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C annon B each O utdoor W ear
gas, abnormally fast moving clouds or (snort) the
planet Venus.
For decades, military and
commercial pilots, who literally live or die by their
ability to identify flying objects, swear on their jobs
and pensions they’ve seen things flying objects they
couldn’t identify. A few observations by carefully
trained observers would be cause for speculation;
files filled with them should, one would hope, move
matters past reasonable doubt.
For those with eyes to see, there are
hundreds of photographs of UFOs posted on book
pages and websites; enough that several different
“models” have been identified. There are scores, if
not hundreds, of volumes on the subject, many of
them the result of actual research and clear thought,
reporting and analyzing the thousands of stories
from the thousands of people who swear up and
down they’ve seen a UFO; not to mention the
growing legion of otherwise normal humans who
swear up and down aliens have had, in one way or
another, their way with them. There are the crop
circles made by something that intricately braids
dry wheat stalks, the 1957 formation fly over of
Washington, D.C., the drive-by grid blackouts, the
hundreds of lazer-incised cattle still popping up on
the Great Plains. (No vehicle tracks, no footprints,
some carcasses clearly dropped from a significant
altitude.) Whatever w e’re dealing with, it’s safe to
say it’s more than the fevered imaginings of large-
bellied conventioneers wearing aluminum foil briefs
and Dr. Spock propellor beanies.
In terms of believing without seeing, alien
visitation is hardly a heavy lift. If we accept, and
impressive evidence suggests we should, that there
are regions of the universe which began unfolding
thousands of millions of years before our sun was
so much as a twinkle in the eye of a congealing gas
nebula, then it follows that, just as surely as
quantum probabilities made little green apples,
there must be planetary systems out there just
bubbling over with levels of intelligence which, by
comparison, would rank us somewhere between
amoeba and gerbils. The handmaiden of intelligence
is curiosity. It is, in fact, its driving force. Once a
life form starts thinking, it starts wondering. Once
you start asking questions, the need to see what’s
over the next hill is a monkey on your back.
Humans risk life and limb, not once in a while but
habitually, to see or do something they haven’t seen
or done before.
What else accounts for the
existence of hang gliders and roller coasters? When
Captain Kirk’s spiritual ancestors first sailed out of
sight of land, they had no real choice. Having
thought long and hard about the horizon, only death
would have stopped them from seeing what was
beyond it.
The most endearing aspect of
intelligence is that, given enough of it, the will to
live is easily trumped by the lust for experience.
It’s reasonable to assume that given, say, a
hundred million year head start, a few intelligent
life forms would have been curious enough to sail
out of sight of their star system. If, for no other
reason, than because they can. Hillary climbed Mt.
Everest “because it was there.” Would a Zeta
Reticulan need more reason? Would time and fate
eventually bring them here? Why not? We raft
down the Colorado, book rooms in quaint third
world villages, videotape primitive mating rituals
and, lest we forget, have a space program of our
own that’s seriously wondering about terraforming
Mars. On a darker note, when humans discover
new worlds, they tend to beat up the natives, take
their stuff and leave a mess. That’s what makes us
gerbils.
And so, in the minds of the thoughtful, two
questions immediately arise: who are these life
forms and what do they want? I haven’t the
foggiest notion. Given the little I know of the
world, I make only one assumption: few, if any,
aliens we encounter are likely to be families
vacationing in saucer shaped Winnebagos. Or
mindless nitwits in fast as light SUVs. They will
be, in all likelihood, agents of either government or
big business. Judging from what we read in the
papers, this not a win-win situation for the common
earthling.
Which isn’t to say the situation is without
good news. If the Alpha Centaurans wanted to cook
and eat us, they’d probably have started by now.
Any invasion (or, from their point of view,
migration to the new world) will, after awkward
beginnings, probably boil down to business and
politics as usual. How much more ruthless than
Congress, the Supreme Court, big oil and the
pharmaceutical drug cartel can vicious insects be?
If the alien agenda involves interbreeding, who’s to
say it won’t be meaningful and fun? The way
things are going, intimate encounters with an
operationally intelligent life form might be just
what humanity, and evolution, needs.
