The ghosts of Bedrock

I don't know if I believe in ghosts, but I love a good ghost story. On a website I frequent someone asked, "What's the life expectancy of a ghost? How come a majority of ghost are from the 19th Century with only a handful dating back to the 18th Century? Where are all the Caveman ghosts or even a few from 300 A.D. would be nice?"

That's a pretty good question, where are the ghosts of Bedrock?

On the question of pre-18th century ghosts, that's just a misconception. There's actually quite a few Revolutionary War related ghost stories, especially around New England, and tons of Native American ghost stories, especially out West. There's a local, or somewhat local, Native American ghost story centering around Serpent Mound up in Peebles, Ohio. That's about forty-five minutes from here. That one even made it into the Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown Series volume on Mystic Places. Across the pond you have much older ghost stories. Sightings of Roman soldiers, for example, are pretty common.

Not sure if anyone's ever seen a "caveman ghost". Maybe that's where "wild man" sightings come from, or even Bigfoot?

There's some logic to the idea that ghosts "expire" over time, though, especially if you buy into the Stone Tape Theory.

The Stone Tape Theory suggests that ghosts aren't really souls of the departed, but rather "psychic echoes" recorded in the environment (not necessarily in stone itself) sort of like a 3D movie. Most ghost stories envision a ghost as the soul of a departed person. This doesn't really make sense though when you think of what people say they actually saw. For example, "I was walking along a back alley in London one night when from around the corner came an 18th century carriage drawn by a team of horses. The passengers on the carriage were dressed in 18th century apparrel, and they each had blank expressions on their face. They seemed not to notice my presence as they continued down the alley and disappeared. I later heard that people have been seeing the ghostly carriage as far back as the early 1900s, and the stories are typically the same."

The problem with viewing ghosts as the soul of a departed human is that one would have to assume in the above example (a typical ghost story) that not only does the passenger have a soul, but so would the horses, the carriage, and even their clothes, not to mention all of those lost souls that became ghosts decided to all hang out together in the afterlife doing the same thing over and over again.

The idea that what's being viewed in the ghost story isn't "ghosts" but rather an echo of some past event, sort of like a 3-D movie being played, evolved from that need to explain not ghosts as souls, but rather ghost stories as scenes taking into account all the elements involved in a typical ghost story. If one took the idea seriously, that it's a recording being played back, it makes sense that the recording would degrade over time – and that ghosts would have a "life expectancy". Whatever psychic echoes there were in caveman days may have dissipated over time.

Untitled

Related to a project I'm working on:

Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

—T. H. Huxley

Or, in other words, problem solving through serendipity. It doesn't sound very reliable, but it has always worked for me.

(knock on wood)

X-Files 2 publicity photos released

First publicity photos released from the new X-Files sequel coming out in July. Everything's hush-hush, naturally, but they've gone back to their roots, favoring the "monster of the week" format that made them successful versus the long running X-Files mythology of aliens colonizing the planet in preparation for a hostile take over. They've also gone back to Vancouver to film the sequel, which is where all of the early X-Files were filmed. That's cool, because there's only so much you can do in the desert outside of LA, as the last couple of seasons of the show demonstrated.

Apparently no one ages in Hollywood either. It's been six years since the final episode of the television series and the intrepid paranormal agents look like they've been frozen in alien carbonite and thawed out just to film the sequel. It must be all that hybridation going on.

The film is still untitled, but a production crew is working in Vancouver under the codename "Done One". There's no official statement that Done One is X-Files, but it's not that hard to figure out. Us X-Files fans are trained to look for clues. The director listed on the Done One roster is a Rich Tracers, a clever anagram for Chris Carter.

Done One. That doesn't sound very enthusiastic, does it? Oh well, the real enthusiasm lies in the die-hard X-Philes like myself – who've been waiting six friggin' years for a sequel! All I can say is that it's about time, and I hope everyone stays onboard so that ten years from now, when they're filming X-Files: Infinity, the production will be called "Done Twelve".

Reductio ad Hitlerum

Random Internet terminology: Godwin's Law.

Anyone who participates in heated discussions online will recognize this to be true, though they may not recognize the term. Reductio ad Hitlerum, or dog latin for "reduction (or argument) to Hitler (or the Nazis)" was coined by Strauss, in 1950, but adapted as an adage for the web by Mike Godwin in 1990. It is now generally referred to as "Godwin's Law". The law states:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving
Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Your Second Life, no really

In the early days of the web, businesses swarmed to adopt private chatrooms and instant messenger programs as effective business tools for dealing with out-of-office communication. That's so 2-D. As 3-D environments like Second Life become more viable, is it possible that one day we may all conduct business in immersive online environments, in a sort of, well, second life? It's a definite possibility. Last year Lawrence Lessig, cyber-law professor and founder of the Creative Commons, began conducting seminars on legal, social and technological issues while on "location" in the Second Life virtual world. This month, Forrester Research released a 24-page report, Getting Real Work Done In Virtual Worlds, telling its clients that virtual worlds are on the brink of becoming valuable work tools; and that within 5 years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for business as the web is today. As Gary Trudeau said, "I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence." Maybe someday soon, in the non-local Internet of the near-futre, I may actually succeed.

