Letters to Fred: Schrodinger's Cat

O...... M...... G......

I think I have absolute proof that tabby can actually teleport. I wasn't sure before, even when I witnessed it with my own eyes. I have of course been known for being able to hallucinate with, and sometimes without, the aid of various chemical substances, but this new proof of teleportation really takes the cake. First though, let me elucidate on the eye witness event. 

I haven't mentioned it to anyone yet because I figured I didn't actually see it. It looked so odd, so impossible that I immediately wrote it off as a brain fart. I saw tabby walk under an ottoman; not strange of itself, but here's the thing, as the back end half of her was still disappearing under the one side of the ottoman, the front end half was coming out the frontside. This is plainly impossible since the ottoman is about one and a half times as wide as tabby is long. Not only that, but as soon as one bit of the cat disappeared under the ottoman, it would instantly start to appear coming out from under the other side; i.e. on the near side of the ottoman you could see tabby's torso, hind legs, and tail, and simultaneously on the far side you could see her head and front legs, as though relativity was playing tricks and the space under the ottoman had simply ceased to exist. This was clearly impossible and did not happen since immediately after witnessing it, I checked under the ottoman to see if anything funky with the laws of physics had happened, but no, all of the space that had ever been under there... was still there. This of course left but one logical explanation, I was living with a teleporting cat. But I already knew that. There was no need to scare myself and my friends with a detailed account of what was likely no more than a technicolor brain fart. 

However, something happened today that has made me certain that the ottoman incident was no mere hallucination, but was in fact... the real deal. This occurrence is truly a locked door mystery. 

Tabby let herself into the attic today, a room for which there is only one door. No one else could have possibly let her in, I was the only person to go in there today, and I had an assistant to stand guard at the door while I moved a few things into storage. The attic is "off limits" for the cats and therefore is a place of infinite mystery and desire, and they will capitalize on even the slightest moment of neglect on my part as I enter or exit the room, such that I must create a gap between the door and the jamb no wider that something I can still squeeze through, fill it with wiggling hips, flailing legs, stomping feet, shouted curses and insults, as well as various unintelligible sounds of consternation, I must do this or my dear feline companions will immediately disappear into the dark and inaccessible recesses, refusing to come out until the have determined it to be five minutes past supper time and therefore to have a reason to meow indignantly despite having had the run of the place all day, making quite a fool of me. Hence the need for my assistant. 

Okay. So you can now see that there are two witnesses who can testify that tabby did not go into the attic during the only time that she could have, that is, while the door was open. Yet, on the wrong side of the attic door is exactly where I found her later on this day, ipso facto she must have entered it while she could not have. So here there is indeed a sort of proof since no one else entered the attic in between, around, or during any intervening moments. And, even though the absence of having witnessed an event may not be accepted as proof of guilt in a court of law, such a thing can still be considered scientifically, as evidence in a series of events, when it is precisely during a time that it wasn't witnessed that the single event, in question, occurred. 

Call me crazy, but I know what I didn't see. 

And, now I am certain. I live with a teleporting cat.

On Dec 20, 2008, at 7:13 PM, linus wrote:

I've been holding out against these things because they're still annoying, but teaching a new class on digital image forces the issue, and somebody gave me one.  We still have our home phone but the cel is 7xx xxx-xxx3.

 

Linus

------ the reply -------

aaahh..... hahahahahahahahahahahaha!!

That's so funny, and that's how it always gets started. Someone gave me my first one, as well. I still hardly ever use the damn thing, but somehow I feel inadequate when I need it and don't have it on me, and so, I start bringing it along more and more often. If there are gateway drugs, you could call this gateway gadget-technology. The cell company I avail myself on, lets all the unused minutes rollover; so long as I keep up a minimum monthly payment. By now, I have so many stored up roll over minutes that I could place a three hour, wide bandwidth, emergency interruption call to the most distant moon of jupiter and still have more than enough rollover minutes left over to phone in a pizza for dinner. Unfortunately though for me and my doppelganger on Calisto, the furthest moon, this cell phone company does not handle international calls. 

