The Think Tank

Joel sent me an interesting link today regarding the origins of April Fool’s Day, which set me off on a little internet search for Tid Bits about the day to celebrate jokes and hoaxes.

The exact origins of April Fools Day is not completely clear, although the most commonly accepted idea is that the tradition started in the 1500’s when the Gregorian calender was adopted.  Prior to that, on the Julian Calendar, the New Year started on March 25 (which makes perfect sense to me since that is my birthday) but, since March 25 is in the middle of Holy Week the actual celebration of the new year was held on April 1st.

Celebrating the new year at roughly the same time as the Spring Equinox makes perfect sense: everything is starting anew after a long, hard winter.  The weather is warming, the trees and flowers are blooming, and the rabbits are… well, they are doing what rabbits do.  For those reasons and many others, the new Gregorian date was met with resistance by many people and as such they continued to celebrate the New Year on April 1st.  This seemed very foolish for those who did get (and accept) the memo, and those enlightened folks gave the foolish oldschooler’s the lasting moniker of April Fools.

Since that time traditions have evolved somewhat from pure admonishment to general bafoonery and joke making.  Many individuals have fallen prey to these endeavors over the years, but in my reading today I found out about several  large-scale jokes which have been pulled on an unsuspecting populace.

Here are some of my favorites:

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Yesterday Shannon and I were walking through Borders wasting time until her appointment at the Apple Store (iPod versus washing machine, not pretty), and I happened across this book, Fingerprints of the Gods, by Graham Hancock.  The description sounded interesting so I downloaded it to my Kindle when I got home.

I’m about 1/3 of the way through it and I am truly enjoying this book.  In fact, basically all I’ve done today is read it… well, read it and look up references to things that I found in the book.

Hancock tells the tale of his journey across the globe to investigate some the worlds most ancient archeological sites gathering clues that lead him to a single belief: that somewhere far back in the deepest reaches of antiquity, much farther back in time than conventional wisdom accepts,  a technologically advanced and intellectually enlightened human civilization existed.  This civilization left its fingerprints on humankind in ways small and large, many of which exist to this very day.

If you are a fan of conventional thinking, this book is probably not for you.  If, however, you are open to logical but unpopular ideas, enjoyed Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos, or simply believe that if you find a similar enough story from a wide array of sources there has to be a common truth in there somewhere, you will definitely enjoy this book.

I certainly am.

I got a hell of a bargain last night.  I’ve been looking for replacement seats for my 1990 300ZX since I bought the car in 2002, but I haven’t found any that were in better condition than mine for less than $600, and that was just for leather alone.  I would have had to do all the installation myself.  The only other set of tan seats that I’ve found in good condition were on eBay and sold for about $450 dollars, but I was outbid by one dollar with 1/4 of a second remaining.  That was in 2003.

Last night these seats came up on Craigslist for $100 for the pair! Needless to say, I snatched them up.  As you can see, there are some fine cracks in the leather and a little scuffing here and there (and that black mark, which I think I can remove), but they are in remarkably good shape for 20 year old seats and they are a tremendous improvement over my existing seats.  Especially for $100 bucks.  Making it even sweeter, one of the tilt controls on my current driver seat is broken, and the best price I’ve been able to find to replace it is $70 dollars.  The new seat comes with a working control unit, making this deal that much better.

You can probably tell that I’m a little excited.  I’m hoping to get these bad boys installed this weekend.

** Note: I made several posts about our trip to Florida while it was happening, but those were mostly submitted via my phone and only told a part of the story.  This is meant to provide you with the full story, including some details and funny bits which never made it into the previous posts.  I hope you enjoy it…  **

Joel and I have always wanted to see a Space Shuttle launch.  A couple years ago when NASA announced they would be retiring the Shuttle program, we decided that we were going to go see one of them.  As the remaining missions dwindled, we had yet to follow through on our dream.  But that all changed in the middle of January.

With a mere 5 launches left on the schedule we realized that it was now or never.  We heard from several people that if you could only see one launch in your life it should be a night launch, and the February 9th launch for mission STS-130 was the last night launch on the schedule, so that was our target.

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It was chilly and wet in the morning

Joel and I took part in the Worst Day of the Year Ride, the second largest organized ride in Oregon.  It is so named because statistically speaking the middle of February is when the worst day of the year occurs, but despite that mathematical fact, the previous 8 rides have all taken place under blue skies with temps in the 50’s.

This was my first year taking part in the ride, and of course, it is also the first year that it has rained.  Go figure.  Fortunately it didn’t rain terribly hard or for very long, probably only the first hour or so, then it dried out.  By mid-afternoon the sun even made a cameo appearance.

I left my house around 7:30 and rode over to Joel’s house, where we met up and rode down by the Rose Garden, along the East Side Esplinade and then to the start line .  Our registration also paid for food and drinks at all of the many rest stops, including doughnuts and coffee/tea/cocoa here at the start line.

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