J.T. McDaniel's blog

Suspension of Disbelief, Where Fiction Meets Religion

When writing fiction I rely on what we call "a willing suspension of disbelief." It's a very simple concept. The reader knows that what he's reading isn't real, but in order to enjoy the story he convinces his brain that, for the moment, it should accept that this is real. Fiction isn't really enjoyable without being able to do this. Most of us have read books, or seen movies, where the plot was so obviously silly and unrealistic that it was impossible to enjoy them. If you can't believe it at least a little it's not fun.

I like to believe there are thousands of people in the United States who can do this when they read the Genesis creation stories, suspending their disbelief and thinking these things really happened. I like to believe there are thousands mostly because I know there are actually millions, and it's just too fucking depressing to think there are that many Americans who actually want to ignore reality.

Why is there this widespread suspension of disbelief about this particular myth? Anyone looking at the Genesis creation myths can see they don't fit in with accepted reality. Just the idea that the earth is older than the sun, and that the earth somehow was having normal night and day cycles before there was a light source, is clearly ridiculous. So is the idea of creating the human species by making a clay statue and bringing it to life. If nothing else throws that one out, we're a carbon based life form, and an animated statue would necessarily be silicon based.

Christians are particularly tenacious in their devotion to the literal truth of this myth. Jews seem to have less of a problem interpreting it as an allegory intended mostly to emphasize the interrelatedness of humanity. When you look at it that way, it doesn't matter that much if it really happened, because the point is still made. All people are related. It's even true, though that connection doesn't really trace back to a particular pair of "first humans," if only because there was no first human. Homo sapiens evolved from earlier human types through a slow process of evolution, and it would be close to impossible to state with certainty at what point the "modern" actually supplanted the "early" in the human line.

Creationists are quite right when they argue that one species doesn't suddenly turn into another, but if you look at enough generations you do find one species at the starting point and another species at the end, with probably thousands of intermediate forms that vary so slightly from one generation to the next that no one really notices one species turning into another over the course of perhaps several thousand years.

The thing is, Christians, unlike Jews, are vitally dependent upon the Genesis creation myths being literally true. For Christians, the important thing about these myths isn't that everyone is related to everyone else. That's just a bonus, and maybe useful for a sermon sidebar. What's important is that the serpent talked Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, and that Eve then talked Adam into trying it as well. This "fall of man" myth is as central to Christian theology as the myth of Jesus' resurrection. It was the "fall" that created original sin. This spiritual taint would be forever inborn, and inherited by all subsequent human beings. This would alienate humanity from god, and could only be removed through an atoning human sacrifice in the form of Jesus dying on the cross.

Without original sin as a reason for his "sacrifice," Jesus becomes just another in a long line of failed messianic pretenders.

When you look at the messianic prophecies believed in by the Jews of Jesus' time, the central theme was the relief of the land of Israel from foreign domination, not the remittance of original sin (which Jews never believed in anyway). Hezekiah, Josiah, Bar Kokhba, and even David Ben Gurion all came closer to fulfilling those prophecies than Jesus ever did.

The necessity for original sin goes a long way toward explaining the desperation exhibited by Christians in resisting objective reality. They want creationism taught in schools because accepting that Adam and Eve never existed means the central tenet of their belief system is meaningless. Without Adam and Eve they don't need to be "saved" because there's nothing to be saved from. If you're not born already doomed to an eternity of punishment in hell for the failings of a mythical ancestor, you're just not going to be as worried about that fate.

If you don't need saving, and you don't have to worry about eternal punishment in an imaginary hell (which, remember, apparently didn't exist until the New Testament writers dreamed it up), then you also don't need churches, or preachers, or any part of the multi-billion dollar industry that is Christianity in America.

You might even start doing really radical, dangerous things, such as thinking for yourself instead of just doing as you're told. And the churches certainly can't be having any of that!

