1 Degree of Separation

I have not been particularly proactive on the blogging front lately--I blame my dissertation. It's not so much that I have been writing as that I have been thinking about the fact that there is a dissertation, and that it is sapping me of the will to live. But enough about that.

This entry sprang from the novel idea of experimenting with the "six degrees of separation" idea--you know, that theoretically, you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows Bin Laden. That is, our world is deeply interconnected. It also proves without a doubt that Hussein is tied to Al Qaeda--so there! (Of course, then so is Bush ...)

So, my idea was to pick an item on Amazon and use the "Explore Similar Items" function. My intent was to wade through the function until I found two completely dissimilar movies that were separated by a mere six degrees of separation. It was an exciting challenge, and with rampant giddiness, I typed in the phrase "Monty Python." With shaking fingers, I clicked on "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." With wanton tremblingness, I clicked on "explore similar items" and found ...

The movie Seven.

For those of you unfamiliar with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I recommend you get a life. However, for those of you unfamiliar with Seven, let's just say that it involves a serial killer. Now, let's just say that Holy Grail involves coconuts. I cannot really figure out what coconuts and serial killers have in common. Granted, according to the Amazon description, in Seven, "green Detective Mills scoffs at his efforts to get inside the mind of a killer," and in Holy Grail, bad guys scoff with outrageous French accents, but that also seems too tenuous a connection.

All in all, the experience left me feeling cheated and hollow inside. I expected only to have six searches to come up with a completely weird relation, and I have it at the first try. Where's the challenge? Quite frankly, some of the one degree of separations are downright disturbing--why is it that if you search for similar items to this standard Bible, one of the hits on the first page is The Satanic Bible? Yes, Satan does show up in both books, and they do both have the word "bible" in their titles, but still ...

Art Attack

They say that "the pen is mightier than the sword," and so too, the easel is mightier than the uzi. Art has the power to move us ... and perhaps also to kill us. According to an article in Ottawa Citizen, the Ottawa Heart Institute has had to remove several paintings hanging in their hypertension waiting room after they learned that patients were afraid of the paintings. As Jacques Guerette, the vice-president of communications at the heart institute, said, "The queens [in the paintings] had very intense eyes and they were triggering that feeling that they were watching you as you walked around and they were blowing all our hypertension results." Mother England is watching you, my son.

There were some other minor setbacks in the Heart Institute's attempt to use art to soothe the savage breast. As the Ottawa Citizen article remarks, "there was also the painting that looked like the gateway to heaven that was put, only briefly, at the entrance to the critical care unit -- a place where not every patient survives." I suppose the painting suggests that there are many different roads to heaven, and one of them is through the ICU.

Canadian Conspiracy Revisited

Thanks to my wife for calling my attention to the warning, issued just yesterday (Jan. 11), about "Canadian spy coins." Apparently, there are Canadian coins out there "with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside," designed to spy on the movements of key American leaders. As I mentioned in my last blog entry (six days before this scandal broke), I thought I had recently been the victim of a cruel Canadian plot to steal my valuable Lincoln pennies in exchange for pennies with a transvestited Lincoln on it.

Now, I learn the plot is far more sinister. At first, I had thought that being left with transvestite Lincoln pennies was merely a side effect of their ploy: in order to get my money at no cost to themselves, they had to exchange my money for something that is worthless to me here (i.e., I cannot sell a Canadian penny for an American penny). Now, I learn that the point was not to get my money so much as to leave me with a tiny radio frequency transmitter that I cannot get rid of! They gave me Canadian pennies because they believed there was no way I could get rid of them!

This raises a number of problems, of course, such as 1. what governmental secret do I apparently hold that the Canadians are trying to keep tabs on me? and 2. how do I get rid of these Canadian coins so that America's future is secure? After my wife read my last blog entry, she suggested that it was "immoral" for me to get rid of the Canadian coins by sneaking them into the bank as regular coins. And, to be honest, I was being hyperbolic in the last entry; it wasn't so much that I was trying to "sneak" the Canadian coins in as that they had gotten mixed in with the American coins, and I wasn't about to search through the whole pile to find them. However, in light of this article, I can say that my wife was wrong: not only is it quite "moral" for me to sneak in Canadian coins, but it is my patriotic duty. I cannot risk the precious governmental secrets my brain holds ever falling into the wrong hands--it is my duty to get rid of the coins as soon as possible, "by any means necessary," as Malcolm X would have said, if he were working for the Bush administration. Sure, you might suggest I try leaving the pennies in places such as the "trash can" or "an ancient Indian burial ground," but I believe that God wants me to be a good steward of the resources He has given me, especially if those resources include cutting-edge surveillance technology. To do anything less would be criminal.

