Is Edison Spinning in His Grave?

The debate rages on over modern curlycue light bulbs, which we hate, versus the good old time traditional light bulbs, which we all love. Through some unwelcome interference, the heavy hand of government, Thomas Alva Edison's good old light bulbs are going away, being taken off the market. We have had mixed emotions about this travesty, going from general everyday rage to exceedingly hot rage; the one constant is a bitter anger that shall never end.

Now, added to that, is a brand new debate, taking us to the grave site of the famous inventor and leaving us to wonder, Is Edison spinning in his grave? I personally believe he has to be, if his anger is anything like mine; the key takeaway from everything I know of him is that he was very invested in his inventions. And anytime anyone did anything remotely hostile to one of them -- I'm guessing here -- it sent him over the edge. He went ballistic. At the very least, he must be spinning over this!

But I'm nothing if not fair. So I will first present the NO response: He's not spinning.

NO! Edison was all about progress. He loved innovation. He knew as well as anyone -- thanks to his endless tinkering -- that inventions always will be improved on and adapted to the times. It just so happens that in these days the old ways are out, often for arbitrary reasons. But they frame it under the guise of "saving energy," so for that flimsy reason we have to change the light bulb. But Edison would have been fine with this, no doubt liking change for change sake, and innovation (so-called) merely for the sake of keeping busybodies occupied.

Edison liked making money, so he would've understood the real motivation here, the vast fortunes to be made by needlessly switching us to something different, however inferior the replacements might be. As for "saving energy," there's one light they can't tinker with -- the Sun -- the same old sun Edison often looked to for inspiration. Last time I checked -- which was in 2002 as a crew member on the spacecraft Solar Quest VII -- the great solar giant still had plenty of energy to give. No observable lack. So, NO, Edison is quite secure in his grave, no spinning.

YES! There was no one quite as vain as Edison. Children revered him. I know I did. We even had to memorize his middle name, which is more than we did for the average guy. It was a weird name we didn't know, that none of our friends had, ALVA. With that kind of adulation, Edison protected his reputation with ferocity.

Other inventors couldn't stand to be near him. He openly did all he could to sabotage them, mostly through legal means, tying them up for centuries in patent fights. Which he also invented, meaning he could never be similarly sued. Edison was inventive, yes, but even more so he was PREventive. His first aim was to hem in progress, to be its sole master.

The idea that Edison today could be doing anything else but spinning in his grave shall receive no credence from me. By now he's even worked up, with limited supplies, some kind of spit -- the Turn-o-Dead -- to make his spinning easier and faster. There's simply no way he could ever take this horrific change in the light bulb lying down. Even I'm up in arms over it; imagine how much more irate the inventor has to be.

So YES, YES, A THOUSAND YESES -- Edison is appalled, obviously spinning in his grave.

How Many Light Bulbs Will I Need to Hoard?

There's been big news about light bulbs. They're not going to make them anymore. They're being replaced by a more squiggly higher priced thing. I had some of the earlier models of these. You turned on the light and by the time you took a pee it was just getting close to being bright.

Obviously I prefer the classic bulb, that's ready when you are. You click it on and it beats you to the toilet. There's never any doubt where everything's going, since the vagaries of things pressed against underpants for eight hours never guarantees a straight stream.You have to eyeball the eye.

I wish I would've started hoarding bulbs a year ago, when they were still manufacturing them. Now, with 2014, everyone's snapping them up and it's illegal, I guess, to make more. But still, I suppose since drugs have been illegal forever and dopeheads still get them, it's not beyond all hope that classic bulbs will pop up somewhere.

I'm thinking -- unless I do have a shady rendezvous with some shady supplier under a dim streetlight -- I might really have to get on the stick and find some. I have a few bad sockets in which the bulbs don't last that long. The last thing I want is to buy $9.99 bulbs for a month and a half worth of good. I need a steady supply of the cheaper stuff.

But where to go? Walmart might be out. Everyone's going to think of going there. Instead, what I'm thinking, there's all those cheapo closeout places, where they get unsold freight from who-knows-where. I know a place. It's junky as hell, but if you dig you can find some unusual things. Christmas trees all year long. Candy 10 years old, the kind where the ingredients are so mottled you have hallucinations, the good stuff. I used to know a guy who knew a guy who found things you can't find, like Walkman cassette players. Which I also should've hoarded.

