The Oppenheimer Report - 9/10/12

The Democratic convention took place last week in Charlotte, N.C. and it was marginally more interesting than last week‘s episodes of Big Brother. I’m not fan of Barack Obama (or Joe Biden) but I think Bill Clinton knocked it out of the park with his endorsement speech. Does that guy know how to work a crowd or what? I predict an almost equally divided America and a very close and contentious race leading up to the November elections. Obama will campaign on the I-killed-bin-Bombin'-saved-the-auto-industry-and-brought-affordable-healthcare-to-millions-and-remember-Republicans-are-evil-rich-old-white-men ticket, while imploring us to give him another four years to restore the ailing economy. The elephants will say Obama has had four years and the economy is still a mess, and he’s a socialist pig who is probably not even an bona fide American. If the silent (bible-thumping-ultra-conservative) majority does not turn out in record numbers, and if Mitt the Twit does not win the Ohio electoral vote, I’m thinking that the incumbent will prevail, and he certainly will if the economy improves (which I doubt a Republican congress will allow to happen). Rating it solely on the two conventions, in my usual over-simplistic way, I’d say the Republicans might be voted off the island.

NASA’s latest toy, the Curiosity Mars rover, has sent back its first photographs from the Red Planet and some of them are truly amazing. My favorite is the above photo, which depicts the rover‘s view as it lumbers at a snail's pace towards its destination at the base of 3.4 mile high Mount Sharp. I’d like some close up photos of Olympus Mons, that Martian volcano which is 3 times as high as Mt. Everest. I’m sure I am violating some copyright law by reposting this photograph without permission, but I’m counting on the fact that none of the twelve people who might read this report will blow me in. These are certainly not the first close up photographs of Mars, but they are the most recent. I believe there is presently one other rover on the surface and three orbiting spacecraft. How cool is it that we have a machine driving around on the surface of Mars that is sending us back pictures and data, from a distance of over 100 Million kilometers?! How cool is it that we can litter a new planet with our discarded space debris? Lifting our leg on the cosmic fire hydrant, so to speak.

And in the our-society-is-going-to heck-in-a-hand basket department, the other day I read about a new smart phone application which enables passengers to hail a cab. So far the app has not been sanctioned by the cab police, but it’s only a matter of time. Isn’t it illegal for drivers to use cell phones; how’s this going to work? This app would take all the fun out of the serendipitous and predatory practice of cab hailing, and gives an unfair advantage to the tech savvy. One can now order concert tickets by cell phone (totally unfair!), remotely control the climate of one’s home, program PVRs to record favorite television programs, and a thousand other miraculous labor and time saving tasks. This latest app will give us even more opportunity to disconnect from our society and avoid any form of face to face communication. Not only will we be able to text our cabby, but we can likely eliminate all human contact with him or her. Pretty soon the transformation will be complete and we’ll all be slothful (and illiterate) couch potatoes too lazy to fight off that old lady for the last cab. Deeesgraceful. It reminds me of an amusing SNL skit advertising a new app for pre-occupied smart phone users to warn them of obstacles like oncoming busses and cars, thus allowing them to remain incessantly glued to the screens of their phones. Then there is the real life YouTube video of a woman inadvertently falling into a fountain in a shopping mall because she was so immersed in her cell phone communication. Indeed I felt out of place as a pedestrian at a major intersection in Toronto last week when I found myself surrounded by fifteen or twenty other pedestrians, all completely rapt in their smart phones. It was a pickpocket’s paradise! I too am reluctantly becoming one of the (i)pod people. Fascinated by the novelty of being able to send a photo to anyone’s smart phone or computer, I’m becoming a texting fool. I’m not sexting though. Or is it Weinering?

I wonder if there was or is life on Mars. In some ways that planet is similar to Earth, and there’s evidence of water in the photographs. Perhaps there was a Martian society and, like ours, they became imprisoned and ultimately exterminated by their own technology. We naturally assume that extra terrestrials would be smarter and more developed than us, but perhaps they were just a few thousand years ahead of humans in their march to extinction. I’ve got a theory based on my voluminous knowledge of the workings of the world, and I think that The Creator, be it Mother Nature, or Allah, or name-your-diety, just stands patiently on the sidelines until our civilizations begin to implode. Just as someone like Newt Gingrich is about to be elected leader of the free world, a smart phone rings. Hello, this is the future calling, time to reset ... and with that a rogue asteroid wipes the slate clean for the next evolution of boneheads.Then, like a child whose Lego skyscraper has toppled, said Creator shrugs and begins again. Nobody's perfect.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED