A Near-Death Experience

    You don't hear much about self-drive cars these days. All the talk now is about electric vehicles.  But I had a near death experience in a self-drive bus about twenty years ago. The administrator of the small rural hospital where I worked was fascinated with the self-drive concept as was the hospital's IT guy who was a true genius. The IT guy, Bryce, developed a self-drive apparatus for the hospital bus. He and the administrator, Mr. Jacobs, secretly tested their self-drive system on the gravel roads in the surrounding country.

   One Thursday morning in the early nineties I showed up early at the hospital. Several nurses and I were signed up for a two day conference in a city six hours away. We were all surprised to find Mr. Jacobs sitting in the driver's seat of the bus. This was most unusual because Mr. Jacobs always went to administrator's conferences in Florida or Hawaii. It was then he revealed that the bus was a self-driving vehicle. He said he and Bryce had made the trip to the city a half dozen times in the past year and had worked out all the bugs. This would be the first trial with passengers.

   We were waiting for Bryce to show up when Mr. Jacobs got a call on his bag phone. Bryce was sick and wouldn't be able to come with us.  Mr. Jacobs said we'd be fine without him. Mr. Jacobs sat in the driver's seat, but let the self-drive system control the bus. It worked perfectly. Once we got on the freeway closer to the city Mr. Jacobs came back and sat with us. "The freeway is the easy part," he said. The nurses and I looked at each other uneasily. One of the nurses said, "Mr. Jacobs, shouldn't someone stay in the driver's seat just in case?"

   Mr. Jacobs brushed her off. He was clearly elated with the bus's performance. "We plan to license Bryce's system and the hospital will be able to expand with the added income," he said. Right after saying  this, he clutched his chest and slumped to the floor. As soon as that happened, the bus slowed, pulled into the breakdown lane and stopped. The nurses started working on Mr. Jacobs. One of them knew how to use the bag phone and called 911.

   An ambulance from St. Bonaventure Hospital soon arrived and took Mr. Jacobs away. Our conference was at this same hospital so we planned to drive the bus there. Suddenly, the bus door closed and the bus pulled out into traffic. I got in the driver's seat but the bus was under the control of the self-drive system. The bus cruised past the exit to St. Bonaventure, keeping up with traffic.

  None of the nurses' suggestions to shut off the bus worked. I couldn't even get the four way flashers to come on. One of the nurses called 911 again and explained our situation. Soon highway patrol cruisers were in front and behind us. The one in front gradually slowed and the bus slowed as well. Soon cruisers were in all four lanes, gradually slowing until all traffic on the freeway was stopped.

   A trooper told me to pop the hood and he disconnected the battery. Soon a wrecker arrived to haul the bus away and the troopers dropped us off at the hospital. Mr. Jacobs was doing ok but did not want any visitors. I went to my conference, but didn't get anything out of it which was not atypical. 

   Next day we rented a van and drove home. I kept badgering Bryce in his lair until he came clean. He was proud that the bus pulled over when Mr. Jacobs lost consciousness, but admitted the GPS in the bus had been mistakenly set for the St. Bonaventure Rollerdrome in another city. 

  The hospital paid a hefty fine to the state which agreed to keep the self-drive fiasco quiet. The nurses and I received nice "bonuses" to keep mum and no more was heard about licensing Bryce's system. Everyone involved in the bus ride is now either dead or retired so I see no harm in releasing my story in this remote corner of the web. According to google stats, my blog only has four regular readers, one of whom I know because he always leaves a comment. The other three I suspect are bots.

It was an OJ kind of day. 

 

Sunday Squibs

 Men will go to a wedding to party, to a funeral for lunch, while giving the baby shower a miss to play golf.

If my guest wants to discuss politics or religion that’s fine, but he won’t learn my opinion unless it jibes with his own, which discussion will then be mere valium. 

The WASP smiles when the LBGT group adds another letter, but what sorrow and pain is within each of those little letters.

My role as grand puppeteer I think I’ll let go. 

It’s gotten too much for my fingers and toes

We must tie up this strong man Satan in order to plunder his goods. Better let Jesus to do the tying and let the plunder go to charity. 