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For more ramblings along these lines, be sure to pick up a copy of my latest book, More on Theistic Atheism & Other Essays, which is now available in trade paperback and on the Amazon Kindle reading device. In addition to the titular work, this little (160 pages) book includes essays on the afterlife (or the lack thereof), some reasons why I don't believe in debating creationists (it lets them claim there's actually something to debate, among other things), and the idea that not only is it not wrong to test god, it's actually long past due. If god is real, let it prove it.

Politics is rung in. Just imagine how tough it is to be a traditional Republican in a party currently dominated by, for want of a better term, a pack of fugitive Dixiecrats and religious nuts. The proper relationship between government and religion is discussed (essentially, government should offer zero support to religion, and religion needs to butt out of government), and between religion and science. I see science as mostly not caring that much about religion, and religion as an active enemy to science, unless they can find a way to pervert scientific findings into appearing to support religious dogma.

Modern myths are also brought up, particularly the rather silly notion that the world is going to end on December 21, 2012. How many times has the end been confidently predicted, and then not happened? Hell, if Jesus couldn't get it right (he was confident he'd be back no later than the early 2nd century), why would anyone think a bunch of so-called psychics and sensitives have got a lock on it? Getting one up on the Millerites, the 2012 doomsday types are already starting to fudge their predictions, without waiting for the end to not happen.

There's a little on gay marriage, my essential theme there being, "who cares?" After two marriages I'm personally more inclined to say, "Just go shack up," but if two people want to get married, why not let them? It isn't even a religious function in this country, though the state governments do allow clergy to act for them and sign the license. Marriage is really about property and inheritance, which is hardly an exclusively heterosexual concern.

I even talk about god. There's an essay on The Nature of God, and another called The Childish God, either of which will no doubt upset a few readers. Religious people don't like to be reminded that their deity frequently comes across like a self-centered two-year-old whose mother wouldn't give him the last cookie. Very close to the end we find Dissecting the Decalogue. It's just what it sounds like, a further look at the ten commandments (which were also discussed in This and That), this time the Deuteronomy version.

The book ends with Odd Animals and Space Aliens. I think there's probably something to cryptozoology as long as you're talking about insects and fish, but it's mostly a load of hooey when you start claiming that Bigfoot is really roaming the Pacific northwest, or the Florida Everglades. As for space aliens, I have to agree they almost certainly exist (even a very conservative estimate suggests quintillions of potentially inhabitable planets in the universe, so the probability there will be intelligent life on at least some of them is fairly high). I also argue that there is virtually no chance any of these aliens have ever visited earth, or would even be likely to know anyone was living here. The number of potential inhabited planets is vast, but so is the distance between them.

Anyway, if an alien civilization was able to build a starship and travel to a distant planet, don't you think their medical science would probably have advanced slightly beyond proctology?

Proof of Human-Dinosaur Contemporaneity

At Gen 6:4 it is stated, "There were giants in the earth in those day." What were these giants? It seems unlikely they were men, because all illustrated editions of Grimm show that giants are extremely large, something like 30 or 40 feet tall. Such heights are simply impossible in normal human beings, except when exposed to certain forms of radiation (see such documentary films as The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, or The Amazing Colossal Man), or through the use of magic (Grimm, Harry Potter). Actual humans can't grow much taller than about eight feet and still support their own weight.

It follows, therefore, that these biblical giants can only have been dinosaurs. This follows from the most important precept of biblical interpretation, Scribere aliquid, ergo verum est (Someone wrote it, therefore it's true). We do, it must be noted, also have additional evidence.

Dinosaurs were contemporary with man at least into the 20th century. In 1914, Winsor McCay, undeniably a human being, was preserved on film riding on a large sauropod dinosaur apparently named Gertie. There was also the well known documentary, The Valley of Gwangi, in which several reasonably well known actors may be seen interacting with various dinosaurs. The important thing here is that these were wild dinosaurs, including a rare specimen of Tyranosaurus harryhousenus, unlike those in Jurassic Park, which were specially bred from ancient DNA fragments.

