A Hairy Situation

I know this is TMI, but I don't care. Also, I don't know why I'm telling you this.

So, I have long, curly blonde hair. The one thing about hair like this is that, a) it's beautiful and b) it gets everything. And it's damn noticeable when it does. You can always tell when a fallen hair is mine.

Now, because I have the ability to groom myself, most of the hair comes out in the shower when I brush it. During the day whatever does fall out gets stuck in the curls and no problem, comes out the next day. But every now and then, some escapes these fates and falls onto things. Namely, one of those things is my desk chair at work.

I work sitting on one of those average, black, fabric office roller-chairs. The back of my roller chair looks like I sewed some grain in there and started growing hair just in case I went bald at any time. What I'm saying is there's a lot of hair on there - because I'm the only one that uses the chair.

I've been reading a lot of Harry Dresden novels lately (written by Jim Butcher) and if you haven't read them you should. This got me thinking about the hair on my chair. The reason is, if anyone gets your hair (or blood or blood or etc.) they can perform magic on you and there's very little you can do about it.

Looking at my chair, anyone could just take some and I could be dead with an exploded large intestine tomorrow because I was careless (and kind of gross). So, I thought, Dresden would never leave hair on his chair - and neither should I!

So I began cleaning.

And, Oh. My Lord.

The amount of hair I pulled off of there was astonishing. Like a handful. A clump. I can only describe it as a "in his dying throes he managed to get a grip and tear out a chunk of his murderer's hair but because he was interrupted the killer didn't have time to pick it up before running away" amount of hair. Detectives would look at the clump of hair in the vice-like grip of my rigor-mortised hand and say, before putting on their sunglasses, "Looks like our killer got into," sunglasses, "a hairy situation".

YYYEEEEAAAAAHHH!  *The Who plays*

Mahalo.

P.S. I'm sorry.

It Ain't What it Used to Be: How Science Shows Us The Future Isn't What it Once Was

Science, the frontier for the human race to discover all that is mysterious and hidden within our vast and expanding universe. It has given us space travel, modern medicine, the basic understanding of our entire world and, maybe, eventually, teleportation and space colonies. It is the single most important thing we have in our culture at the moment and it will bring us into the mysteries of the future with a curious glint in its eyes and a sturdy, graceful stride that inspires confidence in us all. 

It also completely ruined the sci-fi future I, and all those from my generation, had envisioned for our world. It did it with the grace and tact of telling a child that rainbows aren't, in fact, magic bridges to leprechaun's gold.

"Look, a rainbow, it's magic!" The child would say.

"No," science says. "Silly child, it's merely light reflecting off the water particles in the air and refracting."

The child cries. Science smiles with a job well done.

Twenty years ago, the 2000s seemed like a futuristic and somewhat terrifying place, with the Terminator films telling us the apocalypse was nigh and films like Escape from L.A. and Johnny Mnemonic showed us that we will likely be living in a slightly camp, neon-lit, junk-filled, post-apocalyptic insane asylum.

Instead, we have Priuses, iPads and wars that are pretty much completely conventional. Sure, the weapons are more advanced, but the basic premises are all the same; people go out to shoot other people on foot, from cars, from planes or from boats - but boats are going out of style.

In four years, we will be in 2015, the future date set by Back to the Future Part II where the future world has large, 3D-movie-like advertising, hover-boards and flying cars, clothes that speak and self-dry and sexy, lady cops in tight, spandex body suits. I don't know if I'm the only one, but I don't think that that is going to happen.

Now, I know Terrafugia just released its first flying car to begin sales last year after being officially cleared as street and sky safe, and you can have one for the price of a small studio apartment.

However, despite all that excitement, there is still logic there to take down the fun, "Flying cars are a terrible idea," Dr. Daniel H. Wilson more or less tells you in his book, Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived. "Instead of drunk drivers, we'd have drunk flyers crashing through your roof."

Great. There goes that idea. That, by the way, is only one of the reasons why jetpacks will never happen. The other, of course, being that we can't fit enough fuel into the jetpack for it to fly for more than thirty seconds, and without burning our feet off. So, there's that.

Two things we do now have from the future we always wanted are lasers and data tablets. The army is, in fact, working on laser weapons that are considered non-lethal weapons under their current development. They fire superheated beams at people that burn incredibly, making people run away; it's mostly to disperse rioting crowds. So, while cool, it is not Star Wars, solid-colour lasers that make fun sci-fi noises. 

And last, but not least, we are brought to data tablets. If you've seen any science fiction film in, say, the past thirty years - or more likely, even more - you've seen a data tablet. Often a translucent glass rectangle that is a touch screen and can access any piece of information that the main characters require. For as many years as they've been fiction, people have wanted to have them. Information at your fingertips all the time? Excellent! A touch screen? Super cool! Translucent? Alright, not so much, but still! And we have them - if you are any one of the people who owns an iPad or other tablet or simply any kind of smart phone made nowadays (iPhone, HTC, Google, to name but a few). That's right, we have that piece of sci-fi technology right here, right now - and to be honest, we had no idea what to do with the tablet tech once we got it. Sci-fi movies didn't take into consideration that laptops and other personal computers - or that ordinary cell phones with an internet connection - would be so common amongst people.

So, there's that.

We do not have Fifth Element pills-that-turns-into-roast-chicken-as-soon-as-it's-in-the-microwave. We don't have colonies on the moon. Where is my Skynet? Sure, where we're at is great and we really are living the future, though we don't really realize it, but I feel like our future isn't going to be the cool, flashy place we thought it would be.

Mahalo.

Akos Pakos

Hello literate masses! Good to see you again. Recently, I've been reading a very interesting book that I hope will interest you all. Have you ever wondered where the term "Hocus Pocus" and "Abra Kadabra" came from? Have you ever been curious as to why salt, water and blood are so important in culture, and in magic? Have the spirits and amulets ever interested you? What about the origin of the names of angels and the gods? Then this is the book for you!

Joshua Trachtenberg's "Jewish Magic and Superstition" (1935) is a great overall introduction to all the facets of Jewish magic in the medieval era until now. It covers amulets to incantations, spirits to divination, names to exorcisms. Albeit, the chapter on names is a little dry, and some of the chapters can be too wordy, but generally this is a very accessible, academic book on the topic of early Jewish, Western European and some Christian magics and superstitions and the real reasons behind them, and the reasons why they are or aren't in practice now.

It's sixteen chapters are an everything you want to know guide to these topics. That being said, it is true that, as a result of it being written so early in the 20th Century it is, perhaps, of the academic language persuasion, but it is still a very accessible book. Though, fair warning, there are some paragraphs and quotes entirely in other languages (German, Italian, Latin, etc.) which remain untranslated by the author, as the expectation was that the readership knew these languages, though I believe that contemporary publishings of this book do give translations of these passages in the notes.

Hope you enjoy it. Mahalo.