From the Odds and Ends File...

You know, it dawns on me I've never, ever, encountered a neglected kitchen where there wasn't just a running river of mommy issues ranging from heavy to severe in direct proportion to the depth of the pile.  Oh well, I suppose this shouldn't really be that big a mystery, not really, not since the only thing more maternal than washing dishes is childbirth.

The Subject was Coffee...

===originally published Jan 25 2012===

Back in 1968 when my dad died we took him to his home in southern Idaho to bury him.  His heart never really left the high plains of his birth, it was really the only choice.  My mom's brother drove us up there, it was a long haul from Los Angeles.

Let me fill in few details, so the rest of this makes sense.  My father was from a pioneering family that arrived in Idaho with the Mormon migrations, the family had subscribed to that faith for several generations at that point.  They were good people, they lived their faith rather than exploited it, I have no complaints with them even though I myself do not subscribe.  My mom on the other hand was a recent convert to Mormonism when she married my dad, and as converts so often will took everything to the extreme.  First fervor the Catholic folk call it, although I suspect my mother had motivations even beyond that.  

The e-cig Affair -or- Practical Paranoia in the Pursuit of Pussy

They tried, Gods above know they tried.  They had the motives understood, but the scientific and technical understanding to support those motives were beyond their reach.  I’m speaking of course of the great dystopian writers: Orwell, Huxley, Levine and the like.  Now, if the good doctor Isaac Asimov had been one to write horror stories based on social deformities HE might have been able to foresee the potentials, he did have both the imagination and the academic scope to infiltrate and  expose the darker realms of science.  But sadly he just liked to write good science fiction yarns, the world never had the advantage of his perception in such terrestrial realms beyond the power of statistics wielded benign.  Rust in Peace, R. Daneel Olivaw.

Such science-horror stories are nothing new, of course not, Mary Shelly started it all back when what passed for science couldn’t pass a modern high school course on the subject.  The writers did what they could, it’s up to the rest of us to understand and actually mount a defense against the nightmares they presented being translated into reality.  Normally I’m not one to go paranoid just because I’m ignorant of something, that would be destructive foolishness for there must be a motive before the most lethal of things becomes a threat.