Nerd's Knight Out

My oh my, but the days fly by. The editor informed me the other day via e-mail that my word output is way too low, and made mention of my not holding up my end of the Culture Hub. “I’ve been doing research”, I countered.
“Werd, Milty: input without output is poor programing. ”

She’s right.

Necessity in the explanation of my formidable absence of late requires confession of my longstanding obsession with obfuscated historical details, specifically of recent regarding trans-generational motivating factors in the accumulation of assets and domains to the effect of the subjugation of the multitudes by the spiritual equivalent of tainted cheesecakes. After all, everyone knows that very few can resist a cheese-cake. Thus, I have concluded (in very brief summation) that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden did not produce mere apples, as the master of disinformation has promogulated, but gâteau au fromage, tainted as it was with the burden of choice for all succeeding generations between good and evil, between salads and fats/sweets, with the multitudes always recalling from cultural memory the savor of that first bite and being blithely held in its sway, indulging self to the neglect of the Creator who holds even greater delights in store for those who would serve and apprentice under Him. Ah, but mans natural sense would demand ‘his’ cheese cake and eat it too, right now if possible, even if it lead to hardening of the 'hearteries' and 'cognitive cellulite'.

Throughout history, those with the greatest access and control over creamcheese have ineffably been able to sway the tides of history by offering bits of this olfactory indulgence to their obsequious lackeys in return for their consent even unto death in the conquest of territories near and far in the procurement of even more access to fromage de la crème with which to placate and fatten their empire. Names and places have disappeared beneath the sands of time, yet not the force of that first choice which has driven men, both noble and despotic, throughout the ages. And alas, the teeming swarms of populace throughout each age have in the main, shaken their cake pans before their cheesecake benefactors of the day for the tidbits offered, rather than keep a clean cake pan for for the Master Baker to fill.

But after such vigorous contemplations and astounding conclusions, I determined a sabbatical of a few hours was in order. I opened Trillian (the multi-platform chat messenger - uber geek, btw) and up pops fellow nerd Sir GoodKnight, who has also been deep in research. After querying me as to the current date and day, he somewhat sheepishly admitted he hasn’t fully dressed in days, and on ruminating on it, realized he hadn’t eaten in 16 hours or so today, but wasn’t sure about yesterday. I congradulated him of course! Such devotion to the pursuits and dissemination of knowledge are to be lauded, but for the sake of checking in on my cognitive collaborator, and being as it was long past sunset, when all proper geeks and nerds would still be up, I determined to go visit.

I found my injection molded and padded cranial cover and removed the linux backup floppies from it, pulled my velocipede out of the bathtub and discovered the rear pneumatic traction surface had lost it’s inflation, so located the pneumatic compression chamber device under the stairs and manually restored the 5 bars of pressure to the vulcanized black band, then took the velocipede out under the boreal lit sky by which to lubricate drive and shift mechanisms without oiling any critical cellulose notation errata that may have been on my floor. Giving a final check of all systems by a short circle in the deserted thoroughfare out front, with a mapquest printout taped within view from a old plastic mike boom for the computer sound input superglued to the helmet, I headed off. Fortunately, Sir GoodKnight is not far away. I’d forgotten that while dogs are usually asleep at that hour, at this time of year those kitties with the racing strips (Sp: Mephitis) are frequently out and about. I arrived without incident (IOW, my arrival was not announced other than by a ‘knock’), and entered his humble (for a nerd, perhaps humiliating for anyone else) abode to find him without shoes, socks, hair unkempt, shirt unbuttoned, still at the computer, cutting and pasting, annotating in the word processor, parallel searching via multiple search engines and in general, being the nerd I know and appreciate. “Hey”, I said. “Mmm?” he replies, “oh, Hi Milton. I’d offer you a seat, but...” True enough, the only horizontal surfaces available for occupancy were the area of floor I was standing on, and his couch: covered on one end by himself with laptop, and the other by volumes of reference works open and book marked at various pages, with a lone cereal empty bowl and spoon marking “chapter 16" in one of them.

“Eat?” I queried.
“Could”, he said.
“BRB”, I said, and headed for the kitchen, where I found two cans of organic tomato soup among various other canned goods, opened them with my Swiss army knife, found and rinsed off two spoons, put them in the cans, then headed back to the front room where I took up a seat on the floor while waiting for an opportune time to give him his soup. I watched as he deftly navigated multiple windows and browser tabs, checking to make sure he had the data he desired, and following the track of his eyes, I could tell he was one by one, closing windows.

“Reboot”? I asked.
“Gotta reload printer drivers - corrupted again”, he replied.
That took but a few moments, then a reboot for good measure, then he was back on line. I was beginning to think I might have to devise a soup cap, sort of like those sucker caps I’ve seen on line that hold a can of your favorite beverage on each side of your head, with a straw from each can to suck on to establish a siphon flow. The prospect of a getting a somewhat fibrous and viscous material through a straw posed some interesting conceptual challenges, but he shortly closed the laptop cover.
“Done?” I asked incredulously.
“Nope”, he said, “just downloading the nightly build of Mozilla 1.8 Alpha”.
I was in luck - he has dialup, and this would allow him time to eat. I handed him his can of soup, we bowed our heads for a moment of silent gratitude, looked at each other, raised our soup cans and eyes to the heavens and said in unison, “thanks”! Using his laptop as a table for his can of soup, he took to reading something from one of the texts beside him.
“Think you can find relationships between the Persian symbol for zero, also meaning ‘seed’ to them, related to the god Zoroaster: literally the "Seed star", Astarti, Ishtar and a host of others and Saturn, which is also called the star of Tamuz and identified with the god Kronos”. My mind leapt. “Knight! of course!!” Taking out my handy dandy note pad and pen, I made the following symbol:

Ø - the planet with a band of rings.

