Big Big Man

OK, I lost all my friends talking about dogs. Now I will lose the rest. It is time to talk religion.

I used to be medium sized when I was seven or eight and prayed to be tall. I made no crazy promises like I would crawl on my knees to Rome if it happened, but I went to church a lot.

Then I grew. But God is tricky. He made me not just tall, but taller than anyone I knew, He made me taller than the doors in my house. He stuck my head in the firesprinklers in the ceiling and got me stitches in my head. He bumped my head on trees. He probably laughed a lot.

I prayed to shrink a little. Just enough to fit in my bed. No dice. No moneyback returns on prayers.

Religion is something you have to be careful with. God picks and chooses and sometimes seems to just be fooling around. So pray. But not too much. Remember that.

Going WACKO

I studied electronics a while back. When they used tubes that looked like light bulbs from outer space and glowed purple and green in the dark. It was neat. That’s when I learned about making things go WACKO. I did that a lot and burned out all mom’s radios and tvs. It was fun.

Here is how going WACKO works:
(1) Process a signal in a black box. That’s electronics talk and it just means putting something somewhere, doing something to it, and then spitting it out—sort of like putting cats(the input) in a basket (the black box) and shaking them and then getting out mad pussycats(the output).
(2) Then you put part of the output back into the black box (that’s called positive feedback) and—WACKO—the black box goes crazy: like taking a mad output cat (feedback) and throwing him back in; then watching all the cats get madder and madder until they rip up the basket.

Sort of like what happened in my old radios.

With my electronic stuff, before it blew up, I would get a loud rrrmmmMMMMRRR noise when it went WACKO, like in the school auditorium when the principal got his mike (the input) too close to the speakerbox (the output) or now when I get my hearing aid upside down. The sound goes WACKO.

So Rule 1 is: if you take too much output and stick it into the input, then everything goes WACKO

Sounds like it could be fun, but in lots of cases it is bad.

Black boxes are all over the world. Banks are a good example--a bunch of people worry about their money and go in the bank and they take their money. Then some of them tell others that the bank didn’t have much money (positive feedback) and then more people get scared and go in and take even more money out and then WACKO—all the people are crazy to get their money. Its like the mad pussycats scratching out the tellers’ eyes until they get their money and making all the cats standing in line get really upset.

But this can’t go on forever. Like the school principal who pulls the plug on the mike to shut up the sound, the bank pulls the plug and locks the door. The tellers are safe.

But (this is important) in electronics I learned that all you need to do is turn the output upside down and then no more WACKO. In electronics talk that’s negative feedback. Lets look back at the cats to understand it better. If you take part of the mad cat output and reverse it 180 degrees (that means, maybe, in this case, give an output cat lots of tranquilizers) then throw him back in the basket, it calms things down.

OK, maybe basket cats are not the best example but they sort of illustrate Rule 2: if you take the output, turn it upside down and stick it into the input, then everything calms down.

You do this in electronics to make the output sound even better and calm down the circuits. But lets look back at the banks: how do we turn the people upside down when they come out the bank. Here’s how: We tell them if they leave their money in the bank they will get a whole lot more interest than they planned for. Then a bunch of them leave their money in and tell people in line that they are getting rich putting money in the bank. That’s how you flip the output.

OK, there is a problem. The bank only has a little greenback money and the rest is in crazy stocks and ponzi schemes. So our real problem is how to make more money when the bank safe is empty.

(We could use the government to do that. But it scares the bejesus out of everyone and they run even faster to the bank.)

Here’s my plan. Don’t give just regular interest. Throw in some big payback items when people ask for their money. When I was a kid the bank gave out a set of dishes when you put more money in. That won’t work now because everybody already has dishes. My plan is use churches to print up some holy money and give that out. Churches have a special bargain for the next world already. Let’s get the Pope and Rev Ike and anyone else with a fancy robe and a printer to sign on to the bank’s team (Maybe for ten percent of BofA).

When the banks run out of greenback money, then they can give out something easy to print up with lots of value. Lets call them Heaven Bucks—the kind you CAN take with you. To buy all sorts of heaven stuff: better wings and bigger harps. Or maybe it can buy you a one way ticket from hell. OK, this heaven stuff doesn’t work for everyone. If you believe in reincarnation you can get Karma Coupons that bump you up like frequent flier miles. No next life as a cockroach. There are all sorts of schemes. And remember the churches tried it before and it worked fine until Mr. Luther messed everything up. They had the big fire sale on indulgences (sort of like holy get-out-of-jail-frees in Monopoly) in the 1600’s. Right now they have holy water coupons you can buy from preachers on TV if you stay up late and watch weird channels. Holy bucks are a marketing paradise.

So we just balance the bank money in and out with holy bucks. No more WACKO in banks. We print all we want. It has lots of value (if you believe in it). It’s great stuff, just like real money.