Counterfeit Canadian Coins

I have been a coin-collector for a number of years, but sadly, some of my albums only went up to the year 1990 or so. Rather than getting new books or pages to put my coins in, I have simply horded post-1990 coins on the off chance that, someday, they will neatly divide themselves into chronological order. Even though this didn't actually happen, over Christmas, my parents got me pages to put cents/nickels/dimes/quarters/half dollars in! So, over the past couple of days, I have sorted through a rather daunting pile of coins and gotten my collection up to date.

But as they say, behind every happy rainbow, there are a bunch of people who are drowned and aren't named Noah. Likewise, behind every huge pile of happy coins, there is also a story deeply laden with tragedy and greed. That story is called, "Evil Victimizing Counterfeiters." As you might guess, in going through spare change in the hopes of finding a valuable coin, you have to look very closely for certain distinguishing features. For example, the difference between the aptly-named 1999 Wide "AM" Reverse Lincoln Cent and your run-of-the-mill 1999 Lincoln cent is that the former has the "AM" in America separated, the latter has them touching. (See here for "The Top 10 Most Valuable U.S. Coins found in Pocket Change.") Now while I was looking very closely at a number of my coins, I noticed a few ... anomalies. Apparently, a small quantity of recently struck Lincoln pennies depict our famous president as ... a woman! At first, I was surprised that these freakishly weird transvestite coins have been widely unobserved in the recent numismatic literature. Had I discovered an all-new irregular coin?

As you might have guessed, no, I did not find a penny that would be worth hundreds of dollars. I found a penny that is, in fact, worth less than a penny. Apparently, I fell victim to an elite group of trained counterfeitors operating in Canada, who call themselves, "The Canadian government." Their sole purpose is to create counterfeit coins that they can exchange for U.S. currency: these deviously cleverly designed coins are even more deceptive than the $200 dollar George Bush bill. Sure, we're all "pre-emptive strike on Iraq," but we ignoring the festering danger lurking on our own borders! Let's work on the northern "border fence," people.

The sad thing is, there is no real recourse for the U.S. victim of the Canadian government. For one thing, the Canadian government is a monolithic establishment, so there is no system of accountability: "Oh, it must have been somebody else who gave you that coin!" they say. "Oh, you should go bleep yourself," they say.

So, I did what anyone would do. I tried to pass the counterfeit money off to the bank. Naturally, I didn't just say, "Hey, can I exchange this penny for another penny?" That would be suspicious. Instead, I took my huge pile of money--including sneakily integrated counterfeit Canadian coins--and said, "Can you exchange this for me?"

Sadly, my greed undid me. You see, I did not merely try to exchange counterfeit Canadian pennies--I also tried to sneak in a Canadian quarter. Sure enough, after turning in the money, the bank teller called me to the desk minutes later to say that there was a problem with my deposit. "Here, we do not take Canadian money," she said, judgingly. Like they were cursed Aztec zinc or something. She was acting like it was my fault that the coins were Canadian! Admittedly, I had knowingly put them in there, but if I had had my way, the coins never would have been Canadian in the first place! I was the victim here! Sure, my deposits would be federally insured up to $100000--so long as they were not Canadian counterfeit!

Well, Mr. Snide Higher Moral Ground Equal Housing Lender--the joke is on you! Sure, you "caught" my Canadian quarter and made me stuck with it--but my Canadian pennies got past you! So whatcha gonna do now? Accept your looses--or simply victimize more innocent consumers, tricking them into taking counterfeit money that you will promptly refuse to accept back from them? Like me, you will be inexorably drawn to moral depravity. All because of Canada.