The Best Of The Best?
Or Is THIS The Girl To Run?
July 28, 2007 by Bodwyn Wook, revised 25 April 2008
[THIS Piece in Bodwyn Wook in August, 2007, enjoyed a vogue among regular readers, as I am sure you shall see why for yourselves -- BW]
Letter From Minnesota:
‘Tractor-Pulling Contests & Farmer-Secrecy’
by Bodwyn Wook
THERE Is humiliation in having an american mother to be sure, in sharing nationality with such insubstantial & irreal figures of a lost & damned generation as Mrs Bill Clinton, G W Bush and all of that lot. No doubt about it…but, also, there are some unexpected consolations:
LAST Night, me & She Who Must Be Obeyed hied ourselves to the Faribault County Fair, in Blue Earth, Minnesota. There — whilst SWMBO sorted out the handicrafts & arts exhibitions — your Minnesota correspondent sat in bleachers with a largely-silent & utterly-intent throng of other enthusiasts, and together we watched and cheered (from time-to time)…the tractor-pulling contests!
THIS Stuff is just delightful.
IT Is indeed “the real stuff,” as the Americans say, and there are all classes involved in it now, including the preposterous land-roving agricultural battlecruisers & behemoths of to-day. These last are science-fictional in loom and mass and aspect, and correspondingly — not least in terms of the mis-led generation that lease them — they are just sheerly unbelievable. Their part only comes later in the muggy night, in the escalating collison of power….
BUT, Really, best of all to behold — and, covet! — are the machines of forty-five and fifty and seventy-two years ago, the now-little & even silly-looking tractors, with legendary names:
FARMALL, Massey-Harris, David Brown, Minneapolis-Moline, Fordson, International, Cockshutt, Oliver, McCormick, Anglo-Semite, John Deere, Case and Allis-Chalmers tractors.
(These last at home, to be sure — we was pretty much irremediably a ‘John Deere’ & ‘Fordson’ family and went to the swedish Grace Lutheran Church, in Old Mankato – we called dismissively, in the true scornful-of-the-neighbours american farmer-fashion: “Asshole Charmers!” The neighbours, a load of Allis-owners for a fact [and non-lutheran catholic Bohunks!], were viewed by us, in our smug green & yellow and grey & red, protestant, fetor of an easily-assumed superiority, alas, as little better than so many…cases.)
IF You would wish, I expect that you could dredge up pictures for yourself, ‘on-line’ as they say, of all of these, including I have no doubt, no doubt, some of the hypothetical A-S models noted above…
http://www.antiquetractors.com/contents.htm
NEEDLESS To say, in the rolling clouds of black (!) diesel-smoke under North-facing roofed-over bleachers, and squinting against the setting Sun, Grandpa was busily scribbling mental notes to himself. And, you may well be right to suppose that the old gentleman indeed perceives that this sort of doings is right up his street! At least this is his private thought, the gentle reverie in commemoration, one has no doubt, of a beloved american mother and the old maternal farming-life:
CHRIST All mighty! I believe I could DO this, by God…! AND kick some ASS, too – and TAKE names! Wow! Listen to that old Oliver 880…pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pock! ‘Sir, this tractor is going to throw both stabilization stramuses — we CAN’T go on!’ ‘Mr Just…God DAMN the stabilization stramuses, tell them God-damn little grandkids to throw MORE kerosene corncobs into the firebox or there WON’T be any Teletubbies on Tee Vee fer THEM little sonsofbitches in the morning, by GOD – I’m slamming the dirty bastard down NOW!’ Pocketa-pock…BAM! ‘ Grampa’s gonna WIN, hooray! ’ Pocketa-bam-pocketa-bam-bam-bam…bamBamBAM! Geez, the very next lottery I get… .
MY Observations last night lead me to the conclusion, for now, that the venerable and small-to-day ‘John Deere’ 80 diesel tractor, with wide front wheels; or else, the ‘Minneapolis-Moline’ G VI propane-fired (!) tractor; either one, or both, of these ones is the best of antique beasts to own — and with whom to compete in these festivities.