I never cease to be staggered by how astonishingly annoying technology that removes a minor inconvenience can be. 

And just think... talking dashboards in our cars appear to be not just a standard within our lifetimes, it seems likely they will become an unavoidable item in any new car by the time our kids learn to drive, which might soon become a very different thing than what we experienced. Yet, having access to children of technology may be a favorable, if embarrassing, thing. Just as our parents called upon us to program that incomparably baffling piece of modern convenience making, the VCR, I can envision myself a scant ten years hence, calling across town to my niece: 

"Hi, Natalie?.... yes, this is uncle mark.... fine, fine, and you?... Look, do you think you could come over sometime this week again? My dashboard keeps talking back to me every time I tell it to make a left hand turn.... oh... oh, ok, uh.... I have to re-boot the axel drivers with an omni what?... Turn-blaster?... Yes, ok, what!??... Well can I buy one at Kragen?... Download, download where??... Updates? But I just bought it last week.... Look I have no idea what's going on with this thing, could you just come over and do it for me?"

So... what do I say? Cell phone, schmell phone. There are children in this country who are being brought up to feel unwell, unsafe, in peril, threatened, in other words, weak and sick, if they and their family are not implanted with micro chips that not only contain all their personal information, and information gathered about them, but work as gps devices to track them. 

Gosh gee wilikers batman, It's a brave new world!

Home for the Holidays

tiki brought home a norwegian rat for the holidays. I know because I saw him scurrying around the house the other day, as tiki and her sister, tabigail, scampered about, everyone playing together. It must have been awfully tiring for mister rat, though. I found him asleep on the carpet in the hallway. That was two days ago, and he hasn't woken up yet. Why won't mister rat wake up?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8sJ1BXu2Po&feature=channel_page

Letters to Fred: Divorce

Sorry I didn't get back to you about the weekend after thanksgiving. I've been real busy and doing pretty well until the day before yesterday when I got this message.

Hi there-

Just a heads up, I started the process for getting a divorce recently. It's really time for me to move on. I found a reasonably priced lawyer in El Cerrito who will be sending you some papers this week. I'm not real clear on what the whole process is, this is just the beginning paperwork stuff, so we can meet with the lawyer to talk about things if you want.

C-



The idea of divorce is not a shocker to me, it's the suddenness, again. She has made no mention of lawyers or filing when we talked.

The only thing I am truly concerned about at this point is the health insurance. Once we are divorced, the insurance company is no longer legally obligated to supply me with insurance. And, since the high costs of monthly meds and a psychiatrist visit alone are more than one thousand dollars, I find it hard to believe they will, from some warm overriding attack of altruism, you know, the kind that scampers up your spine, cuddles your brain like fluffy rabbits and prevents you from stepping on an itty-bitty spider when you could just as easily have crushed it walking blindly on your way to attend to whatever non-spider related business it is you do since spiders are not part of the generation of finance in the ordinary course of a life, even-though the world would grind to a halt with their disappearance it is, after all, unethical, immoral, and just plain wrong to care about fluffy rabbits and itty-bitty spiders during business hours when you could just drop the whole matter and get back to important things like surfing the web for candid pictures of female celebrities without panties, male celebrities with them, and the all elusive moment in barrack obama's acceptance speech where you were so certain he'd said that he would personally insure that your house, the one you agreed to pay way too much for but never noticed having done so until the ballon payments kicked in, was the very house that would never go into foreclosure.

Yikers!

So.... I'm a bit down in the dumps. I made an extra appointment to see my therapist this week. I'd love to set up another weekend to come out to merced, but I know I wouldn't refrain from drinking (I almost did on my own yesterday) and drinking right now could easily become a very unhealthy thing for me to do at the moment.

-mark