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Pussyfoot
(soft step of a cat) To proceed with
caution, subtlety ; used pejoratively, is American in
origin and dates to at least 1893. In England,
pussyfoot has a different meaning: someone who
advocates prohibition. A pussyfooter is a teetotaler,
derived from William E. "Rissyfoot" Johnson, an
American prohibitionist who traveled to London in
1916 to spread the good word. Johnson claimed his
nickname came from his "cat-like policies in
pursuing lawbreakers in Indian temtory."
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The Whole Shebang (entirety) A shebang or
chebang, is a hut or dwelling, dating back to the early
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Booze (alcohol) Arose around the fourteenth
century; in America since the early eighteenth
century. The Random House Historical Dictionary of
American Slang records Benjamin Franklin using the
term boozy from 1722, and Webster's 1828
dictionary has entries for txxise and bouse meaning
"to drink hard; to guzzle," and for boosy meaning "a
little intoxicated; merry with liquor."
Derivative of the Middle Dutch verb busen, meaning
to drink heavily, and first appeared in English as a
verb spelled bouse.
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Cyber- The combination form cyber- used in such
terms as cy bernetics and cyberspace, was coined in
1948 by Norbert Wiener ( 1894-1964) an American
mathematician; from the Greek kubemetes, or
steersman, which is also the root of the word govern.
Wiener may have based his word on an I830's
French, cybernétique, which meant the art of
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Broad (woman) Broad originally meant a ticket
(admission, transport, meal, etc.); then was applied to
prostitutes (a pimp's meal ticket), then to women of
loose morals, and eventually to women in general. It
dates to 1911. Why a ticket w as called a brood is
uncertain, but likely had something to do with
traveling abroad. Playing cards were also called
broads. Go figure
D rag Rare Drag is late 18th century for a wagon or
buggy , because the horse would drag it By the 1850s
this w as transf erred to the street, as in the phrase
'main drag'. In the 1950s was adopted by hot rodders-
- a drag race is one conducted on city streets,
originally.
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C u t the M u stard OED2 has it deriving from the
slang sense of mustard, meaning the best, flavorful.
O.Henry used it in 1904-- 'Cabbages and Kings'. The
phrase comes evolved in the same period: cut refers
to harvesting the plant - if you can3 cut the mustard,
you cant supply what is best.
Red H e rrin g (deliberate misdirection) Derived
from hunting. Poachers would interpose themselves
between the prey and the hunting party and drag a red
hemng across the trail to mislead ihe dogs This
would give them the opportunity to bag the prey
themselves. A red hemng was used by dog trainers,
the pungent fish would create a trail when training
their hounds - they'd follow as if the one they had
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Jukebox Creoles arc languages arising
spontaneously, when people without a common
tongue have to work and live together. The first stage
is pidgin, a simplified amalgam of elements from
colliding languages. Creole is a pidgin that's
advanced to a mother tongue. There arc many in the
Americas and Caribbean: in the Sea Islands off the
Carolinas, 'Gullah' is spoken- several West African
languages used by slaves in the eighteenth century. In
Gullah, there's jook or joog, meaning disorderly or
wicked, coming from a West African language:
Bambara dzugu, meaning wicked, or from Wolof
dzug, to live wickedly. In Gullah/Black English, jook
house - a disorderly house, brothcl/gaming
parlour/dance hall, or a shack off the road selling
moonshine - a tavern or roadhouse providing music.
It shortened tojixik and appeared in the 1930s, but is
almost certainly much older. The jukebox was
invented in the late 1930s to provide music injooks
that didn't have their own bunds. Time magazine,
1939: "Glenn Miller attributes his crescendo to the
'juke-box' which retails recorded music, a nickel a
shot in bars, restaurants and small nxidsidc dance
joints*.
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Conscience and reputation are two things.
Conscience is due to yourself, reputation to your
neighbor. S t Augustine
Become old early if you wish to stay old long.
Cato
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(firearm) likely from a woman's name: from
the practice to name siege engines and cannons after
women. Two famous examples are Mons Meg, the
15th century mortar that can be seen at Edinburgh
castle, and Big Bertha o f WWI lame. In weapons, the
word arise from Gunnhildr, and the name transferred
to the general sense.
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