MOST Of the farmer-competitors of to-day is the crapulous old men of my sort widely to be found in these parts, and it is indeed a sport for, well, fatties among the american agricultural & bucolic orders! This south-central Minnesota [and Greater Iowa, looming and leering just to southward under great bruised clouds of pesticide all climbing up the wall of the thundery horizon, grey-pink in the evening light -- ERS] is the american Summer heartland of county-fair on -fair & the week-end upon week-end of little-town sweetcorn-celebrations & hog-roasts & “LOTSA Beer!”polka-fests….
SO There they set & bob on high in great wadded and dire, pre-diabetic, mounds, on springy little old-fashioned metal fanny-seats, all pierced with ventilation sweat-holes. And there in the catbird-seat, these impossible-at-home roaring old men with their dirty cropped hair sopping in visored and greasy ‘gimme-caps’, and their three-days’ growth of whiskers firing glinting coppery sparks in the setting sunlight, there enthroned and the prostatick king-operators of all they survey:
THEY Throw out! the clutch and ram! the throttle home with art & sagacity, and with just the cunning slightest tickling of the engines’ speed, there they roar & blare, howling in lowest gear of all and slow, slow down the clayey muddy course – all to drag home slow (and, as far possible!), slow the slowly sliding weights on skids….
THIRTY-Five hundredweight was being drawn when I set down first, and when I finally could bear no more of all this tension, they were all just up to hauling along on sledges about five tons!
REMARKABLY, Some of the dinkiest, small and oldest, tractors returned again and again, weight-class for -class. Eligibilty is up to the brass & confidence, and sheer effrontery, of the Minnesota (and North Ioway!) operator-competitor — and, he qualifies, as you might have guessed, by piling on more (and, more!) traction-weights. These are appalling chunks of unwieldy cast-iron, and the art is sublimely one of leverage:
WHERE? They be hung whether fore or aft, and sticking how far out? from gravity’s centre, plus “just how God-damn LITTLE air can we get by with?” in the tyres in aid of traction…these are The Question.
IT Is a desperately secretive sort of calculus & scientire, a veiled and applied alchemy that belies the folklore you may have seen in your Tee Vees there in England about A Little House in the Prairie, of an american & neighbourly, shared, working together in adversity “…down on the farm.”
THIS Is a load of rubbish!
THE Farmer-contestants one-and-all are, I give you my word, as delicately shy as any mahometan ladies in their burqatoot and as fussily are so on this particular point of competitive-secrecy, as so many old methodist dorcases about receipts for — rhubarb-pie! And, this is so at one-and-the-same time as these swag-bellied old men allow their daughters & grand-daughters here on the Minnesota southernmost county-tier and in that brief period of of prettiness between nine or eleven years, and first pregnancy, to parade the fairgrounds in conditions of virtual nudity before the cawing & hooting young bravos from the next town & county:
I Dared to it myself and made application to an off-duty moonlighting county-deputy, to see if possibly anything more and actually to step up & look (closely!), at one or two of the tractors. It was as SWMBO & me left the fairgrounds late last night — and it was to be, alas, “no go!” There in the middle distance & a sore temptation under floodlights, inside the chainlink-fenced Sacred Tractor Precincts, I seen two of the ‘Minneapolis’ tractors I’d especially admired before. As well, the operator-competitor pranced with spanner & grease-gun….
OPPORTUNITY Plainly beckoned in its whoreish fashion, and I thought to ease my doubtless-filthy & shameless-like curiosity on a vital point or two, of technique. So I stepped toward the open tempting gate…as the white-headed looming old cop-in-mufti ranged to cut me off.
‘OH, That’s quite alright, Sir,’ I said (as a rule an english voice compels friendly if quizzical attention in these parts; and, acquiescence most importantly) ‘I’d just be wanting to ask the fella there, just briefly don’t you know, oh, a question or so, er, um…ah…about his weight-arrangements….’
“NAH, None of THAT now, Bud! You need to be WRIST-banded to get in THERE! It’s on account of the IN-surance…”
‘AND The sabotage, I daresay…?’
“BY God, you got THAT right! Some of these sonsobitches’ll PULL stuff if you turn your back even A MINUTE!”
‘SIR, I could cover this flycop with the Webley whilst you go interview the Moline-guys…?’
‘MR Just, you will put away that God-damn hogleg now – always know which fights to pick, Young Sir, and you’ll do just fine…!’