Our eyes adjust naturally to the darkness. We need new eyes to see in the light. 

The hierarchy ranges from self to family, to country, to God. We must chose which we’re most loyal to without worshipping the idea of hierarchy itself

Life is a puzzle with unwritten clues. 

Life gives us a pencil. The answers, we choose. 

Negotiating old age is like flying through a field is asteroids. No matter how good we are, we’re eventually going to crash and burn. 

St. Paul says the wages of sin is death. The sinner counters: then let’s eat, drink and be merry. 

The revolutionary has bullets, the diplomat only bullet points. 

If love is the answer, the question remains how to let go of hate. 

Intelligent Design comes from a God created by man. Science uncovers the design of a God free enough to look random to us.

The church advises looking at others as though they were Jesus. The virtue of patience is available on request. 

Marriage is a testing ground for sainthood. You’re making progress when you realize your spouse is having a rougher time of it than you are. 

Conservative dystopia: a world without guns. 

Some people no matter how much they love a book will never read it again. They feel a reread would delay their goal of reading every book ever written. 

We’re all in favor of a clean environment so long as it doesn’t affect our comfort, our income, and we don’t have to kiss any rabbits. 

Mackenzie

  In Canada they call them First Nations. Them being the people living there in various tribes before the Europeans arrived. The First Nations were happy to exchange beaver pelts for steel knives, guns and glass beads, but were leery of the downsides. Disease seemed to follow these newcomers and they had strange notions about property. They thought a person could own land for himself.

   The newcomers propagated like the beaver themselves. But they wanted so many pelts that when the beaver were wiped out in one place, they had to push further west for fresh pelts. If the newcomers got too pushy perhaps they too could be exterminated.

  One of the pushiest of the newcomers was Alexander Mackenzie from the country of Scotland. His mother died when he was ten and his father took him to New York. When the American Revolution broke out, his father fought for the British. Alexander was sent to Montreal for safety. Soon he was working as an apprentice for the North West Company.

   The Company sent Mackenzie on a mission to find a northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean. He made his way to Lake Athabasca in northern Saskatchewan. The First Nations people told Makenzie the rivers all flowed northwest. Perfect. Except the river flowed more north than west and on July 14, 1789 he arrived at the Arctic Ocean. Even this would have made a decent route to the Pacific if Alaska hadn’t been in the way. The river was later named in his honor. It has the second largest drainage system in North America after the Mississippi.

   Makenzie went to Great Britain to study longitude, then returned to Canada to try again for the Pacific. In October, 1792 he headed west with two native guides, his cousin Alex, six voyageurs, and a dog unimaginatively named Dog. They made it as far as the Peace River in Alberta where they built a fort to wait out the winter.

  When the snow melted in early May, Mackenzie wanted to head down the Fraser River to the Pacific but was warned that the First Nations people that way were hostile. He was directed over the mountains on a grease trail, so named because it was used to haul smelt oil to the interior. Smelt oil was a valuable commodity among the tribes.

  On this day in 1793 Mackenzie and his group arrived at North Bentinct Arm, an inlet of the Pacific about 300 miles northwest of Vancouver, British Columbia. Mackenzie wanted to continue west another seventy miles for a clear view of the ocean, but the local First Nation tribe brandishing spears in their war canoes blocked his way. It’s unclear what their problem was. Perhaps they had an omen Mackenzie and his ilk portended bad medicine for their descendants.

   Mackenzie mixed up bear grease and vermilion and wrote “Mackenzie was here” on a rock then headed for home. He and his group had completed the first recorded crossing of North America north of Mexico and they did it twelve years ahead of Lewis and Clark. 

  Back east, Mackenzie published his journals, got knighted, and served in the Ontario legislature. In 1812 at the age of 48 he returned to Scotland and married the 14 year old Geddes Mackenzie (same clan, no blood relationship). They had three children and were apparently happy, until Mackenzie died of Bright's Disease at the age of 55 or 56. No one knows the exact date of his birth c.1764.

