Repair Buttons, Retain Your Masculinity

I’ve noticed that my pant buttons fall off a lot. They never used to. Either my pants are shrinking or the quality of button thread is not what it used to be. I guess I’ll go with the latter. Whatever the cause, it became apparent that sewing the buttons back on was the only way to salvage an otherwise perfect pair of pants. Now that I don’t live in my mom’s basement and my wife doesn’t do such things, I would sit on the couch with needle and thread and fix the button. On one such occasion, a guy friend called and asked what I was up to. Fearing ridicule, I thought of other things I could say that sounded a bit more “manly”. Cleaning my gun? Watching lesbian porn? Drinking shots of whiskey? I don’t own a gun and haven’t had whiskey in years and he knew it.

Somehow, it slipped out, “I’m sewing a button onto my pants.”
“Ah, hahahaha. What’s your wife doing? Changing your oil?”
I was silent. He continued, “You going to hem her skirts while your at it?”

After a couple of minutes of his laughing at me, I decided to go on a quest to find the perfect way to fix buttons without sewing them on. It’s not that I didn’t want to be made fun of, because being the short guy in elementary school had made me impervious to ridicule. I just wanted to have the same feeling fixing buttons that I did when I was, for instance, changing hardware inside of my computer, fixing a broken door, rotating my tires...

That’s when it hit me. I went to the fabric store and bought dungaree (jean) buttons. They were 6 for $2, so I bought $20 worth to avoid having to go back to the fabric store. Dungaree buttons are 2 pieces; a male and a female part. To “install” them on your pants, all you do is place either piece on opposite sides of your pants and tap them together.

I grabbed an old brick from the backyard and wrapped it in gray duct tape. This serves as the base of your button making machine. Using a claw hammer, you just pound them together. If the pants are thicker and difficult to punch through, placing a piece of wood on top of the brick using a very small drill-bit to cut through the pants will help. Or, you can use a thin nail to make a pilot hole. Once you’ve got your buttons installed, have a beer. Perferrbly something hoppy.

Overgeneralizations

I like to over think things about society based on what I see and what I believe they think, based solely on what popular culture transforms into. I think that this blog should move more into my sociological, theological, and philosophical beliefs. Not because I want you to believe them (because you already do), but because I think that deep down we are unwilling to accept our true nature and believe in things that have slowly become either too hard to discuss or too hard to believe.

A few months ago I was watching a marathon of "Ancient Aliens" on the History Channel and it made me really start thinking. The show was a series of ideas about how aliens have been visiting the Earth for centuries and there is evidence that ancient cultures interacted with them. I got to thinking that if all of these separate cultures can all develop a ideal of "gods" that there must be something to what they might have believed. All of them believed that these gods were from somewhere beyond where we exist and helped them develop their society. They praised these gods and feared them. The show speculated that the gods were aliens.

Now, with the intelligent design theory and the evolution theory, you have two thoughts on the creation of man that to both sides sounds absurd. What if both are true?

The universe is 20 billion years old and the earth is only young in comparison. If the earth is 4 billion years old and life has only existed here for a small fraction of the time, then if the planets that formed before us and had more time to develop, and perhaps create life, then that life would be much older than ours. Obviously. Could they be more developed?

Human life has been around on earth for a long time. A humanish skeleton was found that was about 3 million years old. Over the course of 3 million years, it evolved into man. That is if you believe evolution theory. But it is a fact that the skeleton existed at that time. In between that time and the time when humanity started living in cities and electing officials and building pyramids, it seems that there was not a lot of progress. But, let's look at the time between when the United States declared it's independence and today. Only 200 plus years and humanity has developed electricity, the automobile, air travel, and then space travel. We have been proving Moore's Law and improving our technology at a rapid pace.

If you look at the reverse of Moore's Law, which I'll call Bundle's Law, then you see that doubling up the advancement started a long time ago when the first society realized they needed to eat. The first creature to walk earth slowly developed a way to make getting food easier. They learned to hunt. They invented the club, then the spear. They needed to cook the food, so they developed ways to use fire. They needed to move the food so they developed the wheel... The slow course of their development seems small compared to our accomplishments, but to them it was huge.

I think that it is almost impossible to believe that there is no chance that life had developed before we started. If there was a chance that life began somewhere else long before us, then they are much more advanced than we are. Let's just suppose that they are only 2000 years older. That would be huge if you look at where we will be in 2000 years. But if you look back 8000 years and say alien life started elsewhere 8000 years before that, they'd be where we are today. It is likely that they are a good million years older than we are, in which case they would be far more advanced. Advanced enough to be able to travel into space.

So let's say that they decide to leave their planet for what ever reason and come across a planet with primitive life. My theory is that they aided in the development of our species and got us started on becoming civilized. The people looked to these aliens as gods and loved them, did everything they asked. Then, when we were able to progress without their help, they left for bigger and better things. Or they stayed and the governments of the world have always been working with them.

I think that is just as reasonable a belief as is the stories of the bible. And that could just be a tale of alien creation in itself.

Your mind is being read

For many years the government has been monitoring radio waves of their adversaries. Recently, they have figured out how to monitor your mind.

Using your brainwaves as if they were low frequency radio waves, they can read your mind. The biggest challenge was decrypting the waves. Using a base key, they can. This is accomplished by sending a control pattern to your mind then registering it. Using television, what you hear is used as the decryption key.

Once they have they key, they use cell phone like handhelds to record and process the info.