‘”THE Hell you tell me!”‘ I says aloud in commiserating homely tones, adroitly sliding from my unsteady posh plateau & adding as I turned away in the humid regretful Night:
‘I Am sorry to hear it….’
[THERE Followed this posting last Summer something like thirty-three (33!) comments, ranging all over the imaginal map, so great is the power of the images of old tractors to compel...dreams? -- BW]
33 Responses to “Tractor-Pulling Contests & Farmer-Secrecy”
on July 28, 2007 at 9:28 pm1
Lord Tosspot:
As I was raised on a farm worked by tractors painted persian orange I take offense at the “asshole chalmers” comment. I must assume you are one of those “popping johnnies” types.
on July 28, 2007 at 9:55 pm2
Bodwyn Wook:
RELAX Yourself, Lord Cesspit, be calm! I admit to the ‘putt-putt-putt-putt-putt-Putt-PUTT…puttputtputt!’ inference, but it is all a matter as the Sufis say, of being open to /learning/:
/I/ Learnt last night something about the sheer, positive roaring /brio/, of ‘Minneapolis-Moline’ tractors — and, to-day, in these pp /you/ learn somewhat of the /objective/ facts (hereftofore-not-known-to-yourself ‘twould seem!), of how /actual/ farmers viewed historically these somewhat-hysterical little tractor-thingies of yours….
ALWAYS, The dis-illusionments accumulate, in the middle-part of life!
on July 29, 2007 at 12:14 am3
Grandpa:
Here is a line on a LOT of pictures of old tractors, it ain’t in ANY sort of order!
http://www.antiquetractors.com/contents.htm
But, I don’t doubt it, that if you look through it enough, why you will even find pictures of those rodenty Alice-Is-A-Chump tractors Sir Feverblister was raving about, up above. They was liked especially by the pocket-gopher-country farmers down in the desert west of Blue Earth, MN, because if you DID happen to slip the damn clutch once too often and collapse your fool self into a BIG enough gopher nest (reaching twenty and thirty feet into the ground, well into the clay-bed and to Hell with YOU!) and just plain just could not winch out your crumby little orange tractor-thingy with a skyhook…well, Hell, you weren’t out THAT much!
Grandpa!
on July 29, 2007 at 2:18 am4
anticant:
Sounds like a helluva waste of precious oil to me! When are you lot over there going to start cutting down on your conspicuously OTT fuel consumption?
on July 29, 2007 at 2:27 am5
Mr Smith:
anticant, I daresay you are right.
BUT, Well…don’t you think he wrote it up all rather well, hmm?
on July 29, 2007 at 3:24 am6
ghostlygardens:
Seems to me that all this misunderstanding is just typicaller than hell of the farming life. It reminds me of the old Idaho story about Trouble On The Farm…
A Idaho farmer got in his pickup, drove to the neighbor’s and pulled up by the porch. After a bit a boy about 9 opened the door.
“Is yer pa to home?” the farmer asked.
“No Sir, he ain’t,” the boy replied. “He went to town to the tractor-pull at the fairgrounds with the 880.”
“Well, “said the farmer, “is yer ma here?”
“No Sir, she ain’t here neither. She went to town with Dad to drive the 880 in the Ladie’s Choice Pull.”
“How’s about yer brother Josh? Is he here, then?”
“No, Sir, he went along with Mom and Dad….”
The neighbor sat behind the rolled-down window, chewing and spitting and swearing softly to himself.
“Why didn’t YOU go to town, boy?’
“Well, Sir, I just don’t think burnin’ all that diesel that way is way too way smart…anyway, is there anything I can do fer ya, Sir?” the boy asked politely. “I know where all the tools is, if’n you want to borry one. Or maybe I could take a message fer Dad?”
“Well,” said the farmer uncomfortably, “I really wanted to talk to yer dad. It’s about yer brother Josh getting my daughter Kaylie knocked up….”
The boy considered for a moment. “I guess you’d have to talk to Dad ’bout that,” he finally conceded.