Now it hardly needs mentioning that many hold dinosaurs to long predate human beings. This is in opposition to biblical chronology, which clearly establishes that the earth was created slightly less than 6,000 years ago. Some will naturally argue that the earth itself is somewhere between 3.5 to 4.5 billion years old, but why should we be swayed by this? It is perfectly reasonable to say that a 6,000 year old earth is composed of 4 billion year old material. No one can reasonably argue with the date of creation (1 Tishri, 1, or 5772 years ago Sept 28, 2011), as this is calculable from biblical genealogy tables (though Jewish authorities have discovered that Bishop Ussher miscalculated slightly). This date having been positively established by tradition, which all human beings recognize as superior to such questionable concepts as inductive reasoning, nuclear decay, and critical thinking (the latter defined by Christian authorities as "the process by which children are indoctrinated by evil educators to ignore inerrant biblical pronouncements in favor of contradictory propaganda supported only by evidence"), we can hardly produce any data in opposition.

This seeming discrepancy is, in any case, easily explained. The earth was created at a much later date than it was created. This can perhaps best be understood by referring to a long running series of BBC documentaries, which conclusively established that a container with an exterior footprint no greater than about 25 square feet is able to contain a portable dwelling consisting of several hundred rooms, including an Olympic size swimming pool. As this dimensionally ambiguous device is also able to travel in non-linear space-time, it naturally follows that the material of which a universe is composed may be older than the universe itself, or any planet contained therein.

This comes from another established biblical precept, which is, Testatus Deus, credo, si discordes interficiam te (God declared, I believe, if you disagree I'll kill you). This has worked extremely well for the religious for nearly 2,000 years, though for the last century or two being somewhat tempered by the interference of secular governments. Also noted is the principle, Seperatum quod probat (That which is unconnected proves it).

So we can see, upon consideration, that space-time itself, being non linear and essentially wadded up like a ball of string, whereby one may, at any time, move from one location on that string to another (Beckettian String Theory) dinosaurs and man are logically able to coexist.

Further documentary proof may be found in the collected works of Johnny Hart and V.T. Hamlin, which may be found cited in a large number of newspapers to this day. For those less inclined to mere reading, documentary producers Hanna and Barbera have contributed several decades of programs showing human-dinosaur interaction, including proving that dinosaurs were at one time used not only as companion animals, but as household appliances. H & B are also prominent in the documentation of animal language, and ursine culinary kleptomania.

Finally, the clincher, certain religious groups have built museums documenting not only human-dinosaur coexistence, but such phenomena as animal distribution by means of a large boat, with numerous supporting dioramas, along with a very clear explanation of why the failures of a single pair of apocryphal human beings require the wholesale, perpetual roasting of all human beings who fail to recognize the necessity of human sacrifice at the beginning of the common era. The eternal torture is for your own good, because the creator deity loves you, and expresses that love by torturing you for failing to respond to that love with a complete and willing suspension of disbelief. So, because we all know Exhibet nunquam mentiri (exhibits never lie), it is therefore proved that dinosaurs and humans lived together.

Not a Good Place to Learn Science

I know people who think Tennessee is a wonderful place. How much longer, though? Or is it a function of age? The Tennessee people I know are all older, with grown children. Would they be as fond of the place if they still had kids in school?

Tennessee is one of two states -- the other in Louisiana -- where there is a law allowing science teachers to throw actual science out the window and teach fairy tales instead. It may actually be the only state where an anti-bullying law makes bullying legal as long as the bully can claim that his religion says it's okay to persecute the victim.

In the science classroom, the idea is that teachers should be allowed to teach the "controversy" about evolution, climate change, and other subjects. So far as evolution is concerned, you'd have to ask why such a law would be needed. The only actual controversy about evolution is whether Gould's punctuated equilibrium idea or the older Darwinian gradualism is the correct mechanism. There's no controversy at all as to whether humans represent the current evolutionary level of our particular branch.

But the controversy that Tennessee and Louisiana want taught is the old argument between evolution and so-called Intelligent Design. It's a false controversy at best. Science supports evolution, and nothing at all supports ID, which is just the same old biblical creationism plastered over with a little new illogic, misinterpretations of legitimate science, and quite a lot of pseudo-science.

