter farm night.

Then you have stars which are not scattered randomly through space but gathered in galaxies. Our Sun belongs to the Milky Way Galaxy. (I didn't know that!) Astronomers estimate there are about 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way alone... and there are millions upon millions of other galaxies. As for size, Earth is smaller than a grain of sand on the Universe Beach. Can you imagine...?

Then you have time. It is scientifically estimated that The Big Bang, which is believed to be the event that triggered the formation of our Universe, happened 13.7 billion years ago, give or take a few billion. If that time was condensed in scale to one earth year, you and I would have been born just a blink of an eye before the stroke of midnight on December 31st at 11:59:59 p.m.

So how old am I? Less than a fraction of a second, of course... and looking good for my age.