bubbleblower | Silicon Soapware #231

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                            SILICON SOAPWARE
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                                Issue #231
                        New Moon of October 4,2013


Contents copyright 2013 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative 
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.  See the Creative 
Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details.

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.


                          *********************

As I first-draft this the politicians in Washington are refusing to budge 
on the budget.  The government is in a partial shutdown, and a more 
serious financial deadline may be missed in a couple of weeks or 
thereabouts.  Or it may not be.  By the time you read this it may have 
all been resolved.  That's what many of the media people seem to be 
expecting.

But what if it isn't?  What if it's never, Never, NEVER resolved?  Even 
if it does get resolved this time, what if there's a next time when it 
doesn't?

Would the Federal government evaporate for lack of funds, leaving the 
fifty states (plus a few odd territories and such) to go their separate 
ways?  If that were to happen, how would the various states deal with it?

If the Feds manage to hold together long enough it may get resolved by 
whatever new Congresspeople get elected in November of 2014.  Or if not 
then, there will be a new President (along with more Congresspeople) 
elected in 2016.  Would that fix it?  Or would things have gone too far 
toward total collapse by then?

And what of the military?  Back in Revolutionary days, when armies and 
navies relied on muskets and horses and cannon and sails, the military 
could probably have survived on some mixture of freelance mercenary work 
and random plunder.  But nowadays, what with all the high-tech stuff that 
needs a sophisticated industrial base and a somewhat stable economy to 
keep supplied, that seems doubtful.  So what would they do?

Many of you are much more into political stuff than I am.  Any thoughts?


                          *********************

Maybe the budget mess never ever gets resolved, and eventually the 
Federal Government withers away for lack of funds and is replaced by 
something else.  After a few centuries it's pretty much forgotten.  But 
legends linger, and there are those who whisper of some eventual Chosen 
One who will some day rise up and lead the True Americans into a new 
Golden Age...


                          *********************

"Your writing stinks."

"So instead of a spell checker should I have gotten a smell checker?"


                          *********************

A recent XKCD page ( http://xkcd.com/1274/ ) has an open letter to all 
the groups secretly running the country, asking them to please get their 
act together (he didn't used the word "act", but the word did end in 
"t").

That reminded me of an earlier thought that the various groups secretly 
running the world may be constantly trying to take each other over.  Then 
one of the groups had gotten control of another in a way that put the 
whole chain of command and control into a closed loop.  So now it's 
running out of anyone's control, making decisions more or less at random, 
with everyone involved thinking the resulting chaos is in accordance with 
someone else's master plan that would make sense if only they had the big 
picture.  But it isn't being planned at all.  It's just chaos.

It may eventually break down and reform itself into something stable.  
But don't bet on it.


                          *********************

A few days ago I went to the dentist.  While I was waiting I bubbled the 
receptionist and a couple of other staff people who wandered into the 
waiting area.  They seemed to enjoy it.  The dentist enjoys it too, 
although he spends less of his time in an area where it's safe to have 
bubbles floating around.

Later on the dentist said something about how seeing the bubbles made him 
kind of want to do some himself.  I suggested he buy some the next time 
he's at a store that sells it: "They do allow dentists to buy bubble 
stuff."

This led to a slightly silly discussion of how stores might enforce a 
rule against selling bubble stuff to dentists, and how he might 
circumvent such a rule.

In this age of computers and databases and such, the authorities pretty 
much know who is a dentist and who isn't.  So they could simply require 
ID for all bubble sales and refuse the sale if the buyer is a dentist.  
This, however, isn't foolproof.  Many dentists have non-dentist employees 
such as receptionists who could make the purchase for them.  Even if you 
managed to trace those relationships, most dentists have friends who may 
not be listed as such.  And even if you were to track down all friends of 
dentists, it's possible to make your own bubble stuff from dishwashing 
liquid or shampoo or similar materials.

So it may be just as well that they do allow sales of bubble stuff to 
dentists.


                          *********************

"He grew up in a place where too many people were crowded into too few 
houses.  The houses were fairly old, built when high ceilings were in 
style.

This seemingly wasted space in otherwise cramped quarters inspired him to 
invent a bottom-loading washing machine that could be hung from the 
ceiling.  It was not commercially successful."


                          *********************

Several times a week, weather and other circumstances permitting, I'll 
take an afternoon walk around a neighborhood park.  There are a couple of 
baseball or softball fields there, and quite often, at least during 
baseball season, there will be a game in progress as I walk by.

Most of the ones I've seen over the past few months have been rather 
mellow softball.  The pitching is underhand slow pitching, the players 
don't seem to worry about stuff like uniforms, and I got the feeling of 
an informal party mood, even if they do keep score.  They may have 
eventual tournaments and champions and such, but most of the games have 
been between what appear to be neighborhood teams that aren't likely to 
get into that kind of high-stakes situation.

But one day recently there was something different: The teams appeared to 
be playing hardball.  They may not have been literally using a baseball 
as opposed to a softball, but they were wearing uniforms (or at least 
matching shirts), the pitching was overhand like in baseball, and coaches 
or maybe parents or somebody was shouting advice to the players.  The 
overall mood had more of a hard-edged feel to it.

I got the feeling that I was seeing two different cultures, one based 
more on having fun and the other more on winning or otherwise gaining 
status.


                          *********************

Halloween is coming up.  The stores are in bloom.  We're also seeing the 
fiftieth anniversaries of various pivotal events back in the Sixties.  
All that reminds me of this:


                              Going to Seed


On a mild October evening I browse the Halloween store, 
A place of gore and gravestones, 
  spiderwebs and skeletons, 
  costumes and cauldrons.  

A packet catches my eye, 
Stirring up memories of days almost forty years gone. 
It is a "HIPPIE KIT":  
  A headband with the word "PEACE" on it, 
  A large peace-sign neck pendant,
  And a pair of rose-colored glasses, 
  All marked "Made in China".  

The tie-dyed T-shirt and longhaired wig are not included, 
But no doubt await me down another nearby aisle.  

As a plastic skull 
  blares a tinny rendition of the well-known Funeral March 
Part of me dreams of taking a time machine 
  back to those days of overwhelming optimism
  in the face of overwhelming adversity. 

Would those I would show it to laugh or cry
  to see all their grand world-changing dreams 
  summed up in a pack of trinkets in a costume shop?  

To those who would cry I have words of consolation:  
While the bloom of the Flower Children has faded,
  their seeds continue to grow and spread, 
  flowering anew into a rainbow of colors 
  beyond what they could have ever imagined.   


                          -- Tom Digby
                          written  Tue Oct  5 20:54:34 PDT 2004


                          *********************

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