Study Questions

While I am travelling, students reading my posts as school assignments can answer the following questions:

1. Rotas Sator discovered the Sator Square while inventing a reversible vest to protect humans from volcanoes in the first century. The vest was a flaming failure at Pompei and litigation fallout is still clogging the Italian courts. Some believe Sator’s vests caused the Pompei Eruption, although scientists accuse Roman brothers Heart, House, and Global Warming of dousing the eruption with lighter fluid. Was this written by Artificial Intelligence, an unintelligent human, or an unintelligible politician?

2. Last summer a woman ushering her child to the Pool at a fancy resort was overheard on her cell phone: “I love my mother to death but if I had to live with her, I would kill myself.” Does she love her mother “to death?” Would she actually kill herself? Will her son someday say those same words to her?

3. A grandmother asked her 13 year old grandson how football practice was going. He responded with the text: “I’m him.” Should he have more humility like his grandmother believes? Or is it time to get him an agent as his grandfather suggests?

4. President Joe Biden congratulated President Jimmy Carter on his 99th birthday: “I just hope I can be half the President you have been.” Is Biden half the President Carter was? Is Biden going to be twice the President Donald Trump was? Should Carter run for President in 2024, even if he is a fraction of his former self?

5. If you eat too many foods rich in iron, are you irony? If you do not follow rules, are you unruly? Are you pro digital eQuator or are you antiquated? If you are in a stage where you are not dating, are you inundated?

6. An appalling lack of leadership exists even though Amazon offers 57,136 books with the word “leadership” in them. Is the Suicide Squeeze novel one of them? Why does “lederhosen” appear in so many fewer books? Are authors embarrassed to use it?

7. No matter how many times I sign in to accounts with all the right passwords and count the motorcycles in the squares, no one seems to believe I am Geoff Stamper, especially WordPress. Am I him despite all the notifications of his unusual sign-in activity? Or am I just wearing his lederhosen and pretending to be him?

Wasted Days & Wasted Nights

Time is precious. I save it, spend it, and squander it. Same as money. I waste time and money just keeping track of them both. I feel naked without a watch and would be naked if someone had not invented money. The two are intertwined. Time is money. When your time is up, your money is redistributed. I am ahead of that game because I am constantly redistributing money before I expire. In fact, I am spending money even before I earn it. I cannot control my time or my money. I can pause the television show to go to the bathroom or step outside and yell at my neighbor for letting his moles roam free in my yard. But I cannot pause my life to catch a breath. Time is ticking when I am sleeping or reading Blogs. This seems unfair. I have tried napping while drafting and reading posts in an effort to make better use of my time. But this just makes me crankier and more unpopular (I had no idea that was possible). I memorized the multiplication tables, learned cursive, mastered the slide rule, and studied five years of Latin. Time spent on these activities seems like a monumental waste because my phone is way smarter and faster than me even in my areas of expertise. However, I am told that learning obsolete skills has had a tremendous impact in the development of my brain and that my grandchildren will be hampered without these skills. Trust me, my brain is disorderly and wanders on the backroads of sanity. I am well prepared for the manual transactions of the past but ill equipped to handle present day apps. Today’s reality is full of artificial sweeteners, limbs, and intelligence. As I relax, listening to Freddy Fender and nodding off into the keyboard, I hope my grandchildren are not spending too much time playing the abacus, memorizing prepositions, and ignoring obvious signs of the impending future. It descends on its own terms, regardless of our preferences and thoughts on the matter.