“If it helps any, Sir, I know that he charges $50 fer the bull and $25 fer the boar-hog, but I really DON’T know how much he’d try to git off of ya fer Josh!”
on July 29, 2007 at 4:52 am7
QPR23:
It keeps trying to be intellectual and then goes in for bad jokes about sex.
on July 29, 2007 at 5:05 am8
Grandpa:
That reminds me about the sales guy from the St. Peter Woolen Mills who showed up back in ‘83, when I was out dragging ground in the Spring. It was drier than a popcorn fart and I was trying to turn up the damp soil so it all wouldn’t blow away straight to Hell. (A real counterproductive kind of a process when you think it through!) Anyway, Claire Anne was in the old house trying to make hash-oil with acetone out of a huge pile of old stale ditchweed I’d had in the shed for a few years. We was going to trade it to the fools in Minneapolis for cocaine and real mushrooms (not those LSD damn things!), and anyway, the knitting guy asked her if she wanted any “coarse yarns?”
“Hell yes!” Claire Anne said, cackling to beat Hell and lighting up a dooby full of fresh weed, “Tell me a couple!”
on July 29, 2007 at 6:06 pm9
Grandpa:
It was real good dope we just got in a bag in the sloping back entryway into the South Street Saloon down there in dope addict Mankato. I got it off N who later ratted on everybody but not me, because the welfare squeezed her hard about her kids and taking way the foodstamps. THAT KIND of a damn town, does anybody remember?
on July 31, 2007 at 3:44 am10
QPR23:
Hideously overwritten and all you had for soup in the first place was nettles.
on July 31, 2007 at 4:59 am11
QPR23:
I mean the whole Bodwyn Wook boiling is awful, actually this bit is better than most and a frank basis for Benny Hill-type double-entendres, except using big words.
on July 31, 2007 at 5:38 am12
alamut malamute:
The mental picture I get of the old man making his grandchildren toil to fire the boiler is like the old Rowland Emett pictures of trains. Is there a steam-powered class?
on July 31, 2007 at 4:56 pm13
lavenderblue:
Wonderful !
Absolutely Wonderful !
I would have loved every minute of it.
Bugger the killjoys of this world !
on July 31, 2007 at 8:51 pm14
Mr Smith:
lb, good morning! It is bright & sunny as bastards and fixing to be hottish later, here in southern Minnesota where early pregnancy follows untimely beauty as sure as a german army full of SS-men tarryhooting through Poland….
ANYHOW, I am glad you enjoyed this bit — ‘we’ had loads of fun, whacking it out, and I am esp taken by alamut’s mention of Rowland Emett drawings, of steam-engines.
HAVE You seen these?
IT Was back when Atlee (bless his soul!) was nationalising the railways, and playing Seize The Cabin-Boy & silly buggers, generally….
on July 31, 2007 at 9:25 pm15
QPR23:
It’s in the news, someone won the Worst Writing Award there in the states. Dreadful syntax, awkward construction and the inevitable potty humour, all cited in the judges’ decision — let’s put up this Wook windbag for next year!
on July 31, 2007 at 9:31 pm16
QPR23:
I mean nobody does it better, or worse, than Wook, including the endless plagiarising of Jack Vance and (less occasionally to be sure) James Thurber. ‘Rhodomontade & piffle’, he said so himself.
on July 31, 2007 at 10:11 pm17
QPR23:
There IS also A load (not ‘loads’!) of number-disagreement which apparently is intended for effect, but who knows WHAT effect? It is all part of the too-clever attempt to juxtapose the English and ‘American’ languages. This concept of the antisemitic H L Mencken’s is an abortion, and it is a nonsense much like the ’special relationship’ generally. But, it amuses Wook if no one else, and now at least he is not pouring out incomprehensible venom at The Times, CiF and other public venues. Bodwyn Wook? Enter at your own risk. Especially if the sleeping-pills haven’t worked.
on July 31, 2007 at 10:27 pm18
Bodwyn Wook:
‘Esepcially if the sleeping-pills haven’t worked’ typed QPR23 in his original — I don’t delete or censor, not particularly; and, GPR23, although pedestrian, is /not/ a half-wit; but, he is equally-obviously a two-fingered typist (like myself); and, thusly, in splenetic excess mis-strokes himself, so to speak: I detest /unintentional/ error & won’t have it — hence Mr QP’s corrected text appears, /supra/.