Alexander Mackenzie, at the age of 35 or 36

  

   

Pizza Repair

   It's good to have occasional accidents and disasters as long as no one gets hurt. The other night we had a couple of guests in the Shêdeau for pizza. Normally I would prepare and bake the pizza in the Shêdeau so I could chat with our guests. But I was on the final chapter of an audio book and my loan was ending that evening.

   I left Teresa to entertain our guests in the Shêdeau while I retreated to the big house and put my ears on. When the pizza was done I picked the pan up with hot pads and headed out the door. 

  The mosquitoes have been bad and as I hastened to shut the door behind me the pan leapt out of my hand and fell face down, half on the welcome mat and half on the wooden porch floor. It made a clanging noise which I thought would alert the others 137 paces away, but the noise of the river rapids covered my boo-boo.

  I got our largest spatula and turned the pie face up. The half that had been on the floor looked ok. The part that landed on the mat looked like a fresh lava flow. I tried smooshing the ridge of cheese back in place while scraping the toppings off the mat and spreading them on the cheese.

  I knew I couldn’t  present this mess to our guests. Then I got the insight that would turn this evil into a good. I turned the oven to broil and slipped the pie onto the top shelf for a couple of minutes.  Except for the dent in one part of the perimeter, it looked like new.

  As our guests munched on their slices I held my breath waiting for someone to bite into a pebble. I was prepared to apologize for the stray olive stone even though I hadn’t used any olives.

  A person may tell him or herself they are never going to drop their freshly baked pizza on the floor. What I say to that person is you haven’t made many pizzas.

Galileo discovered gravity by dropping a cheese lovers and a personal pan pizza off the Tower of Punza.

Sunday Squibs

 

It’s good to avoid evil, but we should not automatically dump everyone we happen not to like into that sulphuric bin. 

We’re so busy inflating our our portfolio, we don’t notice our betrothed is doing the same. 

For the retiree, hump day has been flattened into the never ending weekend. 

Don't brag about your skills. People will be constantly asking for help with things they could do just as well themselves. From the meek and humble no one expects much.

Which is better? Too much time or too much money? You can spend time to making money but money can’t buy you time. 

People pity the shy and the bashful for all the fun they’re missing. But the shy are like the deer, inhabiting an austere secret world the boisterous cannot know.

I give ten percent of my income to the poor and ninety percent to the rich. 

Without the promise of coffee there are many who would stay in bed all day. 

The world is full of messes. Some are benign, such as the constant construction around hospitals. 

If you’re able to come up with two or three facts about the historical figures everyone has heard of, people will call you a genius. And pay for your coffee. But not your beer. 

Sleep is a kind of dementia with this difference: we can’t recall the earliest, the youngest dreams of the night but only those closest to our awakening. 

A person gets rids of all his bad habits only to make smugness his new poison. 

Wealth can build a road across the swamp or it can be content with simply owning the swamp.

By taking care of number one and number two at the same time, even the slothful can be multitaskers. 

Not content with loving a girl

The poet insists on describing each curl

In exchange for wearing a hair shirt composed of his neighbor’s foibles, the saint is granted an occasional view of God’s back. 

The honey do list is an acknowledgment that men are poor multitaskers. 

We screw up in life about as often as we screw up in typing. A back space key is more needful than a forward delete. 

Though both feelings are off the mark, it’s better to live life feeling it’s too early rather than feeling it’s too late. 

We wash up on this shore like a message in a bottle, to be read by whoever finds us, while we read the message in them. 

Great River

  

"The Nile" in Hieroglyphics 

   Back in the day there were four  centers of civilization, all of them along great rivers: the Nile, the Indus, the Tigris and Euphrates (count as one) and the Yellow River in China. If I had to live in one, I'd choose the Nile. Every spring the Nile would flood and fertilize my fields.  When the water retreated I'd plant my crops.

   After the harvest, my buddies and I would go off and work on the monuments. At night there would be beer. Not bad. I might even have done some hieroglyphics carving. Not that I could read them. That was for the priests.

   The last person who could read hieroglyphics died about the same time the Roman Empire expired. The Arabs later tried to translate them, as did scholars in medieval Europe. That last Egyptian priest had left a dictionary behind but it was full of errors which slowed things down. 

   The big breakthrough came when Napoleon invaded Egypt. It was on this day in 1799 that French soldiers looking for materials to build a fort discovered a stone near the village of Rosetta. The stone was covered with writing on one side. The soldiers' officer realized the stone was important and had it moved to Cairo.

   The stone had three different scripts. The first two looked like different styles of hieroglyphics and the third was an ancient Greek script. Copies of the inscriptions were made and distributed to scholars all over Europe, and the race was on to translate the lost hieroglyphic scripts.

   Two years later the British defeated the French army in Egypt and confiscated the stone. It was placed in the British Museum after the floor was reinforced. The stone weighs almost 1,700 lbs. In the early days, a visitor could touch the stone. Now it's behind a barrier.

     It took many brilliant brains coming at the stone from varying angles to figure out what the stone was saying. The British scientist Thomas Young and the French linguist Jean-François Champollion made the ultimate breakthroughs in 1822. These two initially collaborated, but later a dispute arose among them over who had done the most.

   The writing on the stone was a decree written in 196 BCE announcing the coronation of King Ptolemy V and establishing his divine cult. The stone would have been part of a stele or stone pillar and several would have been placed in temples around the country. The top set of hieroglyphics were for the gods. The second, a speedier hieroglyphic script, was for the priests, and the Greek script was for the commoners, if they could read.

   In 2003 Egypt asked Britain to return the stone. The head of Egyptian antiquities said the stone was an "icon of Egyptian identity," which is ironic since the Ptolemys were descendants of the Greek general who took over Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great. In response to Egypt’s request, the British sent a replica of the stone, along with a note saying that they were taking care of the stone not just for themselves, but for the world.

  In the room at the British Museum where the Rosetta Stone is displayed, there are portraits of Young and Champollion. French visitors complain that the portrait of Young is larger than that of Champollion.  British visitors complain that no, Champollion's portrait is larger than Young's. It turns out the portraits are the same size.

Pedestrian friendly Rosetta Stone at Champollion's birthplace 

   

  

Sunday Squibs

 My defense mechanisms in the face of aggression are but a Maginot Line. 

For every homicide the police have three classes of suspects: primary, secondary, and tertiary. On tv the culprit is always from the third group. In real life the guilty party is sometimes from the secondary group, but the jails are filled with primaries. 

A writer exorcises his demons who then fly to the reader’s soul. 

If people you find preachy could spend time as you, the end of the day would find them in the confessional box. 

Botany Bar pickup line: Mycelium or yours?

Husbands are facetiously accused of having selective hearing, but it’s because they’re so busy with their wife’s current request that they can’t focus on anything else. 

A writer without feedback grows reckless. 

Peasantrification: return of a previously gentrified neighborhood to its original slum state. 

Only a few can follow Jesus’ admonition to sell everything and give to the poor. The rest of us are still negotiating with the devil. 

The antidote to the fact that everyone is random is to swallow the pill that everyone matters. 

Poop stinks to warn our ancestors not to eat it and us not to play in it. 

If I could get a vision of earth as it really is in the solar system and in the galaxies, I’d have to lie down and close my eyes till the vertigo passed. 

My Christian belief oscillates between only a few being saved or that everyone eventually gets in, depending on how much of an angel or a demon I’ve been that day. 

Cooking is a solitary pleasure. The crowd is happy to talk among themselves till dinner is served. 

The challenge of marriage is to make someone happy without making yourself miserable.  

Flexibility? Resilience? Get married and you’ll find out how much resilience or flexibility you’ve got. 

When my investment statement comes with a cover letter offering free psychological counseling,  I know that a bear has been gutting my piggy bank. 

That yardarm yonder is used to hang miscreants as well as to determine if the sun is high enough for the day’s first drink. 

Based on how often people get me wrong, I must also get them wrong just often. Maybe more so since I presume they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. 

I can judge the age of a vehicle by the number and size of its cup holders. The introduction of Supersize drinks in 1987 was a watershed event.  

It's curious that rationalization of one’s motives has a bad name, since mankind defines itself as the rational animal.

We howl when trying to remove a purchase from its plastic packaging. Take a deep breath. Relax and remember that it came from those puzzle masters, the Chinese.