Beware of the trembling earth

I don't know if every state has this, but when I was growing up – six or seventh grade – and living in Georgia, we were required to take state history classes. One of the things I learned about was a 438,000-acre stretch of wetlands called the Okefenokee Swamp, situated at the Georgia-Florida border. The name comes from what Seminole tribes called "the land of the trembling earth". This stuck with me because I imagined it as grasslands growing on top of the water, that you could walk on and not fall through, trembling like a waterbed mattress or one of those inflatable bouncy cages you find at carnivals. Turns out it's just a swamp.

I was thinking about the Okefenokee tonight while out walking my dog down at Limestone Landing. It rained really hard the other day and the Ohio River had risen, strangely enough, to the exact height of the concrete dock that extends into the river. I always love it when the river gets this high. It's like walking on water to go out on the dock; the river surrounds you and you feel like you're a part of it. Some debris had gathered in the pockets between the irregular-shaped dock and the shore. It looked like a solid layer of wet earth.

I was standing on the dock admiring the river when I heard a loud "Ploop!"

"What the hell?" I thought, and turned to see the retractable dog-leash I was carrying led straight into the muck, straight into a small patch of water surrounded by debris with hardly a ripple showing any other disturbance.

"Mocha?" I asked stupidly (Mochaccino is my dog).

It had to have been at least a full second before her head bobbed to the surface. She had gone all the way under and when her face appeared she looked as surprised as I did, confused as to how the ground had suddenly opened up and swallowed her. I'm sure being dunked beneath the icy waters came as a bit of a shock as well.

I'm a bad father. I couldn't stop laughing as I fished her out and took her home for a warm bath. Of course now I realize that she could have been swept under the concrete slabs, or gotten tangled in branches beneath the surface of the water, or any of the other things my smarter than I wife told me about when I got home. There is absolutely nothing funny about a frozen dog-cicle, though it sure seemed like there was at the time : )

In any case, when the sun has gone down, and you're out for a walk by a river swollen with rain, take my dog's advice and watch where you step. Beware of the trembling earth.

Past midnight

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
- Bill Vaughan

I wanted to post some New Year's resolutions on New Year's Day. Since today is the 8th, obviously my first one is to avoid procrastination.

Actually many of my resolutions involve better managing my time and avoiding participating in what Kurt Vonnegut called "granfalloons" (communities whose shared identity or purpose is ultimately meaningless). That's easy. I'm already a few steps ahead. I am no longer a member of the "TV Watchers" community – the writer's strike killed half a season of Heroes and what else is there to watch? I am also no longer a member of the "Mumbling Political Debaters" community. That sounds counterintuitive in 2008 since it's an election year, but it's hard to be interested in politics when you really don't support any of the candidates. That saves me countless hours of blogging, mumbling in forums about politics, watching YouTube videos, etc. Heck, I've probably saved a collective month of my life right there.

Side note: The writer's strike isn't all bad. Apparently a lack of freshly written movie scripts pushed through the as-yet untitled X-Files sequel set to be released in July. Hollywood was digging around in their bin of already finished scripts to push into production, and up floated this one (you can't see me, but I'm foaming at the mouth). This will be one incredible year for movies.

Back to resolutions. I've actually got hundreds in my head that deal with a general betterment of the only contribution I have to the human race – myself – but there's two that supercede all the others and make for master resolutions. These place all the others in context. They are...

• Surround myself with positive people who feel that life is an adventure, full of mystery, and worth pursuing, people who are as motivated and engaging as I am (or as I would like to be).
• Continue to care about the people who occasionally float through my life that are either miserable by design or circumstance, but remain detached enough that their reality does not become my own (while realizing that this is harder than it sounds).

The parenthetical statements above are natural corollaries to their previous statements and though they sound like "outs", which aren't very resolute, they are simply acknowledgments that no one is perfect and everyone gets wrapped up in negativity at times.

And that's all there is to it. If anyone – hopefully myself – can maintain these master resolutions and whatever sub-resolutions stem from them, it's bound to be a great 2008. If I remember to, I'll come back in Jan. 2009 and tell you how I did.