[In closing, I would only draw attention to the artful employment, by myself, in the preceding, of a remarkable punctuate-descendo:
[ -- & ; and, & ; but & ; and, thusly, & : & --
[Only the construction 'thusly' /remotely/ may be prey to criticism, an were it objective of construction & /not/ mis-conceived, in veneficence.
[So there, by Christ!
[ s/BW (by Grandpa!)]
on August 1, 2007 at 3:25 am19
Judson Andersen:
For Christ’s sake, if you are going to make a noun into an adjective then start with the God-damned NOUN. It’s called “punctuation!” “Punctuate” is a verb, like I’ll by God punctuate you one right in the nose, if you don’t stop assholing around with plain English!
“It follows as night the day thou canst not be false to any man,” well, that’s the kind of slop they taught us in one room school District 153 out here in God-damn LeRay Town, but it ALSO follows just like clap from the gleet that “punctuationate” comes right off of “punctuation!”
(Only WHY anyone would WANT to write like such a God-awful jackass is simply beyond ME!)
Now that I’ve settled you bastards’ hash I’m going to lay down, I’m too damned old for these damn fool fracases!
An (!) I EVER run into any of you sonsofbitches, I am going to run like Hell in the other direction.
on August 1, 2007 at 5:23 pm20
MerkinOnParis:
I agree with Lavvygirl
on August 1, 2007 at 6:39 pm21
The Editor:
AND, That settles /that/!
NO Offense intended ["like Hell!" --Judson A.], Mr QP, but these most certainly are /not/ the pp of /The Squawbunion County Pile Driver & Terre de Bleu City Daily Blast/, wherein all content is reduced and confined to the reading-level of some hypothetical 5th-grader.
WE Are, altogether, great fans in these precincts of the subjunctive and give to our correspondents a sublime degree of /literary/ freedom not to have use /f—/ in order to communicate. As well, the remoter forms in English as demonstrated by Mr Andersen, /supra/, are highly to-be-welcomed.
TO Be honest, the only thing that threw ME just a tad was not so much the possibly-contrived number-/dis/agreement in Mr Wook’s submission as the shifting use of /sat/ and /set/. However, Wook’s rejoinder is that he is attempting to transcribe an authentic narrative-mode (like Eubonics!), in which he illustrates the sometimes-farcical collison of paternal and maternal Englishes, and — since I’ve heard this for myself — he actually talks that way in casual tale-telling, of which this is supposed to be an example at least in its vernacular parts, I expect the /we/, ‘me and SWMBO’ and all, simply must leave it at that.
IT /Is/ a classic example of a redoubtable once-standard English-usage being /informed/ ['...if not positively ruined, for good & all!' -- Wook] by other and heterodox, American-language, sources.
s/E Raymond Smith,
Senior Editor,
/Bodwyn Wook/
(a /Cosmopolis/ publication — /all rights reserved/ Vega System & London, Old Earth)
on August 1, 2007 at 9:06 pm22
krakisdottir:
No it DON’T! That’s what Mr. Wook would write and it’s what I think too. In The Wind In The Willows MR. BADGER didn’t let Rat give Mole any feces (laugh, laugh) about HIS grammar, you know. And, anyway, now I might NOT be ditching out of urban studies and here’s why. Last year in my so-called Junior Paper I wrote up the collapse of professional systems of city-management. In fact that’s how I came up with your weblog at first, because I am studying all of you old guys (for my mandatory Off The Boomers Program!) I wrote that because of the Erdoes theorem (I guess it’s actually just a statistical principle, and the professors most threatened by it right now are trying to study it to death!) that closed systems, those that limit input to ingroup-participants, just become less able to incorporate new ideas. I tried to show that the “deincidence” (how’s THAT?) of SPECIFICALLY manager-supported experimental initiatives is a direct function of a be safe type of attitude. Or rather I proposed this as a valid area of study. Anyway somebody at my school got real excited and they told me just last week all sorts of swell stuff in a letter about extra money to finish my major and so on. So now we are negotiating! My dad says you NEVER drive up to the county line with the cattle until you see the other people are there already with the money. And not until your guys have outflanked ‘em on at least one side, just in case it’s a bunch more of screwing around! That means that I already have been looking into Coptic-studies (remember?) and as a precaution put a ancient urban-history spin on it. So, some OTHER people who like my stuff are all for it too. I get to deal — whee! Give me my undergrad degree NOW, put me in the grad program IN CHARGE of the math part, and we can dance. OK? Me
on August 1, 2007 at 10:33 pm23
krakisdottir:
I see I forgot to explain that the Erdoes principle is the idea that everyone is only six contacts away from anyone else in the world. So I should have added that on one level I will argue AGAINST it by introducing some error-velocity vectors. I mean I THINK you should be able to quantify a selective direction as a measure of consequences, and if I’m right it should allow prediction of the decay of converses. I mean what’s sauce for the management professional is backfat and hot drippings for the elected city officials too! Sooner or later all systems breakdown, because of internal magnifications of distortion OR outer stuff (”Don’t look now, THIS guy is from Beijing!” impinging the statistical space. Why I’m good at it sorta is because I think I can SEE this in more than four dimensions and when you introduce the velocity of stupidity constant, that’s a joke but not really in this case, I can see the whole cloud, let’s call it a cloud that stretches way out and does all sorts of weird stuff. Sometimes the whole thing goes into what I guess you could call a black hole, basically it all moves into another “box.” But that has an additive algorithmic “gravity,” too, you can never “just” delete a thread, oh, never mind, anyway I’m all excited. Part of the reason everybody has got hydrophobia about it and trying to bite on ME with big offers is because if I’m even kinda sorta right, it means you CAN quantify stuff like sociology and THEN it won’t be a cult!
Oh, velocity of error is when other people outside the system “randomly” are trying to make contact with you (some with GOOD ideas) and can’t break into the communication-chain. In this case, professionals talking to other professionals and ignoring outside advances. I can understand that, I suppose you’d get crazy if you let everybody in, but you also get screwed by it at the end too.
on August 1, 2007 at 11:12 pm24
Grandpa:
Sufferin’ sawfish!
on August 2, 2007 at 5:40 am25
Emmett:
I Can’t even do algebra very well, but as a non-mathematician I have to wonder how you assign values to (or, ‘quantify’?) anything like a “stupidity-constant’? Awfully good work if you can get it! We know it’s real immediately on hearing the concept enunciated, krakisdottir. But, what happens next?
on August 2, 2007 at 6:32 pm26
krakisdottir:
OK. Glad you asked that, it’s way early out here west of Bismarck and I have to work with the horses, mostly helping trim hooves because my dad and me do all our own farrier work. So this is good practice for when I have to answer questions from other non-math people on committees that can screw you over and and not give you money and things!
The way I would do it is to start out with an ideal situation and then try to distort it in different ways. Take a kid’s balloon, full of air or helium doesn’t matter because we’re just on the surface so far. It can be described as a virtually infinite series of EXACT points in 3-dimensional space. OK, so as the temperature changes the diameter and the surface area as a result, they both change and so you can add an in-and-out dimension or rather an ADDITIONAL vector in three dimensions.
Thank God and Bill Gates and everybody for even just PC’s because just throwing in the daily diameter change makes the math way busier.
But anyway EACH POINT IS UNIQUE in space — and even more so when you add time. If it helps you can imagine the time as going from red to indigo or something, and on back to red over and over, that’ll take you in ONE direction. As you add dimensions it gets even busier. Try to imagine the colors pulsing past each other on two “parallel” OPPOSITE beats, that’s TWO directions just in the time we already know about (sort of) from our experience. Again the big deal that makes Barak Obama THINK he can get away with shit in Pakistan that Bush can’t is that every one of these points is unique — and it is ALSO unique all over again (MORE coordinate values) inside a bigger box we can call the “Big Picture.” Except there’s “always” one more bigger picture — it’s sort of like one picture piled on top of another wider one like the lady said to Aldous Huxley about evolution and the turtles, an “infinite” series, except remember that there is also something I would refer to as “integral gravity,” just because it shapes lines even on a simple cartesian X-Y grid.
Some numbers pull this way, others another.
OK, so now we have set it up so that EACH POINT IS UNIQUE IN SPACE AND TIME, and it is even more unique to us looking on from outside (!), plus time can go anyway two ways “at once” and (I hope this is obvious) in more ways than that. So now we have an ideal situation where I’m in charge because nobody else even know’s whats up — kewl! So NOW I start to screw around with the balloon, squeezing it out of shape in different ways, calculating how the numeric ensemble or (all you really need) integral descriptors CHANGE. Now it’s really important to REMEMBER THIS, numbers don’t care and they CAN go inside each other and just like that the balloon can DO things, like disappear inside itself I mean. Now if you try to force it the poor balloon pops and you’ve got to blow up another for your niece or she’ll be so pissed — but you can follow the numbers (I guess I mean that literally) in your brain or computer and — there we go!
Remember, nothing actually disappears, it can’t. This is conservation of energy and it means the fat-atoms firing off in my brain just as much as anything else. So now you can see what I mean about graphing or measuring stupidity in public administration OR any big Dilbert company like Amazon or Wally Mart or whatever.
Everything is real, even a thought is unique in spacetime and it can too be nailed!
Anyway you don’t need to worry honey, Aunty Pippi is here, it’ll be OK sweety, here’s another balloon.
on August 2, 2007 at 6:43 pm27
krakisdottir:
I said about Barak Obama and Bush.
That’s a rude point because IF there is anything to it the government people and power-ME-up dorks will try to fund this so they can screw around with things — it is in pure math terms at least likely a BIGGER deal than bombing Hiroshima ever was, and so who can say what’s right?
Because if you can get good enough at it it should be possible to “go back” and make things the way you want them. Imagine how silly and crappy that’ll be if Bush or the democrats get a hold of this too soon, but I bet it’ll be like nuclear fusion because it’ll just take awhile.
Anyway, I could go back with a big vacuum and pull people out of Hiroshima just ahead of time, and a tweezers to keep SOME people from being little babies in the first place, I know that sounds conceited but when everybody is rotten like now you have to trust your own judgement.
on August 2, 2007 at 6:44 pm28
krakisdotti:
r
Got to go, the horses are waiting in the pedicure lounge!
on August 2, 2007 at 8:07 pm29
Emmett:
WHAT Of that SF-idea that one may not muck about with the past, inasmuch you will then sent all sorts of ‘distortions’ ringing down the vectors and, thus, bugger the present out of all recognition?
on August 3, 2007 at 9:15 am30
Nagemi Mahmood:
In visionary work it should be clearly understood that in no case can the operator eliminate anything. You cannot make Auschwitz to never have been. But the operator who does the hard work can attain to the state wherein he or she adds — note this well — ADDS so much to the past that it is thereby wholly transformed.
Regardless of the language used to talk about this, terms are only approximate and as should be well-known “the map is not the terrain.”
Every attempt to make a statement about what is real nevertheless is a gain, for reality itself — this how the real becomes “more” real.
I do not think krakisdottir is making the following mistake about her mathematical language (or her non-mathematical paraphrases!), but remember this about any language:
“Words are an aspect of the attempted communication of thought. They are not thought. When we see words described as ‘thoughts,’ we should make sure that we know this distinction.”
(Idries Shah, pbuh, /Reflections/, The Octagon Press [London, 1978] — p 63)
on August 3, 2007 at 7:52 pm31
krakisdottir:
That’s right, any real situation is just the platform you step off of. There is no meaning to any of this without context, it’s like Venn diagrams because the particular number field is always contained in some other field. In reverse-order systems too, “bigger” numbers are actually inside of declining negative number-lines. This is really a lot of fun to try to see inside your mind and I hope some of you think so too, because magic (!) is just what you think it is and that’s what this is big time! More horse toenails today, dang! Visualize THAT!
on August 3, 2007 at 9:16 pm32
The Editor:
krakisdottir, I hope you are not offended? I think to perceive from prior contacts that you indeed do not mind, but I /do/ edit, not content; but, most certainly, typographical error & /cet/. I hope, actually, that what I am doing helps as your stuff is altogether very interesting!
s/The Editor,
/Bodwyn Wook/
(a /Cosmopolis/ publication — /all rights reserved/ Vega System & London, Old Earth)
on August 4, 2007 at 5:01 am33
krakisdottir:
If I really get mad at you I’ll just go riding away in the sunset and the next thing you know THINGS will start to change shape! Me
Emmett R Smith all rights & those of revison reserved 25 April 2008]