Next, how many will I need? I probably go through 20 bulbs in a year, mostly 60s but a few 40s. I'd seriously love to have some 75s for my garage, since it's hard to find anything in there with a 60. But I could use a 60 if I had to, then I'd want to accentuate it with a flashlight, or two 60s in side-by-side lamps. Now, if I need 20 bulbs a year, and I'm virtually 61, if I live till 80, that's 19 years, 19 x 20 = quite a few ... I might need to space them out. Use a few, then not replace them for a year. That'd cut back on, let's say, 10 a year. Tough but doable!

The good news is I might not even live till 80. My dad didn't make 70. I mom just barely missed 80. That would be 12 years between the two. Split the difference. I could easily die anywhere between 73 and 76, meaning I've just saved four years worth of bulbs at the least, which is a savings of 80. Getting easier all the time! If I could just die at 73, or maybe 72 with a little willpower, that'd be 160 bulbs. So it's suddenly very manageable. And, if I stepped it up and quit exercising all together, and ate a few more full slabs of fatty ribs, breakfast, lunch, dinner, I might not even have to worry about it.

This is serious business. I can't believe the government screwed us over on this deal. And gave Thomas Alva Edison the finger. Who was considered the smartest guy who ever lived when I was a kid. With Einstein coming in a close second. After them, no one else even came close. Not a living soul came in third.

They Thought Dentistry Was Some Kind Of Hoax

I was stunned to find out about this. But a little research, and it didn't take much, shows it's absolutely true. Dentistry started out with a great deal of suspicion. We're only lucky the first dentists stuck with it.

People tend to be skeptical. Full of doubt. But it's nothing now like back in the olden days, in the earliest days when man had barely made progress. Thomas Edison had to literally hit people over the head with the light bulb before they saw the light.

I was at the dentist's office just yesterday, and my dentist had only enough time to tell me the bare essentials of what went on way back when. Years ago, it seems, they didn't even believe dentistry was a true thing. Of course those who really thought it over -- the first pioneers themselves in dentistry -- saw it was logical: If you can tie a string around your tooth and pull it out with a door knob, surely a professional could help you with it.

And that might have been the problem. The average guy would obviously think, If I can do it myself why would I pay someone else to do it? Everyone has a sadistic baby brother who'll help out in a pinch, and he's built up enough animus, of course the rest of us are willing to help him, too, and how! They weren't thinking of root canals, crowns, or wisdom teeth, that are tough enough to ruin the knob, etc.

And not only that, they had a teaching from the Bible -- they being pious -- that suggested that when it came to teeth you just left well enough alone: In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few... (Ecclesiastes 12). The verse more or less says you use your teeth till they grind themselves to powder, then you spit the powder out.

But a few of the pioneers, the first men into dentistry, somehow had their consciousness raised, then struck out to convert others. And I would say they were ultimately successful, because as far as I can see, today there's more dentists than gas stations. We're crazy about our teeth, straightening, whitening, braces, polishing, cleaning. It's actually a little ironic. The first dentists were mostly doing extractions, but that's the one thing that's hard to get today. For some unspecified reason, dentists want you to keep your teeth...

I have the ad pictured above to show one of the pioneers, a certain Dr. Witless, who really has to receive a lot of the credit in proving people wrong. Look at that, he was giving away $1,000 worth of dental care just to prove the point that unrelated third parties could do dental work!

And from the looks of things, he was more concerned about simply making that point than in doing anyone's teeth any good. When he says, "I'll extract teeth for you ... simply to prove to you that it truly can be done!", notice he doesn't care whether the teeth need to be extracted, he's only doing it to promote dentistry. And just a look at his before-and-after graphics shows he didn't want to leave even the slightest doubt about it.

What do our current dentists think of those olden times efforts? The way I take it, they're amused by the quaintness of it, while also realizing how much better it makes them look. Because we're so used to modern painless techniques that we see the pioneers as barbarians. True, there is still a lot of discomfort today, shots, your jaw propped open for 20 minutes, mouthfuls of sticky stuff when they're making impressions, and the fact that the free floss is a measly 5 yards. But when you think of the olden days, you're happy, and willing to buy your own floss.

We've obviously come a long way. The skeptics are all gone. The so-called Dental Truthers have all died. Thanks to guys like Dr. Witless, who were willing to pull out every single last tooth in their heads, and free at that, to make the point. And, really, if you left the office with nothing but bleeding gums and still didn't believe, of course there's not much he could do about that.

Today's dentists might be amused by the pioneers. But they also owe them a huge debt. They were the ones who led the way, the trailblazers, who gave the practice of dentistry a foundation to build on. And if it weren't for them, just speaking for myself, my smile would look worse than it does. I'd be a mumbling fool. And worse, probably a virgin.