My Favorite Sins

Those hot-shot Catholics in Rome just approved some new, big sins a couple of weeks back. I think that’s great. We built a bunch of really neat, super-bad things in the past couple hundred years but were still playing with old sin rules. It’s like having a skinny-butt, Victorian-age pitcher tossing up softballs to 21^st century steroid guys. We have long ball, home run Sins today that the Pope never thought of until just now. He never talked about bad cell phone behavior. Or leaving cluster bombs on playgrounds. But times are changing and Hell is opening up for new age sins. I’m glad they are finally making the big time back in Rome.

But they forgot to downgrade the sin top ten, I mean the seven big guys that just are not that deadly any more. Next to atom bombers and poison-kid factories those seven deadly sins are downright tame. Let’s look at them one by one:

First, how can you say much bad about Greed here in America? We celebrate rich folk flaunting their mansions, hi-cost cupcakes and other surgical protuberances. We all want greed; some are just better at it. And to help those without money in their genes, we have greed schools everywhere: four “Growing Greedy” cable channels, a thousand Pray-and-Get-Rich Mega-Churches, web courses on grabbing houses from the dumb and poor and, for the big league greedy, MBA’s in finance. Remember, Do greed. Do it good. How can you go to hell for that?

And you’ve got to have Envy to help that top-tier greedy sons-of-guns get rich. Without envy who is going to buy anything new. The news is we have grown way beyond envy. We don’t want what our neighbors have (that’s envy) we want something better and bigger with fancy, shiny, chrome spinner wheels, too. That’s not envy that’s consumerist competition. Our President said it’s our sacred duty, like being a dead soldier. He says “Have more, more often.” That won’t get you to hell. That gets you to the mall and saves our economy.

I thought Gluttony was making a real sin comeback. I thought we had a holy war coming with Big Mac living getting clobbered by metro-sexual new cuisine. “Too much” was wronger every day. But now I see we celebrate the virtues of all eating; both big and flashy are OK. The slim and active chow down and eat arugula, too. Food technique can get you a PhD these days. If you know the regions in Tuscany and the 93 types of dim sum, and have the sharpest knife set in your neighborhood, you are hot, not evil. If you can eat 47 hot dogs in 12 minutes you are a hero. Can you really go to Hell for powering your heavenly body and even plumping it up a bit, all in the glory of hamburgers, Cinnabuns, and pate? Praise God and pass the condiments. That sounds like heaven to me.

Four more to go.

Poor Pride. How can it go against bumper stickers praising smart-ass kids, high school pride rallies, Pick your color ethnic pride, and those banner wavers who buy Chinese-made US flags. The opposite of pride is not humility; it is neurosis, self doubt and wussiness. Pride rules.

Lust, it’s an ex-sin for sure—it’s the gas that keeps our four-stroke engines going. It’s the sticky wet glue of our society. Why else would car-hound guys hang out with clothes-happy women? And vice versa. But what about unnatural lust. Some want it to move up to the next level of Sin. Unnatural is hard to find though. Monkeys and my Mom’s chihuahua do it with anyone furry they can find, monkeys even do it with their big banana trees. And humans figured out more ways than monkeys to be super-natural. This nature stuff is what sin was supposed to save us from, but now natural, green living gets you thru those pearly gates. And who knows what really goes on up there where there is no underwear beneath the white silky robes. Let’s root for more lust not less.

Next is Lazy. It’s bad, for sure. Just laying around, doing nothing, maybe sipping on a margarita. Bad. But wait, that sounds like my last vacation. Jimmy Buffet made a business singing about this to old retirees. Lazy is good if you work for it. Lazy is a just reward, not a sin. And I can see me with my wings tucked in, laying around beside the pool, upstairs with those angels. How can heaven be a sin?

Finally we get Wrath--that’s red hot anger to most people. I know I can’t take all the anger shows on TV. Fox News is surely a sin. And talk radio is worse. But then public TV is so polite you wish Cokie Roberts would slug Bill Moyers sometime in a WWR ring. So this one is a maybe on my new sin list.

One maybe out of seven. We really need an update. Please forward your new sin list to Rome. Let them come up with more top-dog new sins, like the FBI and Most Wanted TV shows do with their crooks. We need sins that deal with tight seats in airplanes, racism, genocide, droopy pants and boogie boarding, oops, I mean water-boarding. You all go right now and text that guy with the funny hat and who drives around in the Pope-mobile.

From Wikipedia, here they are: “. . . luxuria (extravagance, later lust), gula (gluttony), avaritia (greed), acedia (sloth), ira (wrath), invidia (envy), and superbia (pride). Each of the seven deadly sins has an opposite among the corresponding seven holy virtues . . . chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility.”