American Elephants

There are common sayings about folks who seem to get all hyped up about unimportant things for unknown reasons. For example, the climate of the Earth is controlled by the action of our sun. And the sun seems to be just fine up there, rising in the morning and sinking beneath the Western mountains at night. Sometimes folks get all excited about what seems to be normal and common for no reason whatsoever. Like the sun goes down one night and somebody starts wondering about what if it didn’t come up in the morning.Well, we wouldn’t last long, but why are you questioning that ? What if the air suddenly expelled all its oxygen and we all died from not being able to breathe? What if the sun decided to shut down, and just not shine any more. Well, clearly, we’re done and that’s the end of it all. Is there some reason you assume the sun might shut down?

It’s easy to catastrophise and decide that something really really terrible might happen, but I don’t know what good it does nor what we could do about it anyway. So we usually don’t worry about really major stuff like the sun turning off or the planet blowing up. or even about an invasion from another planet. If you chose to think up some big things to worry about, you could probably find some. Probably more worthwhile to worry about President Biden’s leaving classified documents in incorrect places or why he seems to be encouraging illegal immigration. We do have strong laws about how to come here and become an American citizen, and it’s not hard to follow them. Lots of people have come here according to law, applied for citizenship and become citizens. Takes a little longer to follow the rules, but it works. Why a President of the United States would want to encourage illegals to cross the border, is a good question. There seems to be a very long history of just how this world was created and populated, and how the world was populated from very small numbers of early humans.

There’s so much we don’t know. There are lots of other planets out there, do they have inhabitants? Are their inhabitants like us, what we call people? We have never contacted people on another planet. If you start thinking about what we do not know, we don’t even begin to understand what we mean by not knowing. Is Space just what we can see with our best telescopes or does it go on forever and ever.

Why are we here? Are we alone or just a speck in an enormous unending universe that we haven’t really even begun to understand? Are we the only speck of humanity and set here to discover the enormous universe, or do we really have all sorts of neighbors just out there a little further. I’m getting way too far into the unknown department.

I’ve been reading a biography of Oliver Cromwell, and the portrait on the cover of England’s famed “Proprietor” shows a gentleman with shoulder-length curly hair, which I assume was common in his day. So I started wondering just when short hair for men became fashionable, setting aside today’s wide-open fashion for anything goes. I assume that the “fashion” today is for pretty short hair with lots of exceptions for whatever.(with the full understanding that a walk down the block would probably show you a bit of everything.) Seems as if the fashion is pretty much straight old haircuts, with, um, variations.What we think of as pretty much a “standard hair cut” originated in the 1920s, encouraged by the crew cuts of a couple of world wars. Not sure where today’s “anything goes” came from. WWII was military crew cuts, and that’s been ordinary ever since. Haven’t seen any portraits of our soldiers with anything but a standard short cut ever since. I would assume that a standard short cut is much more comfortable than long hair, but I’m female. What do I know?