This sort of law is wasteful on several levels. It wastes the legislature's time, it wastes the state's money, and it wastes the time and efforts of students when it would be far better employed learning something useful. In the monetary area, it not only wastes money paying the salaries of the people who came up with this nonsense, but it also wastes the money that will be spent in a pointless effort to defend the law itself. ID is religious doctrine, with no science in it, so teaching it violates the establishment clause of the Bill of Rights. Several other states have already wasted a lot of taxpayer money defending this sort of nonsense. People were designed by an omniscient, omnipotent creator. If we were, obviously, we'd all remain young, vigorous, and completely healthy until we were about 95, then die painlessly in our sleep. Anyone claiming there was a designer is also going to have to  admit that the designer was an incompetent boob.

The anti-bullying law is even stranger. I doubt you'll get anyone in the legislature to admit it, but the intent seems to be to insure that it remains legal for high school students to torture gay classmates by reminding them that they're going to spend eternity in a very unpleasant imaginary afterlife (as opposed to the much more pleasant imaginary afterlife the bully is expecting). I can see the law having unintended effects, for while Christians may be the majority, they're not the only religious nuts in Tennessee. How will the cheerleaders feel after being repeatedly harrassed and called prostitutes because they're not covering themselves with burkas? That would be legal, too.

And speaking of harrassment, Jessica Ahlquist is still getting death threats because she had the nerve to force her high school to remove an illegal banner from the auditorium. Or, more precisely, because she wanted them to remove the line that designated it a prayer, and a benedictary line at the end. Most of it was just a collection of non-religious, positive thinking platitudes that no one would have cared about. The letter that was released a couple days ago has the appearance of having been composed by a particularly nasty middle school student, but the content violates any number of criminal statutes. It also provides a good reminder that the only reason Christians stopped killing anyone who disagreed with them is because they now live under secular governments that won't let them. Otherwise, you'd just have the Pilgrim Fathers, whose idea of religious liberty included the persecution and murder of anyone who didn't believe in their particular Calvinistic interpretation of Christianity.

It Seemed like a Good Idea at the Time

Some things sound like a good idea at first, but after a while you're not so sure. The ideas and slogans on this list are partly silly things I made up myself, and partly the real thing. Anything followed by an asterisk (*) is real. Anything else, you can blame me.

• A delicious new treat! Mrs. Lovatt's burgers! 100% pure ground Chuck.
• Red State, the Musical
• Everything fried in pure creamery butter*
• Shakespeare mentioned starlings, so we should introduce them to America*
• Rabbits are quite tasty. The Australians will love them.*
• What Germany needs for a leader is a nice, Austrian vegetarian.*
• A brand new production, starring Richard Simmons as Willy Loman.
• S.P.C.M. (The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Microbes)(This one really wouldn't surprise me that much.)
• "The best musical ever to close on opening night!"
• WBC! a new musical, starring John Barrowman as Fred Phelps.
• Review: "Perfectly awful. Don't waste your money. If there is any show you need to miss this season, miss this one!" Quoted on poster as: "Perfect... Don't...miss this one!"(*?)
• and Wally Cox as Superman.
• Seen at dislexic bigots convention: DOG HEATS GAFS.

This is the sort of thing writers do when they can't think of anything useful. I'm going to say that I have never heard the first one before, so as far as I know I can claim to have made it up, but it's such an obvious pun that I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if someone else said it first.

I think I may be blogging more frequently in the coming month. My doctor found a nodule on a vocal cord, so for the next month I have to use an inhaler twice a day, and the suggestion was that it would help if I didn't talk any more than absolutely necessary. I have a suspicion there may still be a laser in my future. Either way, I can only hope that high B-flat returns. Especially since, right now, I have enough trouble hitting the E-flat. Not good, when an A-flat is required to even lay claim to being a baritone. 

We'll just have to wait and see. On the optimistic side, even if it involves surgery, I don't have to worry about it ruining my singing voice. It's pretty much already shot, so going from "sings crappy" to "can't sing at all" isn't that much of a loss, and generally the odds are in favor of getting better.