Before Bugs Had Cement To Crawl On

I had the interesting opportunity today to observe bugs crawling on cement. It's an educational experience, to say the least. One I will gladly avail myself of again in the future if I ever have the chance...

The photos were taken by me, and obviously show two bugs. The top one looks a tick and the bottom one is something more like a spider. Each of them was doing OK on speed, making me think that the convenience of cement isn't just a convenience for us, but all manner of creatures. Isn't that interesting? That we, of all the species, pour cement, but the other species are right there to use it!

It's something to think about. It made me wonder about the first bug ever to discover cement. This would have to go way back. Up till then, all they had was rock, dirt, grass, weeds, etc., and that could pose something of an obstacle course for speedy travel. From their point of view, a rock would be like a mountain. Grass and weeds like a jungle. But then someone comes in and paves the path, and they're getting around pretty fast.

So that goes back to the first bug to discover it. Then generations pass, which in their time might only be a year or so. And suddenly we have bugs who've never known a world without cement. Naturally, they take it for granted, never even imagining what their parents and grandparents did, taking a week to get from their hole to the creek, whereas now the journey takes only 20 minutes. No longer do they have to tote water back to cut down on trips. It's all right there at hand. If you're thirsty and you've got 20 minutes, hey, get on the cement and buzz over, of course assuming you can't fly.

If you can fly, cement would still come in pretty handy. It gives you a much nicer place to land. However, and this is important, from the point of view of bugs, the cement can look fairly rough. To us, being substantially bigger, we don't notice much variation in the surface. But for them there's all those crags, not even mentioning the huge cracks between sections. See the edge of picture 2? That's a section line, looking pretty big if you're less than a quarter inch long!

Even the cracks, though, as big as they are, can come in very handy for bugs. Because when seeds and grain blow anywhere, if they're going to get stuck, it's going to be in the cracks. Making the cracks of a pathway a great place to find free food. And it's more or less lined up, ready and waiting for you! So they eat more on the way to the creek, making them thirsty enough to justify every trip.

It'd be great, knowing what we know now, if we could somehow construct (or otherwise procure) a time machine, and set its coordinates for some time in the past before we had cement, and travel back to observe what bugs had to do. It's likely we'd be sitting at the creek waiting quite a while before any showed up. Because the trip there would be a killer, unless they had thought of the obvious solution of living closer to it.

I can picture us back in time, crouched in the weeds, lost in our observations, then we suddenly look up, startled to be looking into the faces of curious Native Americans. We make fearful and hasty, confused sign language to the effect that we come in peace -- pointing to our camera and notepad. They don't believe us and carry us back to the camp, a trip that we note would have gone so much faster if only they had cement paths.

The Pop Goes The Weasel Killings

As a crime boss -- Hi, Machine Gun Ricky Wayward here, boss of the Skids organization, centered in the Skidrow district of our town -- I have many talented underlings at my disposal. Pickpockets, arsonists, snipers, bookies, scientists, prostitutes, drug runners, pool sharks, bootleggers, and a couple of IT kids who can get any illegal MP3 download you want. What a team!

I had an idea for offing some of my worst enemies. I want to terrorize the crap out of them before their death, to make a more sinister and memorable reputation for myself. I myself could do the same old same old, walk up to a guy and just kill him. The big trouble there is they're not exactly going in their pants for fear, and that's what I want. I want, I demand that the name of Machine Gun Ricky Wayward strike absolute terror in my victims.

That kind of reputation is what I need to take over the entire town. Skidrow of course only rules over the central part of town. The rest is divided between four other gangs, The Aristocrats, The Outlaws, The Ciggies, and the ethnic El Conquistadors. I want to loosen those bozos' control, their iron grip, and make it all mine!

OK, anyway, I'm busy thinking, what are some of the scarier things in life? Clowns, zombies, midgets, carnies, gypsies, psychos, teenagers, fundamentalists, hoarders, repo men, and last but not least, jack in the boxes. Then, of all these, which could you trust most? It'd have to be the one non-human thing, the jack in the box.

I've always thought, since I was a little kid, there's no more mysterious toy than a jack in the box. Because there's pieces in there you never see, forever enclosed and hidden under the jack. It's a hiding place. You could retrofit one of these to be a weapon of mass destruction. I said it 10 years ago, and I'll say it again: Saddam Hussein would still be in power had he only catapulted jack in the boxes at the American invaders!

