Skizworld

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One Sunday morning I woke up to a strange squawking flock sound that reminded me of something very specific.  It was the sound I heard while exploring the telegraph hill area of San Francisco and a green cloud of Parrots left a tree, circled the hill, and came back. The problem is I live in Bernal Heights on a different side of town.  Later that Sunday I was removing the last of my stuff from the basement of my previous place less than a block away and I saw parrots, at least 5, eating from a porch bird feeder three houses down. My first thought was these people somehow brought the wild parrots to our neighborhood.

The very next day I was taking a lunch break walk at Justin Herman Plaza downtown and I heard the same sound.  Over by the square tube fountain sculpture thing was a very tall leafy tree full of parrots.  Took a bit of scanning the tree to finally see them but judging from the other passers by looking up, I guessed this was unusual.

This is exactly the kind of thing you see. (Thank you dianaclark of youtube)

A little reading and I learned that these feral parrots are able to survive here because of introduced plants and birdfeeders and the like providing year-round food.  What I don’t know is if the parrots are actually new to these two locations (Bernal Hill and Justin Herman Plaza) or if they move around more depending on the season or if they’ve always been there and I just never noticed.  I think I would have been woken up by them in the past though.

And the Wild Speculation Begins

I wonder if they’ve recently had a birth explosion and in my mind I see this geometric expansion on a map and at some point they reach a critical mass and the mayor will be on the news talking about what to do about the “Parrot Problem.”  The parrots are finding food year round but what happens if their population exceeds the food supply? Suddenly I’m reminded of a film I saw where parrots were actually attacking sheep in Chile or Argentina at night. San Francisco emergency rooms at night will be full of people with flesh eating parrot bites and someone invents a ridiculous hat that keeps the parrots away and you can’t leave the house after dark without it.  Of course there will be a contingent of Bay Area pro Parrot activists that think we should communicate with them and give them the right to vote along with their dogs who already own some of the nicest beaches in the area.  Any thoughts of taking action to cull Parrot population is met with strong resistance from the Parrot Liberation Front as activist circle the parrot trees chanting “Free the Parrots! Parrots are People!”  And the parrots, being parrots, take up the chant too but they end up with a more truncated version of the chant that sounds like “Feed the Parrots People!”

Eventually the PLF finally fully understands the threat when  group of them late at night are coming home from a protest on city hall and hear “Feed The Parrots People!” repeated as the flesh eating feral parrots descend on them.  One of them gets off a 911 call and for a moment they think they’re going to be saved as they hear fire engines coming but in truth it’s just a flock of parrots that live in a tree next to the fire station that learned how to mimic the siren and now they’re joining the feeding frenzy.  People fear the night and if they hear someone screaming “help, parrot attack!” nobody dares help because the parrots have heard people shout “help! Parrot attack!” so many times that they have learned how to say that too.  Who will save us when Polly doesn’t want crackers anymore?

Back to Reality

But seriously I really do want to know if they are new to those locations or if I just didn’t notice them before so if anyone currently studying the San Francisco feral parrots reads this feel free to educate.

In 1987 in an episode of The Facts of Life called A “Star is Torn” George Clooney played boyfriend to the character Cinnamon who is played by 80s synth pop star Stacy Q.  You can see the two together at 5:06 on this clip.

In an episode of Golden Girls an invitation mix up leads a group of several Elvises to be invited to Sophia’s  wedding.  The “No Way” moment comes when you look and see that one of the Elvises is Pulp Fiction Director Quentin Tarantino.

This man singing is in fact, Willie Nelson. . .

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So if you want to tell a story that spans star systems, you have to either find a way to travel faster than light or tell a story that includes, years, decades or more just getting from point a to point b.  But what if you just want to communicate with another star system? If you want to send an email to your friend orbiting Alpha Centauri (the closest star to us not including the sun) you hit send and the message zips up to a satellite aimed at the star and the message gets attached to a radio signal and is off!  And 4 years later your friend gets the email and can send a response.  So it takes you about 8 years to get a question answered.  It’s another mind boggling testament to how big the universe is.  I always thought it was amazing that I could send an email to Japan from California instantly or even have a live text chat, not to mention skyping with video.  When it comes to the speed of light or even very close to that speed, everywhere on earth might as well be the same place.  One of my biggest wow moments in learning about astronomy was finding out that radio waves were actually light with really long oscillations, way way below the visible spectrum.  At interstellar distances, instantaneous communication goes out the window.  Sucks if you wanna do a story about interstellar pen pals but I’m sure a good writer can find a way to make a cool story with that.

You don’t even have to go to another star system to experience communication lag time.  Take an imaginary situation where someone is orbiting Venus and got a little too far away from the ship on a space walk and it will take them 6 minutes to get back to the ship but the thrusters to leave Venus will ignite in 3 minutes.  Back on Earth somebody has the instructions to override the thruster sequence and give you more time.  You send your radio signal and wait for the response.  What you have to know for your story is where Venus is in relation to Earth.  Lets help them out and say they went on the mission to arrive when Venus was the closest it could get to earth which is 38 million kilometers.  Will they get the info in time?

