Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Due Dates

My birthday is on March 29th and has been every year since I was born. What very few of you probably know is that my original due date was March 6th which according to my doctors meant that I was over 3 weeks late in jettisoning from my mother’s womb. Many people are of the persuasion that if a woman goes more than 3 days past her “due date” then she must be induced. The only explanation for this mode of thinking is that the baby must be born as soon as possible to prevent it from developing to its full mental and physical capabilities. “The man” is certainly behind it with a vast and intricate conspiracy to keep the next generation dumb and weak so they are easier to control. It never occurs to anyone that when a mother goes past her due date, it is actually quite possible and within the realm of natural plausibility that (pause for suspense)…the doctor got the due date wrong.

Heresy, I know…what was I thinking? Of course, the doctor never says “We need to induce labor now or it could get dangerous for both you and the baby…and if it doesn't get dangerous then it will prove that I’m a hack and don’t know how to predict due dates and all my credibility in the medical field will be lost and I won’t be able to eat lunch in the senior doctor’s lounge!”

So what if I had been born on March 6 like the conspirators had wanted? Well, March 6 is the 65th day of the year and the 66th day during leap years (what does that tell you?). Regardless of the leap year, there will always be exactly 300 days left in the year on March 6. Dmitri Mendeleev presented the first periodic table on March 6. David Crockett died on March 6, so did Bill Travis and James Bowie along with a few other people in a fort somewhere in Texas…on the continued downside, Michelangelo, Lou Costello, and Shaquille O’Neal were all born on March 6. To top it all off, on March 6, 2008, a bomb went off in New York’s Times Square.

I’m not sure what the world would be like if I had been born on March 6, perhaps my appendix wouldn’t have gone bad at the age of 7…perhaps I wouldn’t have had asthma…the list of legitimate speculations is innumerable, one thing however is for certain; I was born on March 29th and through my very birth, I was sticking it to “the man.”

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Human Enlightenment

In the course of human events it often becomes necessary to enlighten those who are less “lightened” than ourselves. The lightenedest of scholars have spent an ambiguous number of decades attempting to discover the complex and irrefutable method for bestowing this “enlightenedness” upon the endarkened members of society. Massive volumes of books and journals have been published to explain these phenomenon and the best they have come up with so far is the analogy of a light bulb coming on inside a person’s head once they come to the realization that whatever they were thinking about, now makes sense.

What they fail to tell you is that the light bulb isn’t failsafe and often comes on at the worst possible time. Just for the sake of argument, imagine Billy, our unenlightened friend, is staring over the edge of a cliff into an enormous precipice. At the base of this precipice sits a huge pile of chainsaws and a pack of hungry snow tigers…while Billy is thinking about what it would be like to fall from such a height, the light bulb in his head suddenly switches on and his mind tells him that jumping into the air from his current position would be both a good idea, and actually quite fun. The light bulb continues to burn as Billy rationalizes…..”it’ll be like flying”…”scars are cool”…”chicks would dig me”… Meanwhile, the group of lemmings that have been watching the whole ordeal from a nearby cliff are persuaded by Billy’s nonverbal communication to do exactly what he is thinking. Case in point.