Day 3786

The big event of the day was watching the Blue Angels do their flyover of Dallas. We walked Dawn a little later this morning, so we would be in a good position to see the planes around 11 AM. It was all over pretty quickly. We did see the Blue Angles, but they weren't very close. If you were downtown you probably got a good view, but our vantage point in the park was a little too far away. I've seen Southwest Airlines planes on final approach that were more exciting. Oh, well. It was a nice day and it was still something to do.

Dawn seemed tired on her walk because it was a lot warmer at 11 AM. We're going to have to continue walking very early. Like all of our Dalmatians, Dawn really doesn't like the heat. She will drink water from a bottle though, which is something that Dot and Dash never learned to do. We'll go back to walking early again tomorrow morning. It just seems to work better.

I discovered recently that one of the astronomers I met at McDonald Observatory has an amazing Instagram account. I guess I knew he was into astrophotography, but I never realized his images were so amazingly beautiful. I wrote the guy to complement him on his photography skills and also mentioned that my article about observing with him at one of the large telescopes was going to be published in Sky and Telescope. We made plans to get together again at the observatory when life returns to normal. Lord knows when that will be though. He didn't think that the observatory would reopen to the public until later in the Fall at the earliest.

I'm disappointed that the response to the pandemic has become almost completely political. That didn't take long. Each side has staked out their positions and both seem to have valid points. Unfortunately, there seems little room for compromise. The longer this drags out, the more entrenched each side becomes. It seems almost impossible to find out what is really going on. There are powerful forces at work here. I don't care what you believe. You are being manipulated. We should be united like our parents and grandparents were during World War II. It's not happening though. When this is over, we will be more divided than we were before.

I grew up during the cold war. Our adversary was the Russians and our anger as a country was directed outward. Almost everything we did, including landing on the moon in 1969, was focused on beating, humiliating, or bankrupting the Russians. Without the cold war, we probably wouldn't have even gone to the moon.

Perhaps it was for the best that we directed our anger outwards in those days. We are an angry people. We always have been. Today we have directed this anger inward and it is destroying a great country. We are literally cannibalizing everything our parents worked so hard to create. The Russians and especially the Chinese must be laughing at us now. If our self-destructive behavior continues, they will achieve the world domination they want without having to lift a finger. If you like conspiracy theories, it is pretty plausible to believe that the Chinese unleashed this virus on purpose, knowing full well what would happen next.

I'm still waiting on a FedEx package. I don't think it is going to come today. In the grand scheme of things this isn't a big deal. Waiting for the package will give me something to do tomorrow.

Patches is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 1612

Buzz Aldrin couldn't have said it better. "You promised me Mars colonies. Instead, I got Facebook." When I saw this quote today, it summed up the last several decades for me. There are no large dreams that capture the imagination of entire countries anymore. Instead, we have become a fractured, totally divided world that agrees on nothing and can't get behind anything of consequence. When I was growing up, the best and the brightest went to work in places like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. Today they work for Google. I was an Oak Ridge kid myself for a while, since my Dad was doing something secret at one of the labs. My young friends and I were science nerds before the term was even invented. We were convinced that we'd be traveling among the stars by now. None of us ever dreamed we'd be downloading funny cat pictures instead.

Not only has the world become trivial, I have become trivial as well. When I was a young kid in Oak Ridge, I thought I'd be an astronomer when I grew up. I actually ended up becoming an architect. Then in my mid 20's I had an epiphany. I realized that I was a fairly shallow person and became an ad man instead. I thrived in advertising, largely because my shallow nature fit me like a glove. I thought having a few people like me made the world a more interesting place. It probably did. The entire equation changed when everyone decided to get a degree in marketing. You don't really need that many people like me. There is a reason why big companies hire most of their advanced technical talent from India and China. American college grads no longer want to split the atom and go to the moon. They'd rather have their own reality show.

I don't know where we go from here, but I do know that people like John Kennedy and Buzz Aldrin don't resonate with today's young people like they did with me. Going to the moon in ten years from a standing start was a ridiculously ambitious goal and we did it. These days it would take ten years just to agree on what we wanted to do.

I certainly didn't do much today. I went to my breakfast restaurant a day early, because I'm going to be busy tomorrow. The first thing I noticed was that the restaurant, which is typically packed on Friday mornings, was virtually empty. Could this mean that we already have a de facto four day work week? All my clients seem to have flex-time employees these days and I know quite a few people who don't work on Friday already. What's going to happen when the robots get really good?

Maybe some of my clients have started taking Thursday off as well. It was certainly slow today. The dogs got two nice walks, including one in the morning where the temperature was brisk and cool. Dot and Dash love the cooler weather. Later in the day, I filled the car with gas, went to the bank, and paid a quick visit to a Fry's electronics store in the neighborhood. The store was almost as empty as the restaurant was this morning. Sign of the times, I guess.

Sadie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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