Well it turns out 38 million kilometers = 2.113 light minutes.  Earth received the message and there’s still time.  They upload and send the instructions and when the message is less than half way to Venus, doh!, the thrusters ignite and your space man is stranded orbiting Venus; Sad.  If you want your people to communicate real time from Venus to earth you need some new technology that doesn’t exist yet.  Like any sci-fi story, you don’t have to know how it works but you should mention that it’s there.  Take the same story and have the people at Venus’ furthest distance from Earth and the message takes 14.51 minutes to get there.  This time the message wouldn’t even get to Earth on time. I’m not really one to nit-pick for its nit picking sake but when I see people speaking real time over radio signals across interplanetary distances it is distracting. I sometimes wish I didn’t know some of this stuff when it gets in the way of the story like that.  It just becomes a better story when you include the lag and impresses upon us just how big these distances are.  If we were sending an emergency message from Jupiter to Earth the best time we could get would be about 35 minutes.

If you don’t want to do all the math someone created a very helpful conversion table at following website.

http://www.easysurf.cc/cnver15.htm#slk2x

They have several different conversions to choose from.  I had to remember that all of these distances from Earth are variable because any two planets are constantly moving, getting closer or farther away.

I can be difficult not to take all this amazing technology for granted.  I’ve only had an iphone for a few months but it’s already becoming one of those things you just expect to serve you and sometimes I forget to marvel at all this thing does.  So “unexpected use” is just that, I never thought I’d be using my iphone/smartphone for . . .

I’m in the grocery store with a list, actually a notepad list that I thumb typed while looking at the whiteboard at home.  I suppose I could have taken a picture of the list but then I couldn’t delete each item as I added it to the basket.  That’s not the unexpected use.

My girlfriend is very specific of what she needs for the cooking and since she’s a phenomenal cook I like to get her exactly what she needs even if I don’t know the difference.  The next item on my list is Mint and when I see the sign for it in the store it reads Mint/Dill 1.50 per bunch.  Below the sign are two different plants and I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know what Mint or Dill look like.  Yes, really!  I’m a suburban hot pocket and frozen burrito guy.  One roommate called me a box-etarian and someone else question: “what, like you can only make Macaroni and cheese?”  “Oh my no, Macaroni and cheese is far to complicated, there’s like a pot and water and maybe stirring.”  So yeah, there are plenty of plants I don’t know the names f0r and plenty of cooking ingredients that I wouldn’t recognize in their natural habitat.  I look around embarrassed about to ask the produce guy that already thinks I’m an idiot because I can’t tell the difference between Cilantro and Parsley.  If only I had the internet . . . oh but I do!  Back out of my grocery list on the notepad app, pull up Safari browser with the hand that’s not holding the basket and I type in “mint plant.”  There’s a wiki entry and I pull it up.  The picture of mint is a little small so I do that touch screen thumb and forefinger thing that makes it larger and hold it up next to the two plants.  Good, nobody saw me, now I know the difference between Mint and Dill.  Sad but hey if you have a tool, why not use it.  I’m waiting for the app that will take a picture of the plant and tell me what the plant is.

I remember seven years ago, maybe more, the news was Leno was planning to retire and Conan would take over the role. For me this was convenient because Leno was just a show I might watch while waiting for Conan to come on. So I’ve tipped my hat that I’m a Conan fan but the thing that really made me mad was Leno backing out of retirement. Whether or not you think he’s funny or interesting, most agree that Leno’s inability to step away from the spotlight is pathetic and classless. The guy flaunts his wealth with his collection classic vehicles and yet he seems to need more money because he’s not ready to retire. I wonder, is it the money, the need to be the center of attention, or both? I thought it was already a trashy move to have a show that is basically the same as the tonight show and stuff it before Conan at 10pm. I get the image if a child that HAS to shove their way to the front of the line and never willing to give that spot up and if someone else gets a turn at the front the child just starts a new line.

I suspect that maybe the economic downturn may have hurt Leno’s portfolio and he is unable to keep his current lifestyle if he retires. Otherwise, why? Does having people cheer for you every night entitle you to do whatever you want?

What Kanye West did to Taylor Swift is nothing compared to what this talentless childish pathetic hack who can’t even read a que card without stumbling over his tongue is doing.

Conan is more naturally funny. He has true wit and Charisma and he’s a professional. Plus he’s a risk taker in the best sense; he and his writers try things that are funny to them that may fly over the heads of some folks.

NBC this Leno at 11:35 business is a bad bad idea. Somebody grow a back bone and lose Leno. Jay Leno, it’s not too late for you to step down and see salvage some shred of respect in the industry. Everyone can make a mistake. What Kanye did was a drunken mess but every time Jay shows his face as a late night host on NBC before Conan’s show is a Kanye moment.