“How then, being as the ancient Persians had no telescopes that we know of, did they devise and assign an accurate symbol for a planet they could not really see, and why are there an uncanny number of ancient references to “the star of Saturn”, including veiled references in the Roman celebration of Saturnalia which existed heartily even unto the 5th century AD, some 4,400 years after the Flood by Scriptural reckoning, celebrating the return of light to the sky, albeit at that time, the sun at the winter solstice, when Saturn is not a star?” He took a spoon of soup and continued: “and even the flag of Islam, has the small star within the crescent moon, indicative of two lesser lights in the sky, the moon being the larger. Is it one of those odd coincidences, a chicken or egg thing whereby we named the planet Saturn after the symbology it had with the myths, or the myths were formed from prior knowledge of the planet, which may have been a star which went out, and may well have been closer to the earth at one or more points in history?” I was floored, well, figuratively as well as literally in this case.

He took two spoons of soup and then said: “Got some of it from Immanuel Velikovsky: I found a review of his book Worlds in Collision in the May 1958 issue of Pageant magazine on page 146, and decided to check it out. The book is really well documented” he said, before taking to his soup with vigor.

Could Saturn have been a star? I wondered. Saturn being a gas giant having an atmospheric composition approximately three percent richer in hydrogen that of our Sun which is at roughly 92.8%, it potentially could be a star, provided it met the theoretical minimum mass for sustained reaction density, and it is scientifically accepted fact that less massive stars last proportionally longer (at lower output) than more massive ones because of a slower reaction level due to molecular atmospheric density and gravitational pressures. If it was a star... Saturn / Satan - "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! [how] art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High." (Isa 14:12-14) But if it once was lit, why did it ‘go out’? I hadn’t realized I asked the last question aloud, and Knight surprised me by answering.

“I don’t know yet, but from the ancient myth timeline data I’ve come across of various cultures around the globe, it seems to have disappeared at the time of Noah and the Great Flood. The tower of Babel was a likely Ziggurat built to look for it, and the great event seems related to whatever moved it to its current position, potentially a large celestial body that passed through the solar system, re-ordering it and even passing close enough to Earth to tear away a portion of its atmosphere, quite likely slowing it’s spin rate significantly and changing it’s climate to greater seasonal extremes. There is some circumstantial evidence that the earths atmosphere is slightly less dense and more oxygen deficient now than before the flood, simply by the size of things in the fossil record, the longevity recorded of the ancients which could also be spin rate related, and the account of Noah’s getting passed-out drunk on wine. This would seem out of character for someone ‘perfect in his generations’, and being as alcohol is metabolized through the liver by the addition of oxygen, what pre-flood would have been a warm glow, would post flood lay him out on the sand.” “Even more interesting” he continued, “is the Cassini spacecraft which is currently orbiting Saturn with a projected terminal orbital decay of July of 2008, which has aboard a reactor containing 72 pounds of pl two thirtyeight - far more than it needed for the trip, making it the largest potential match ever made.”

I considered that the reaction which leveled Nagasaki was from 18 pounds of p, in a relatively crude mechanism. Seventy two pounds properly configured... Who in their right mind would attempt to ignite another sol? To say nothing of what the ignition shock might do cosmically. Is this why we have a ‘live’ probe on Titan? I dismissed the thought as too far fetched.

I got up, stretched, and went to the kitchen for a beverage of some kind and some bread for us, and surprisingly, found some butter to put on it, while he made a bathroom break, and stepped outside for a bit to watch the borealis. The beverage of choice was organic white grape juice, which we shared from the quart bottle, and between bites of bread and sips of juice, we spent the next few hours discussing things from ancient history to html, linux drivers to shaft drive bicycles. In short it was a great time, and before I knew it, the first birds of the morning were beginning to wake, telling me it was time to head home for bed. I helped him clear his couch for sleep by neatly piling the books on a portion of the exposed floor where I had been sitting, got a promise of a visit from him next week (he wants to download a new linux kernel variation on the dsl, and I told him I’d make a cheesecake) then biding him a cul8r, donned my brain bucket, mounted the velocipede, and headed back home a bit slower, that there would be less a surprise between the pole cats and I.

I pulled into my yard just as the sky was getting pink in the east, took my transportation back to the cellar abode but left it out of the tub because I’d want to shower when I woke, then brushing my teeth, climbed into bed and reflected on this wonderful evening. Wow. While others discuss sports and gasoline prices as if they are the heights of importance, swill cheap beer and make cheap passes at other devalued beings in search of something ‘deep’, one of my friends is looking into the very nature of this universe, our history and potential future, another is crafting words that capture emotional pictures better than a mpeg, and others are doing equally obtuse and nerdy things which the ‘grunt and gas and guzzle’ gaggle would “huh?” half way through the first sentence.

I closed my eyes, still smiling, and said, “thank you Lord Yahoveh, “the Existing one” and “I Am”, for the privilege of being a nerd, amen. Amen.”