Now if I wasn't also getting too old to play the romantic lead. Well, okay, baritone may have an advantage there. You usually end up as the villain anyway. They're a lot more fun to play.

 

So Just Who is Jacob Thomson?

Jacob Thomson is an imaginary person. I made him up as a pen name when I was writing a book called The Alukam a number of years ago. I decided that the book was so completely different from anything I'd done up to that point that it needed to come out under a different name.

I usually wrote about submarines. A couple novels, and some non-fiction stuff I'd edited. There were no submarines in this new book. Doing one of those high-concept Hollywood things, one of the tag lines I came up with was something along the lines of, "Dracula meets Rabbi Small at the 87th Precinct and tells the story in the Penthouse Forum." There was an Orthodox Jewish detective, a Jewish vampire (two of them, actually, one male, one female), and tons of sex. There were no dirty words, though. You'd be surprised just how raunchy you can get without using any dirty words at all. I learned that reading Ted Mark back when I was in the Army.

So I created Thomson to take credit for writing the book. He was a full-fledged character himself, complete with a biography. He even did interviews, though I was the one asking the questions, so he was never exactly ambushed. I wasn't too worried Oprah would out the guy as a fraud, if only because there was never any real question that he wasn't made up. Ostensibly, he was this old guy from Brooklyn who served as a B-17 bombardier in World War II, came home and got a PhD in Literature from Columbia and ordination from some Yeshiva in Brooklyn, and spent the next few decades leading an Orthodox congregation that would have been horrified to discover that he was writing dirty books after he retired. 

He had to be Jewish. Anyone who has ever read the book would naturally presume that the author was. The whole story sort of screams out Rowan Atkinson's words as he separates the Christians from the other departed souls and points down, "Sorry, the Jews were right."

Why did I "out" him as being my pen name and not a real author? For one thing, he'd be 89 this year, so how much longer could I keep him around? Okay, sure, there are precedents. Going by when he first started chasing down the bad guys, Superman has to be at least 110 by now. Dondi was still an 8 year old Italian war orphan (World War II) in the late 1960s. Dennis is still five. But I didn't feel like taking that out.

Anyway, I needed a few more stories to fill out my most recent book, This and That, and there were several Thomson stories that would fit the bill. There were several stories in that book that had been published before, though not where very many people had actually read them.

While I was using him, I used him mostly for the spooky stuff. Stories with vampires, and golems, and generally creepy characters.

I also made him a retiree, and a resident of Pine Island, Florida. Anyone from that area who's read The Alukam would almost certainly recognize the main setting, Port Morrow, as a version of Fort Myers. If that didn't work, some of the surrounding communities include Cape Marl, Belle Springs, and Punta Ancha. The last one is a slightly mean pun on Punta Gorda, because many residents of that town like to translate it as "Broad Point," which is actually Punta Ancha in Spanish. "Gorda" doesn't mean "broad," it means "fat." If you look at on a map it looks like a big old beer belly hanging down into the bay.

So, anyway, Thomson is me. I'm sure some people figured it out on their own. After all, my own Hebrew name is Yaakov (Jacob), and my father's name was Thomas, which would anyway make me Jacob Tom's son.

I did drag him out one more time recently. I put on his character as much as I could and recorded one of his stories, called Mission Twenty-Five. I think the voice ended up with a strong Archie Bunker influence, with the occasional touch of George Carlin in certain inflections. It is, at least so far, the longest thing I've put on YouTube.

 

 

 

 

 

Nonzero Chances

Every once in a while I find myself using the term "nonzero." I actually use it quite a lot in the book I'm currently working on, which touches on a lot of subjects where probabilities come up. Today one of my friends questioned just what it was supposed to mean.

On the face of it, nonzero would just mean greater than zero. I've seen it phrased both ways, but I think nonzero has a more precise meaning. Greater than zero can easily be interpreted as being likely. Nonzero is, generally, used where there really is no chance something will happen, but you can't entirely rule it out, either.

For instance, there is a nonzero chance that some afternoon Candi Summers will show up at my front door lusting after my body. It is nonzero, rather than zero, because I exist, the door exists, and Ms Summers exists (though I doubt that's her real name). Therefore it always remains possible that all three will at some point be in the same location at the same time.

There would probably be a better chance if, a) I still looked more like this off-duty soldier hanging around a bar in Atami in 1969, b) the girl had ever heard of me, and c) I was as rich and famous as I ought to be after writing four books and editing several more.

As it is, I figure the chances are slightly less than they are that a genuine Sasquatch (not the actor in the beef jerkey commercials, a real one) will show up on Letterman with Jack Hannah.

So nozero doesn't mean likely. It means vanishingly small. It's the sort of result you give when you're asked to prove a negative. There is always a nonzero chance that some unknown thing exists, whether you're talking about God, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Bertrand Russell's teapot. There is a nonzero chance that just about anything exists.

This is presumably why even Richard Dawkins recently said that, at least technically, he'd have to be called an agnostic, because there was really no way he could absolutely prove there was no God. He couldn't find any evidence to prove that there was, but there was always that tiny chance that the evidence was there somewhere. I think you'll still find him mostly going with Atheist, though.

Closer to home, I suppose there is at least a nonzero chance that the Republican Party will return to its roots and kick the ex-Southern Democrats to the curb. Gingrich is intelligent, and seems to have a grasp of reality, but doesn't dare show it if he wants to have a chance. Santorum is like the White Queen, seemingly able to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast. Romney is probably too rich, but at the moment seems to have the best chance.

Maybe we'll get lucky, have a brokered convention where no one arrives with the nomination locked up, and the delegates will tell all of them to take a flying leap and nominate a traditional Republican instead. This is, after all, the party that ended slavery, created the National Park System, and ended segregation. I'm not really sure how we ended up as the party most likely to try to replace science with mythology in public education, but I know Barry Goldwater wouldn't have anything nice to say about that.

Well, I suppose there's also a nonzero chance we'll manage to nominate and elect a modern Republican along the lines of Teddy Roosevelt. I just don't see him running for job right now.

The Best Book You Haven't Read Yet

From the latest sales figures I'm guessing there may be a few people who are still unaware of my most recent book. Most of the United States, probably.

This book is, admittedly, a little different. You might even say that it's really three books between the same pair of covers. I started out with a collection of 13 short stories, including a few that were originally credited to that ancient Brooklyn bombardier, Jacob Thomson. I invented him as a pen name when I wrote The Alukam, another rather odd book, being a police procedural featuring an Orthodox Jewish detective in a small Florida town, hunting a "vampire" serial killer, who turns out to be a real vampire. A Jewish vampire, at that, strongly resembling the detective, and actually something like his sixth-great-uncle. It also had a lot of sex in it, but no dirty words.

There's not much sex in the new book, though. Some, but nothing to run screaming to the board of censors about. The short stories in this book cover several genres, including the World War II stories I'm best known for, a little hard boiled crime, and some horror. A couple of them are just strange. Strange is good, I think, and you'll probably enjoy them.

The second part of this book is autobiography. I can't say that I've led a life anyone is likely to make into a Bruce Willis movie, but I tried to leave most of the boring parts out. Back in the early '70s I spent some time hanging around the Broadway scene, and some of that is included. So is my year in Vietnam, along with some stuff from my school days.

The rest of the book is mostly short articles and essays. Some of the shorter pieces originally appeared in this blog. Most of the last part, which includes some religious (a couple of people have said "anti-religious") essays, is new. Just call me a skeptic. I'm just one of those odd people who want their proofs to be externally referenced, and not based on circular reasoning. That applies whether you're talking about religion or alien abductions. I'm not much of a believer in visiting space aliens, either. Why the heck would they decide to pick earth as their favored location for a proctologists convention?

Predictions for 2012

I know this is a little late, but I've decided there is still time to put forward my list of predictions for this year. These are all based on the most reliable of all psychic principles, as explained after the list.

• The sun will come up tomorrow.
• There will be an earthquake in California.
• Someone will be elected President of the United States in November.
• Jesus will return. This will be a previously deported carpenter from Guadalajara, not a religious figure.
• A well know evangelist will be involved in some sort of scandal.
• I will write another book.
• A large number of children will be born.
• A politician will say something stupid.
• The world will not end in December.
• Love Never Dies will finally get a Broadway production.

I suppose the psychic principle involved is now obvious. With the exception of the presidential election, it would be a very odd year indeed when most of these didn't occur. Okay, I don't write a new book every year, but as the new one is nearly done, I feel safe enough predicting it will be completed this year.

As for the others, musical theater references are always handy, and there are always earthquakes (mostly minor) in California. Children are born every day, evangelists (like other con men) are always screwing up in one way or another, and politicians can always be counted upon to say something stupid (it seems to be congenital with a certain Pennsylvanian). Jesus the carpenter returning is a little more tenuous, but it's an extremely common name, so the odds are actually pretty good. It's the Guadalajara part that's iffy.

As for the final prediction--well, you expect to get at least one wrong, don't you? It would be nice if it happened though.

Religion Survey Results

In an effort to determine just which religion is most correct, our pollsters went to Chicago and questioned a total of 12,380 dead people, asking about their experiences in the afterlife. Specifically, the intent was to determine which religious precepts most closely applied to their post-life experiences.

Unfortunately, results proved inconclusive, as none of those questioned answered any of the questions. This despite the efforts of more than 100 certified psychics with highly successful records of contacting the dead both in front of large audiences, and in private homes. But, we obtained no results, not even a single rap on a table. Being a neutral, public service organization, we will refrain from speculating on whether the lack of results was because the psychics were fakes, there is no afterlife, or a combination of both.

In a separate study, examination of Chicago voting records has determined that the deceased show an overwhelming tendency to register and vote Democrat.

My Next New House?

With all the tornadoes over the last couple days, and the way that it seems the non-violent rainstorms of my youth have utterly vanished from nature, I was thinking about what my next house should look like. I figured that I needed to take the weather into consideration, because it's likely to get worse before it gets better. Energy efficiency was another factor. The weather is getting worse, and nothing is getting cheaper.

What I came up with was something like this. Not an entirely new idea, but one we may want to start thinking about as a serious contender for riding out the bad weather.

The house is constructed of poured, reinforced concrete. After the house is completed, the whole structure is thoroughly waterproofed, then covered with maybe six to eight feet of dirt, with grass planted over the whole area. This does, of course, mean that the homeowner will have to add "mow the roof" to his chores list, but I think I could live with that.

I just couldn't resist the round windows and (rounded) doors. If I ever build this thing, I supposed I'd end up settling for the usual types instead. If you don't get the joke, just ask someone about round windows and underground houses. It won't take long to find someone who can enlighten you.

The storm resistance factor is obvious. With the doors and window back under a ten foot overhang, and provided with functional (instead of decorative) storm shutters, instead of having to run to the storm cellar in the event of a tornado, you're already living in it. A tornado has a much harder time tearing up a low hill than a free standing house.

Keeping with the theme, I'd want to use geothermal heating and cooling. Probably a lot of solar panels, too, stuck out behind the house out of sight from the road. Those would obviously be vulnerable in a storm, but they can be replaced easier than people or the decades of personal items you'll have accumulated  inside the house.

I do want a fireplace in the living room. One with high end electric logs. Want to keep that carbon footprint down. The whole design of this place emphasizes that. Dirt isn't a great insulator, but eight feet of it is sufficient that, in most parts of the country, the actual concrete outer shell of the structure will never reach the freezing point in winter. It should also help keep things cool in the summer.

People like straight walls, and the most structurally sound form for this sort of house in more dome-like, so the one thing that shouldn't be lacking is storage space. There would be all sorts of room to tuck things away in the big cavities behind the exterior walls. On the inside, I doubt you would even be able to tell you were living in what amounts to a three bedroom bunker.