Afraid of His Own Shadow

Today, as you know from the saturation news coverage that has knocked the Egyptian Revolution off the front pages, is Groundhog Day in the United States. For those visiting this blog from other countries, Groundhog Day is a very important American holiday in which a bunch of people in a small town in Pennsylvania wait for a groundhog to come out of his burrow to have a look around. If the groundhog sees his shadow it means there will be six more weeks of winter. If he doesn't see his shadow it means winter is almost over. Or the other way around. Honestly, crankyjewishguy (CJG) doesn't think a groundhog knows his ass from his elbow, let alone understands what his shadow is, but there you have it.

Crankyjewishguy (CJG) knows what people from other countries must be thinking: the United States is one of the most technologically advanced countries on Earth and spends billions of dollars every year studying, analyzing and predicting the weather and this is how they do it? The answer is yes, this is exactly how we do it.

In a normal year CJG would anxiously await the news from Gobbler's Knob, Pennsylvania the way he awaits his colonoscopy results. But this year he doesn't care. First, he's in Boca Raton where it's already summer (80 degrees as CJG writes), and second, no matter when spring comes to New England, it's going to be at least August before all the snow melts. And, frankly, there's another reason: CJG has lived more than five decades now and he doesn't believe in the groundhog anymore. CJG can't remember a year when the groundhog's prediction was right, at least in New England. If you live in New England and it's February 2nd, there's always at least six weeks of winter left regardless of whether the sun is out in Pennsylvania.

Now, as for Boca, CJG continued his streak of consecutive vacation days on which he has run into people he knows, or close to it. Readers will recall that when CJG was in Puerto Rico in December he could hardly turn around without bumping into people from home, including the kid who used to work at his local Starbucks, and yesterday, walking the beach, it happened again, but only because CJG made the mistake of wearing a t-shirt with the name of the town where he lives on it. CJG hadn't walked a hundred feet before an excited couple from CJG's home town came running up to see if maybe they knew one another. CJG didn't recall ever running into them at the supermarket or the library, or denting their fender at the bad intersection near the post office, so pleasantries were exchanged, mostly about how smug we felt walking the beach while our neighbors were being buried in another foot of snow. But CJG suspects that he could have been wandering the streets of Khartoum in the same t-shirt and the exact same thing would have happened because that's the kind of guy he is: friend to all the people.

No need for the groundhog here. The weather forecast is for several
thousand more years of sunshine with occasional hurricanes.

Parallel Universes: CJG Asks, Why Can't They Be Perpendicular?

A few days ago, crankyjewishguy's (CJG) friend, Bill, texted him from Florida, where he was on a bender with a bunch of middle aged guys, to see if CJG could pick him up the next day at Logan Airport in Boston. Bill assumed that because CJG is a writer he could easily drop everything and come pick him up because for a writer "everything" means typing a few paragraphs in the morning and then going to Starbucks for seven hours to have a mocha and a nap. Bill happens to be right about that, but the real question is why Bill, who is supposedly one of CJG's best friends, or so he thought until Bill texted him from Florida and CJG realized he was not with Bill in Florida but staring at three feet of snow that needed to be shoveled, didn't invite him for all the fun and games. Anyway, since Bill's entire work schedule consists of teaching three one-hour spin classes each week, the tables have been turned because this morning, in about twenty minutes as a matter of fact, Bill is coming to pick up CJG and drive him to Logan Airport because CJG is on his way to visit his brother in Boca where the five day forecast is calling for sunshine, temperatures in the mid-70s, and thousands of Jewish people in their upper 80s driving ten miles an hour.

Which brings us to today's topic: cosmology. While CJG was idling in front of the American Airlines terminal waiting for Bill last week, he was listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross. She was interviewing Brian Greene, an astrophysicist from Columbia University about his new book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.  Greene is a kind of latter day Carl Sagan, adept at putting abstract concepts into easy to understand terms, except that as CJG listened he realized that though the analogies sounded nice and simple, the concepts were so mind boggling that he thought his head was going to explode.

Space: the final frontier. Or is it?

It seems to CJG that the reason concepts such as multiple universes and bending the time-space continuum are so hard to grasp is that most of us still haven't mastered the cable remote. Now we're supposed to wrap our heads around the idea that there may be many universes layered, Greene suggests, one on top of the other like so many slices of bread in which everything that's happening right now in our universe is happening in all these other universes, too. Actually, that last part was kind of comforting because it meant that there were, oh, maybe another ten or ten trillion cranky jewish guys listening to the same interview. If only we could call each other and form a support group. Then again, maybe all of us have the same cell phone number, too, in which case we'd just keep getting busy signals or be leaving messages for ourselves.

Anyway, the explanation for these carbon copy universes has something to do with the mathematical limitations of the ways in which matter can arrange itself so that eventually matter runs out of options and starts repeating itself, just like Rush Limbaugh. But, even if that's true, CJG isn't buying the notion that just because he's sitting in a Volvo listening to NPR at Logan Airport his counterparts in parallel universes are doing exactly the same thing. Even if we concede the existence of these parallel universes, why did cranky jewish guy in Universe #17, for example, also have to buy a used 2001 Volvo? And is his left tail light out, too? Is that state trooper also telling him to circle around? (By the way, do you understand the implications of all this for Starbucks' profits?) You see, this is where these geniuses who seem to be good at explaining all this arcane stuff fall down in CJG's humble opinion. For the sake of making what they are saying remotely accessible to those of us with just above average human brains, they say things that clearly can't be true because CJG knows for a fact that only in this universe could there possibly be a place like Boca Raton.

The one and only.