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Welcome to the World of the Counterintuitive
for release 04-12-07
Washington DC
by Lightning Rod
It snowed the day before Easter here. Al Gore's testimony before Congress about global warming was postponed twice due to snow and ice. I suppose I should not be surprised. Welcome to the world of the counterintuitive. Things are not as they seem. Even as the Easter eggs lie frozen in the back yard, we are told that the world is getting warmer.
John McCain has the temerity to recount that he took a quiet, safe stroll through the peaceful streets of Baghdad, when we all saw the pictures of him wearing a Kevlar vest, surrounded by a hundred troops with five helicopter gunships flying overhead. Sorry John, most of us don't have the budget to stroll that safely.
Dick Cheney rhapsodizes that everything is peachy in Iraq. Well, for him things probably are peachy in Iraq. I'm sure that all of his Halliburton shares (which of course he doesn't even know about because they are in a 'blind trust') are appreciating. This is all while there is still chaos in the country and American lives are being lost daily and all factions agree that we are the problem, not the solution. No wait, that's counterintuitive.
So Al Gore is throwing a big party in July. A global warming party. Rock and Roll while the water's rising. I can't wait. I love a good concert. I'm sure the music will be much better than the 'science' lesson that goes with it. July is a good month to talk about global warming, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. Hurricanes rotate in a clockwise direction in the Southern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. Sounds counterintuitive, doesn't it?
There is a myth that because hurricanes rotate this way, that bathtub drains do the same--spin clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Northern. But, as I said, this is a myth. The Coriolis Effect, which has to do with the effect of the earth's rotation on moving objects, accounts for the opposite rotation of hurricanes because they are macro-events (in layman's terms, that means very big.) But the vortex that the drain in your bathtub creates is a micro-event in relation to the rotation of the earth, so the Cariolis Effect is overpowered by local events such as which way your foot was moving when you exited the tub.
I just spent the past fifteen minutes in the bathtub doing my experiments. The water spun both ways around the drain. It went back and forth, clockwise to counterclockwise. Local micro-events overruled larger but more distant macro-events. Of course these things average out in the world of statistics, and therefore we can at once have global warming and my frozen Easter eggs. We can have success in Iraq while at the same time having local chaos and the isolated soldier dying every day or so. It's just statistics, it averages out. And you have to think counterintuitively. You know, outside the box of reality.
Just the fact that we have a word like counterintuivity is oxymoronic and unnecessary because we already have the word oxymoronic. It's a contradiction within its ownself. It's corporate Newspeak. It means that you are ignoring the evidence of your senses and your feelings and your instincts and choosing instead to act in opposition to them.
The Poet's Eye sees that things move in cycles. The globe warms and cools. Oprah gets alternately skinny and, well, not so skinny. We vote for demublicans one year and republicrats the next. Skirts get longer then shorter then longer again. They say that the earth flips on its axis now and then. They say. They say. They say a lot of things. Get used to the world of the Counterintuitive. In which direction does your brain spin today? (oops, I meant drain.)
When logic and proportion
Have fallen softly dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head
Feed your head
Feed your head"
--Jefferson Airplane
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
Were captive on the carousel of time
We cant return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
--Joni Mitchell
