Did Schrödinger’s Cat Lick Lasers?

Full disclosure.  I’m a compulsive note taker.  Not just in class (though my class notes are so good that at the end of the semester I have them bound into a book to use as a reference volume), but I scribble little notes into a notebook at the oddest times.  Faculty meetings, funerals, weddings, dinner, and even in the middle of the night when I wake up from a strange dream.  (I’m at that age where I attend more funerals than weddings and should probably stop buying green bananas.). Many of those notes end up as blog posts sometime later.

I usually carry a Moleskin notebook and if I have a few minutes to spare—and I don’t have a book to read—I can happily sit, writing down nonsense, random thoughts, or something interesting that I just heard.  Occasionally, I discover that some of my notes (particularly those I write down in the middle of the night) are a little less than coherent.  I have a note from a couple of years ago, that I jotted down with several stars around it to indicate that it was important.  Unfortunately, I have never been able to remember just what was so important about the words “Laser Licker”.  Did I invent something in the middle of the night?  What did it do?  If it means something to you, go ahead and patent it—I hope it makes you rich.

Every year or so, I take the assorted writings from the current notebook and list them here.  I apologize.

Since at least the time when Andrew Carnegie was building libraries across the country, it was assumed that the reason for rampant stupidity was the lack of information.  Well, now that we all carry small portable devices that can access the accumulated knowledge of the entire world, what do we blame now?  Lite beer?

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had a pet cat named “Dixie”.

On his daily walk to school, the young Vincent van Gogh passed a grave where a tombstone bore his own name.  The grave was that of his own brother, who had died before the artist was born, and his parents gave their next child the same name.

Julia Child’s first successful recipe was for shark repellent.

Panama hats are made in Ecuador.  Camel hair brushes are made from squirrel fur.  The misnomer somehow originated from the brushes’ introduction into Europe back when the brushes were made from the fur of the Siberian Ibex.  If this makes any sense to you, perhaps you can explain why Boston Whalers are sturdy boats that were never made in Boston and never used in whaling? 

Evidently, Schrödinger never realized that everything outside of the box was equally unknowable, at least from the viewpoint of the cat.  If he had realized this, his entire world would have been immediately sucked down a Lovecraftian worm hole.

Fatherhood is the only time in a man’s life when he tells girls to put their clothes on.  

When cell phones first came out, every year they got smaller and more portable.  Now, every year they get bigger than the year before.  Why?

When President John F. Kennedy died, almost every American knew of the assassination within 40 minutes.  It took even less time for the majority of Americans to learn of the Challenger Disaster.  Yet somehow, there are people who believe that space aliens crashed in Roswell, New Mexico seven decades ago and and the news still hasn’t leaked out.

From 1953 to late 1954, the role of Senate Majority Leader switched back and forth from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party a total of 12 times due to the deaths of  senators.  Eventually, the Republican Party, despite having a majority, told the Democrats to just keep the position, as both parties were fairly non-partisan at the time.   Yes, these are the same names of the two major parties we have today.

If Professor Maleficent was any dumber, she’d have to be watered daily.  She teaches imaginary classes in which she pretends to teach while students pretend to learn.

When President Grant, as a young boy traveling to start his first term at West Point, rode on a train at the astonishing speed of 12 miles per hour, he wrote in his notebook that man had annihilated space and distance and that the perfection of rapid transit had been reached.

Would you care to guess the average age of the members of the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the British House of Lords?  Which do you think is the oldest?  Considering that membership in the House of Lords is both inherited and for life, you might guess that the Brits hold the honor of the oldest group of public servants.  Unfortunately, the honor falls to the US Supreme Court at 71 years.  The House of Lords and the Senate jockey for second place regularly, but currently, the average age of our Senators is slightly less at a spry 64 years, while the British Lords average 69.

There are only two types of people early in the morning.  I hate both of them.

Reintarnaton is coming back to life as a hillbilly.  

“Critics are people who watch a battle from a high place and then come down and shoot the survivors.”  --Ernest Hemingway

Adam Smith is the father of the study of Economics.  Buried in Edinburgh, if you want to pay your respects, admission to his grave is free.  Karl Marx, the philosopher whose publications supported socialism, is buried in London.  Admission to his gravesite will cost you $6.

Charlie Chaplin frequently gets credit for lampooning Hitler in the 1940 movie, The Great Dictator.  Usually forgotten however is that earlier that same year, the Three Stooges made You Nazty Spy.  The Stooges’ movie was the first Hollywood movie to ridicule Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Roses are red, roses are blue, depending on their speed, relative to you.

The Model 1860 Boarding Cutlass remained an official weapon of the US Navy until World War II.  Then, in the early days of the war when space on transport ships was at a premium, some idiot supply clerk shipped thousands of them to Australia.  After the cutlasses had sat in a warehouse for months, some enterprising soul had their hilts ground off and had their blades shortened and resharpened.  The resulting mini-cutlasses were then issued as jungle machetes.

After spying a model in Edison’s Laboratory, J. P. Morgan had Edison build the first electric toy train as a birthday present to the financier’s daughter.

Clementine Churchill, the long suffering wife of Winston Churchill, used to joke about an epitaph she wanted on her gravestone:  “Here lies a woman who was always tired, for she lived in world where too much was required.”  Though she outlived her husband by more than a decade, her gravestone lists only her name and the dates of her birth and death.

During the Napoleonic War, mess cooks aboard English sailing ships were required to whistle while fixing meals to prove to the men they were not eating the crew’s rations.

The US Navy maintains a forest of white oak trees in Indiana exclusively to provide the wood necessary to keep the USS Constitution in working condition.

The Institute of Unfinished Research has discovered that six out of ten American adults.

Both the Christian Bible and the Islamic Quran teach us to love one another.  The Indian Kama Sutra is more specific.

People who decry toxic masculinity should remember it is the reason their ancestors weren’t eaten by wolves.

Why exactly should universities be ‘safe places’?  Safe denotes complacency, calm, and rest.  Universities should be exciting places of discovery, where students confront challenging ideas, violently reject long held prejudices and wrestle with cherished opinions.  Walking into a library should elevate your blood pressure as much as an African safari.

That's enough.  My hope is that by revealing a little of the contents of my notebooks periodically, it will lessen their shock value at my commitment hearing.