The Curvature Of Spacetime

When you're young everything moves so slowly, but not in a bad way. I mean, before you start going to kindergarten, you play all day and watch Sesame Street and it just lasts forever. Then comes grade school and its a little slower: You watch the clock a little more, waiting for recess or time to go home. By high school, things have sped up considerably, the days kind of whizz by and even the school years don't last as long; but its still not too bad, after all, three months seems like an awful long time to be dating somebody, and the summers still seem to go on forever. When you're grown, time gets away from you, your kids grow up too fast, and the things you put off just slip by you. Its especially bad if you get depressed: You put on weight and sleep all day and things just become a blur. Finally, when you get old and retire, things slow down again, you relax, and you even drive slower.

Its the same as what happens when you look at things; I mean, when you're a kid you go to a park or a pool and it looks huge, but when you grow up and go back it looks smaller. Its the same with anything: Your school, a house you grew up in, or whatever. Its the same reason you see old people wearing these huge hats with wide brims, because to them they look normal.

You might think its all in your imagination, and I might even agree except for one thing. That is, that it happens the same to everyone. One person might imagine something, but everyone doesn't imagine the same thing. Clearly, this is an observable and repeatable phenomenon.

Scientists call it the curvature of spacetime, and it describes an inverse relationship between mass, space, and time. Put simply, gravity curves both time and space around it, which we would perceive as time itself speeding up or slowing down. Check it out yourself if you don't believe me: Its how black holes are formed, when a star collapses, infinite gravity, infinite curvature of spacetime, and at the heart of a black hole--The Event Horizon--time literally stops.

With that theory in mind, what we are observing is clearly a relationship between the mass of our own bodies and 1) the passage of time and 2) the space around us. Where S=Space, T=Time, and M=Mass, the relationship is expressed:

ST=1/M

In other words, the bigger you are, the slower time goes and the smaller things seem.

Commercials

There's a commercial with a beauty queen--a real beauty queen with a sash and a tiara--who is sitting on a firetruck and laughing. I think she's eating a Baby Ruth bar.

It raises a lot of questions. What pageant was she in? Did she win? Why is she sitting on a firetruck? Why is there no one else around? And what's so funny?

She's very pretty and its a fun commercial to watch, but its not very effective. I can't even remember what its for.

I think advertisers know what the public wants to see, and they know what makes an effective commercial. Unfortunately for the public, these two things are exactly the opposite of each other, because what the public wants is no commercials at all, and what advertisers want is for you to completely obsess on their products and think of nothing else but rushing out to buy them.

Now the people who make commercials seem to have different ways of thinking. Most of them think that a beautiful, sexy woman will sell anything. While I do love to see beautiful, sexy women, I think they're wrong. Because women don't look at those commercials and say "Wow, a beautiful, sexy woman! I could look like her, if I use the same douche she uses!" and men don't look at them and say "Wow, a beautiful, sexy woman! If I drink the same soda as her, maybe there's a chance in hell that she'll look at me!" Which of course she never will. Unless the guy is a billionaire.

Other approaches include cartoon characters, catchy jingles, and cute little slogans. These usually don't work, either, with one pretty consistent exception: Making them as annoying as possible. You get a jingle stuck in your head, and when it comes time to buy that product, you remember the brand name. It doesn't matter if you hate the song, as long as you remember it.

I remember a few years ago there was a commercial for sensitive toothpaste that said it "could help stop pain that could lead to tooth loss". But pain itself isn't leading to tooth loss; in fact, its usually the other way around. I mean, its great if it stops the pain, but the commercial made it sound like it could stop your teeth from falling out.

Car dealerships in the last few years have all started promoting "Low, No-Haggle Prices". Whoever thought of that is a genius. What it means, of course, is that you pay their price, but they make it sound like you're getting some kind of deal. So basically they're limiting my options and making it sound like its to my benefit.

The Beauty Queen On The Firetruck commercial is a new approach. Its compelling, it fascinates you, it draws you in and makes you part of the story. You want to know her, to feel her, to breathe her in. You want to do that little dance with her, to laugh with her, to live in her world and find out what makes her tick.

But they made a mistake in that commercial. They didn't emphasize the name of the product. At least not enough so that I can remember it now.

White Supremacy

I don't understand white supremacists, and I've met more than my share of them. When you're a white guy and you meet a racist like that, they always seem to assume you're "in on it". That bugs me.

Most of them claim that they're Christians and that God made white people superior. But speaking as a white person, I don't feel superior to anyone and I don't see any white people acting in a superior manner. What I mean is, if someone really is a Christian, and they're superior to someone else, wouldn't it follow that their "Christian Duty" was to take care of the inferior? Jesus Christ was superior to everyone He met, but He didn't try to beat people up or burn down their houses. I'm superior to dogs and chickens and monkeys, but I don't hate them or want to kill them. Well, except chickens, but that's only so I can eat them.

Every time there's a serial killer going around chopping people up and putting them in freezers or burying them in the crawl space of his house, who do they look for? A white male. Always. Its never someone Jewish or black or Chinese, and its never a woman. What's more, every time some kid goes to school and opens fire on people indiscriminately, its always white boys.

I just find it very strange. And not only are white people the only ones doing this stuff, but every time you hear one talking about being superior, they are ugly. I suppose a good-looking person might think they're superior because they're good-looking, but an ugly white guy with a crappy job probably thinks that being white is all he's got going for him. Sadly, this is usually true. Its just that being white means so much more to him than it does to anyone else.

Another thing they say a lot is, if African-Americans can have the NAACP and the United Negro College Fund and Miss Black America, why can't white people have their own organizations. This is stupid, because white people have everything else. And besides, if they want to see just white people, they have NASCAR, the NHL and the Country Music Association.