Thunderbolt kids - Who the Hell is Bill Bryson?

A couple of months ago I finally got around to reading Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. I say 'finally got around to' because as soon as it was published I intended to read it for two reasons: first, I have read some other of Bryson's books, and rather enjoyed them; and second BB and I grew up more or less in the same time and the same place, and I wanted to run his memories past my own.

Growing up in Des Moines, Iowa wasn't in itself particularly breathtaking ... Iowa for most of the world is a long way from anywhere ... and Des Moines doesn't figure particularly high on any scale of newsworthyness.

In a sense neither was the post WWII era of the late 40's and 50's particularly breathtaking nor newsworthy. Coming in the wake of the war years, it didn't seem dramatic. Coming before the Swinging 60's it didn't seem colorful.

When I first came across a book by Bryson, I was interested to note that he, like me, grew up after the war in Des Moines, Iowa; and the he, like me, was an expatriot American living in Europe. How could it be that I never ran into BB during all those years? I knew everybody of interest in DM, didn't I? Was it all because BB grew up south of and I north of Grand Ave. (the great social devide in DM west)? But no, my peer-group and my family sphere came from all over town both north and south of Grand Ave, and East and West of the DM river.

In the wake of my Roosevelt High, class-of-'64 40th anniversary reunion [of course I didn't actually travel all the way from Oslo to the reunion] I exchanged some emails later with my old gang, and enquired about BB ('who the hell is this Bill Bryson, anyway?'). Rosy Ransom was the only one who responded, and she said: "You know ... he's Betty Bryson's little brother". But who the hell was Betty Bryson? All the girls in DM those days had alliterative double initials: RR (Rosy Ransom), KK (Katie Kasten), LL (Laura Lemon), LL (Linda Lee), MM (Marlys Meyers), BB (Betty Bjork), BB (Barbara Britton), BB (Betty Bryson). Still, no bells rang.

At sixty, I consider a 54-year old to be 'my age.' I was born in 1946 and BB in 1952, six years later. For a 16-year-old, no 10-year-old is a peer, nor vice versa. The chances of their paths ever consciously crossing are minimal, no matter how much they move around in the same space. If they keep moving in that space long enough (say, 44 years) the chances become much larger, because the peer potential increases in direct proportion to the ratio δ : α where δ = age difference and α = total age. [Thereby, the peer potential between a 10-yr-old and a 16-yr-old is about 4, while between a 54-yr-old and a 60-yr-old is about 20]

So just because BB and SM were born six years apart, and as adults didn't stay put in DM, there is virtually no way they could have known each other.

...Pity, I think I might have liked the guy.

The Real Human Energy Crisis

Yesterday evening I plowed through piles and piles of web pages on the subject of Zero-Point Energy. (Well, actually, only the first 200 or so of 25,000,000 hits on a Google search ). For a number of years now, Zero-point energy has tantalized me. Possibly it's because I have been a life-long addict of intelligent science fiction, and resolving the riddle of 'just what wave are all those light beams from the stars riding on through the vast limitlessness of the void, anyway?' is tantamount to explaining how a lowly human life form could possibly travel from star to star.

But Zero-point energy (ZPE) has sparked a number of closer-to-home brainchildren, too: ranging from visions of free access to unlimited, renewable, non-polluting energy at bargain basement prices; via cult-like claims of direct spiritual access to ZPE through chanelling and meditation; through to paranoid conspiracy theories involving UFOs, Roswell, Ari., Area 51, and alien ZPE technology being evilly sequestered by the military-industrial-complex ... just to mention a few.

Luckily, it isn't only the quacks, the hacks, the paranoids and the schysters that are working on ZPE. Some quite sober scientists, too, have been making steady progress at harnessing ZPE, and that gives me some hope.

For decades it has troubled me that with all our brainpower, science and technology - and living within an ecosystem just teeming with unharnessed energy - we cling so desperately to total economical dependecy on combusting fossile fuels -- As though we all are sleep-walking under a malevolent spell that collectively keeps us from grasping that viable alternatives are, in fact both possible, plausible and necessary.

Yes, we have been sleepwalking ... and no, there is no evil game-master ... the only place to put the blame is on ourselves ... as individuals, as nations, as societies, as cultures and as a species.

My contention is that there has been one, fundamental, all-prevading idea that keeps us in this global trance: Increasing wealth
All our vast science and technology has developed hand in hand with our increasing wealth. Our advances have been continuously motivated and stimulated by increasing our consumption of fossile energy and thereby improving our "standard of living" - read: increasing wealth. In our greedy little heads, the very thought that energy should and can be dirt cheap (there is just so much of it lying around, unused) is a threat [to increasing our wealth].

You can dig up fossiles, or uranium ore, or thorium ore, or build a hydroelectric dam ... and get very rich selling the energy they produce at a profit.

But how in the world can you sell something like ZPE that simply is everywhere? And who will get rich if it's gratis?... And that's what scares us more than all the doomsday predictions of ecological collapse, war, famine, pestilence and abrupt climate change put together.

The human energy crisis is and will remain a truly human crisis ... until we learn how to shake the monkey of individual and collective greed off our backs.

*s*

Bunking the environmental threat

Today is the 12th of April, 2007. There is nothing new in the world, yet everything at this very moment is brand spanking new.

I was looking at new stuff on You Tube the other day, and I chanced to see a vid dedicated to debunking the idea that humans are currently impacting the world's climate (now removed from You Tube due to terms of use violation). I was irritated. For the last fifty years, I have been a convinced and confirmed environmentalist.

---------o0o---------

1957 was the start of the IGY, the International Geophysical Year. My father was a Fullbright Scholar at the university in Wellington NZ in 1958, funded by IGY. The biologists, the botanists, the oceanographers, the meterologists, were already all talking about human impact on the climate in 1958. The freon scare, the CO2 - greenhouse scare, the gulfstream scare, were already firmly emplanted on the scientific agenda. That's fifty years ago. I just hate it when politicians claim that they never heard of the climate threat until recently.

---------o0o---------

On the one hand, it's never a surprise for anyone that no matter how important the issue, nor how convincing the evidence, there will always be a debunker out there that denies it. And some of the great heroes of history are debunkers. For some of these debunkers it's the evidence and the issue that's important, but for most of them it's simply the denial.

On the other hand, for the last fifty years I have been convinced that whenever an idea has become THE hegemonic consensus (eg: that leaded gasoline is necessary, that cholesterol is poison, that protecting the environment will cost us jobs, or that ... whatever ) its time to question it.

So I meet myself at the door ... the believer who after fighting an uphill battle for 50 years, discovers that the world seems finally to have started listening ... meets the skeptic who has always distrusted the consensus ... Whose judgement should i trust the more - myself ... or myself?

Teaching an old blog new tricks ...

I haven't previously tried the blog thing. I have been saying all kinds of things ... on all kinds of topics ... in any available forum for the past sixty years.

But ... just to prove that old dogs can, in point of fact, learn new tricks ... I'm now going to try publishing my own blog.

*s*