CQ CQ CQ de KI4GTH CQ CQ CQ K
Over and over with my
old Bencher iambic paddles, I kept calling CQ only to hear the hiss of
interstellar noise and distant lightning crashes. Dahdidahdit
dahdahdidah: CQ CQ CQ on 40 and 20 and 18 meters. . . and never a response. Not a blip on the panadapter, not a trace on the waterfall.
I'm the last man on Earth, or at least the last one with a radio.
Slowly
I notice that the noise sounds a lot like wind in the palm trees and
mangroves and the beeping of the timer on the coffee pot down in the
kitchen where my wife is making breakfast has woken me up.
The
History Channel has been running apocalyptic nonsense for the last 48
hours non stop. Mayans, Hopi, John of Patmos and Nostradumbass. End
times without end. Now maybe it'll stop and they'll have to dredge up
more old legends and manuscripts and reports of signs and portents like
they've been swooning over with every forest fire, earthquake, food
shortage flood and epidemic -- like the ones that have been occurring
since a billion years before anyone or any thing took notice.
Of course it's only 66 outside and it's been very rainy for December. . . (queue the doomsday music please. . .)
There is a wealth of interesting history that we might expect the History Channel to present.
ReplyDeleteFrom the tripe they have been having, one suspects they are appealing to that huge American audience..the 'redneck' tv crowd.
People love to be scared and they will listen to whomever will provide that exiting fear and to anyone who makes them feel they have secret knowledge.
ReplyDeleteAnd history? That's mostly interesting to people trying to sell something or trying to prop up or dignify some idea they can make a buck out of.
Well, the sun's going to burn out in six or seven billion years, so I guess it's doomsday long before that for humanity, which may by then have moved on to different digs by then.
ReplyDeleteThen there's the personal doomsday -- you know, the one that Ernest Becker says we put so much energy into denying. I suspect that people who get caught up in all this end-of-the-world hysteria are engaging in just such denial, paradoxical as that may seem: the prospect of death then takes on a trans-subjective dimension, lending it meaning it might not otherwise have.
We dinos are too simple to buy into that sort of thing -- death is a sharp tooth or a spiked tail or a slashing talon. That is all.