God, I'm shivering even at the thought of a jack in the box. I can remember my heart racing when I heard "Pop Goes the Weasel" and knew the damned thing would erupt in my face. Now, what if it's full of explosives, what if knives suddenly jut forth and the thing flies around the room, or what if a massive blast of poison spews forth from the jack's mouth? You'll be dead!

So I gave the boys in the lab a bunch of jack in the boxes, and they've been working with them. They're making great progress rigging them up. Different variations, just like I said, with explosives, knives, a machine gun, poison, a canister of muffler fumes for asphyxiation, a Star Trek phaser (which in testing never seems to work), battery acid for spewing, a heat-seeking noose, a poisonous monkey's claw, meat infected with rabies, rubbers tainted with VD, a jar of fumes from a grill used indoors, cancerous organs extracted from cadavers, and, to make it really deadly, a DVD of the Republican debates.

Imagine that. You're one of my enemies. I have an underling put a jack in the box on your desk, then we quietly seal the room. You're looking through some mail and -- WHAT?! -- you hear the box start playing "Pop Goes The Weasel." You know approximately how long the song is -- something like 7.1 seconds -- before the jack pops up. Only long enough to frantically rush the door, then finding it closed, start your final prayer, "Dearest Heavenly Father--", then POP, and poison fills the room. You gasp, you feel your head quickly bloating, you claw the desk, your eyes are bulging, you feel your heart slow, then it stops with a sad whimper, and you think your last thought. Your very last clear thought is one of God's grace and happiness: "At least it wasn't the DVD..." With that, you're dead.

The Perpetual Vibrating Bed

Today's post is dedicated to the memory of John Joseph Houghtaling, inventor in 1958 of the "Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed." A quarter brought 15 minutes of "tingling relaxation and ease."

We remember with great fondness the vibrating bed. But unfortunately, most of them have been junked by now. Mostly because the original repairmen, long ago, threw away the schematics in a shortsighted, selfish attempt to guarantee themselves job security. Not foreseeing that they would eventually die and the rest of us wouldn't have any idea how to repair the tricky mechanisms.

Admittedly, a few brave souls, working with only rudimentary electronics knowledge, usually gotten from fly-by-night technical institutes, attempted repairs, but none of it was any good. Beyond that, it became impossible to get parts, and trying to jimmy rig the devices with non-matching parts from soda machines and jukeboxes gave poor results.

But let's say we could somehow get back the original intelligence to make these things work, that would definitely be a blast from the past, and, more importantly, great for the therapeutic value the vibrating bed offered. I'm thinking of something a friend of mine said, that the vibrating bed was the only thing that staved off headaches for him. If he felt a headache coming on, diving into a warm vibrating bed was the only thing that could perk him right up!

As for me, I had an idea for the vibrating bed in a perfect world. Just fantasizing here! Remember, when you put a quarter in you got 15 minutes of "tingling relaxation and ease." That was a great promise, but it also had a downside: 15 minutes isn't very long! If you're like me, you could only enjoy the first seven or eight minutes. Because you knew it was about to run out, then you'd have to interrupt your relaxation and ease to put another quarter in.

My idea is why not have a method of automatically replenishing the quarters! And I'm not saying you wouldn't have to pay for the extra service. You'd be glad to pay for it if you could only be spared having to roll over and put another quarter in. So here's the idea: You have a way of loading a disc, almost like in a laundromat, with multiple quarters, which then would rotate and deposit the next quarter as needed. What a great convenience that'd be!

But how to pay for the extra service? What I would propose seems natural to me, in fact the only fair method. The only thing I'm bogged down on is how to pay for the final service of moving the pennies. But bear with me, I have an idea...

I'm proposing a hierarchical arrangement of coins to pay for the services. First, you've got the rotating disc of quarters at the bed that would take, say, 12 quarters. At 15 minutes apiece, that's three hours of uninterrupted vibrating, a godsend! But to actually rotate the quarters, you'd have a disc above it that is loaded with dimes. So that'd be 12 dimes. Then to pay for the dime disc, you'd have a disc above it loaded with nickels. 12 nickels. And to pay for the nickel disc, another disc with 12 pennies. How you pay for the penny disc is the biggest drawback, which I can't entirely resolve at this time. It might have to be that the nickels be somehow adequate compensation for the nickel disc as well as the penny disc.

The key thing is that original 15 minutes, great but inadequate, has been wonderfully extended to three glorious hours! Meaning, except for the need to replenish all the coin discs at the end of three hours, we'd have a virtually perpetual vibrating bed!