Month: May 2010

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Meeting Famous People

Many people freak out when someone famous gets near them. I have never envied the famous when it came to privacy or the ability to do things in public. For this reason I am pretty sure that I will never meet anyone famous.

I have been around when famous people have been around and people have swarmed them. Such a scene always drives me away as I would like to not be a person who is bothering someone else so much. This behavior will help guarantee that I never meet famous people.

My claim to not ever meeting famous people comes with some caveats. The first caveat is that I have some famous cousins that I have met at family reunions and get togethers. I met Cleon Skousen (Political and Religious author) at the Skousen family reunion in 1994. At the same function I ran across Bart Oates and his brother Brad who both played in the NFL (Bart won the super bowl the season after that). I met Dale Murphy (Outfielder for the Braves, Phillies, Rockies and two time National League MVP) and have seen him at many family funerals. I don’t count these as meeting famous people because they were really just meeting family who happened to be well known.

The next caveat is meeting someone who is not really that famous or at least not in your area. I met one of the greatest musicians of all time, but his fame is overwhelmingly had only in Canada. Ian Thornley (formerly of Big Wreck) did a show which I attended. His band was the opener and afterward they said they would be in the back of the club to sign stuff and hang out. I could not resist of course since he and his band were the entire reason I had come to the show. I went back and had them sign a CD while the headlining act played. Myself and my friends along with 2 other people were the only ones back with them. It was strange because they had put on a really good show that the crowd enjoyed but since they were not famous no one cared too much beyond the occasional passerby saying “you rock” or something like that. I felt like a silly teenage girl talking to Ian, since I had heard his music in high school and thought it was amazing. Since he was not being swarmed by others because of his lack of huge gigantic fame in my area I consider this one just hanging out after a show with someone who is famous elsewhere in the world. When I write it out I guess I have met a famous person, just mildly famous, and I was not annoying about it.

I can’t believe I almost totally forgot about meeting a famous person under perfectly normal and non-teengirl screamer way. I have met and chatted with LaVell Edwards twice. Once at the aforementioned football camp where I was told that I could be an All-American tight end. The second time was in 1998 when he noted that I must be the one that gets all the groceries in the family since I was so much larger than my uncle. Those were both full fledged meeting a famous person and I cannot find a way to excuse it away.

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Time Travel is Real: UPDATED

UPDATE: I must inform Mr. Hawking that he may be slowly catching up to me. Read about his theory here and then go ahead and find out why I have stated that time travel is not only possible, but is accomplished every microsecond of everyday.

Time travel has been the subject of a large number of discussions, books, movies and such. Unfortunately, they all portray time travel in an extremely unrealistic manner. I myself have previously been fooled by what seemed to be a superior depiction, of what time travel would be like, that I found in some movies. But with a little thought about it, I have come to realize what it would be like to actually travel through time. And now I will share it with you.

To the Future

Time travel is much less dramatic than you think.  In fact, I do it everyday.  Everyone does it everyday.  That’s right, we are all traveling through time.  With our time travel we are heading from point A (birth) to point B (death).  This is very simple to understand and makes time travel much less fascinating than before.  As we head from point A to point B we make observations and learn new things that help us to mark different moments in our time-line.  To take Marty McFly from the year 1985 to the year 2015 (as in Back to the Future 2) it would take thirty years.  That would make a very boring movie.

To the Past

For Marty to go back to 1955 from 1985 things get slightly more interesting.  Marty would have to have been born in 1968 or 1969 for him to be in high school in 1985, which means that if he went back to 1955, he would not exist in human physical form.  Meaning that he would be physically in many different places such as: in some dirt in a field on a farm or in the ocean floating around, waiting to evaporate and rain down in a lake near Hill Valley.  If we change the story a little and only take Marty to 1975 he would be 6 or 7 years old and he would, of course, not be aware of Doc Brown or anything in 1985.  He would also not be aware of his re-travel forward to 1985 as it would seem like he was just living his life as he makes observations and learns new things at different points in time.

The 4th Dimension

A couple of times in the Back to the Future series of movies Doc tells Marty that he is not thinking 4th dimensionally.  This is funny to me, since Doc is apparently not thinking 4th dimensionally either.  Doc tells Marty not to worry about hitting some painted American Indians below a drive in movie screen because the movie screen isn’t there in 1885.  Doc overlooks the fact that in 1885 the particles of matter that made up Marty and the Delorean are not organized into the form of a person and a car.

I used to think that the Bruce Willis movie “12 Monkeys” was an accurate depiction of time travel since he goes back in time to try to change the future but finds out that he cannot change anything.  The fact that you cannot change anything is certainly correct, but the fact that he traveled back in time and was fully grown and aware of observations he had made in the future is a huge mistake.

It is my belief that, on the time-line that is the 4th dimension, we can travel back and forth.  Traveling forward is what we call living and we make the aforementioned observations and learn things.  Traveling backward would take our particles to the older time and replay everything to the future.  As time is “replayed” we are completely unaware of anything that we did not observe or learn before a certain point and we have absolutely no idea that we have traveled back.  If you need a time machine for this to feel right in your head you can just consider your particles of matter to be the time machine.

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Remember the Alamo

I was once in a vegetative state back when I had television and saw what one could get away with calling a documentary about Ozzie Osbourne. There was a moment in the show when they started talking about a fairly famous incident which landed Ozzie in some trouble. The people that were interviewed about the incident talked about it in a seemingly amused manner and appeared to think it was actually quite funny. Continue reading “Remember the Alamo”