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HYPENOLOGY
by Steven CraigHYPENOLOGOLY
Seemingly, i'ts in the genes, this business of making up stories and if they are loud enough and stated often enough, try to make them a fact to everyone.
Hype.
Spin.
Overt Lie.
Must be in the genes.
While I am sure each of you have their own favorite, here are a few of mine that lead up to the reason I am even writing this.
The Earth IS the center of the universe. For millennia’s and millennia’s, religious leaders and philosophers and educators pushed this hype on just about everyone, no mater the culture or nation or tribe or race or sex or age, the earth is the center of the universe. Why, because I said so, and if you do not believe me, I will stone you to death.
Columbus discovered … the new world. A business man, Columbus desired to find a shorter way to China to make money. Period. When Columbus sailed on the ocean and hit a tiny island, he declared for the benefit of his financial backers (no less than the King and queen of Spain), that he had discovered… CHINA. And to his dying day, he continued to try and convince anyone that would listen that the Indians were Chinese.
The Unsinkable Titanic. Yes, a ship too big to sink. Sounds like banks too big to fail. In any event, the vessel was billed as the final word in sailing the ocean, and was so safe, it was unsinkable. No need for life boats or life boat drills or any important safety measures… just come onboard and enjoy the ride.
The internal combustion engine will save the city. Yes, once upon a time, actually again for millennia’s and millennia’s, a city’s streets were covered with horse excrement to the depth of many inches curb to curb, in every block and alley. The invention of the car and the internal combustion engine would save the city and bring on a new era of luxury and growth in a pollution free environment ….
Nuclear energy so cheap, we won’t need to meter it. Yes, I have books published by Life Magazine written by PhDs (before they got hooked on asteroids) on the subject that nuclear energy was going to be so inexpensive to produce and take so meager a measure of resources that it was going to cost more to install meters than it was worth. Nuclear power would be free to all and sundry worldwide, again ushering in a new age of pollution free growth and limitless possibilities as energy to do anything would be possible. Nuclear powered cars, airplanes, rocket ships, soda can dispensers, free power.
World War I, was the war to end all wars. Nations all around the world fought each other with this motto posted on every wall poster and newsprint and school book. Exhausting the worlds population, killing a great many of them, it did not so much end wars as invite new ones.
The League of Nations will manage the peaceful affairs among nations of the world, leading to centuries of peace. After a few years, and new wars, it faded from the stage.
The United Nations will unite the nations of the world, leading to centuries of peace. Heard that one before… and people still bought it.
UFOs. Unidentified Flying Objects. Space Aliens. Anal Probes. Seemed like so many were seeing them or being abducted or given a tour of the galaxy and returned unharmed. Went on for decades. Strange, how with the arrival of the ubiquitous digital camera in every cell phone, dashboard, security and traffic camera, the sightings and reporting just faded away. No UFOs, no space aliens, no mothership. Unlike any possible weapon, digital cameras seeming saved the earth from alien invasion. So, everyone started taking pics of what was there to see. Jet contrails way up there, and labeled them Chem-trails, the spraying of mind control drugs on the general public from Idaho to Alabama. But no UFOs, not anymore.
The Segway will change travel for mankind fundamentally. everyone will clamor for one until they get it. Yes, someone who was very well known as a superior inventor was going to give the world a new paradigm for foot travel , fast easy, safe, to speed you on your way and do so efficiently and with enviable character. Hundreds of thousands of the devices would be sold monthly and even the poor would be elevated to equals in travel. I think a few hundred were built, and mostly used by mall cops.
Everyone will have an airplane in their garage for commuting. Yes, post World War II (along with the coming of the UN), everyone (at least in America) would have a private plane in their garage to use in commuting to work quickly and without congestion. A dozen or so of the things were actually built, and folded up to fit in garages, took hours to fold and unfold, and checkout, taking off on the residential street was tricky with power lines everywhere over head and it was even dodgier landing 60,000 of the things an hour on the street in front of the office. Think of the humanity.
Pontiac Aztek. I loved Pontiac's growing up, had a GTO that ate Fords and Chevys at every stoplight. Where the hell did this Aztek thing, this vehicle of the future, this Sport Utility Vehicle come from? Did Pontiac loose their collective mind? Had to have been inspired by Mystery Science Theater 3000.
New Coke. This was going to change the way the world would taste soft drinks and power Coke Inc to be the paramount world soft drink leader. One taste of it and the world did change. To Pepsi. Coke had to backtrack and effectively say … hey, we were only kidding.
Windows Vista – Worst thing to happen to the PC computer in its history. Nearly destroyed a great corporation, and alienated millions of computer users to go to a better tasting fruit and idled hardware factories, software builders and good olde boys world wide .
Windows 8 – tried to finish the job.
Space shuttle will launch every 3 days. Yes, the Space Shuttle was going to launch into space with people and cargo just like a scheduled airline. After all, it was reusable and only cost 20M a ticket. It was being flown by people in organizations supported by the public that WANTED to believe in dylithium crystals and space travel to the far reaches of the universe. After all, it was so easy on TV and the movies wasn’t it. Funny what a little ice and foam can do to a delicate machine.
Ford Edsel. The car of the future, class, image, technology. Lead by a future war loosing secretary of state, the public was lead to believe ‘it was some plutonium powerd, pancake making wonder-car for the ages” What they got was a Mercury (low end high priced Ford) with a vagina instead of a radiator grill. Fade stage right. Maybe it was too much chrome too late.
The Planet is being destroyed by us humans. The guys that made a flop of nuclear energy now wanted people, to think that we as a species are destroying a whole planet, that we are causing tipping of every scientist's acknowledged feature of the planetary environment from pollution the of oceans to global warming melting all the ice… Gads. This is a planet, and is part of nature, and it has been a natural thing for the planet to heat up and cool off and do nothing off and on for billions and billions of years (sorry Carl). Its all nature. Only a few thousand years ago, but sill long before smoke stacks and automobiles and oil drilling and mass cow stockyards, the earth was covered by glaciers, very cold ice, in places 5,000 – 10,000 feet or more thick, and had been for a 100,000 years. To melt that ice, the earth had to warm up, as much as 14 average degrees warmer than it is now, which meant that nature brought on global warming, got rid of the glaciers that covered such places as New York Boston, Chicago, Seattle, all of England and Europe, melted all that damn ice, and thus made room for us to live there. And as a bonus, cooled things back off again to make it comfortable for us. Its natural. Quit worrying about what nature is going to do anyway, and try to just be able to tell hype from non-hype.
Sorry.
Almost there, just a few more steps…
Global defense against asteroids . Yes, the earth, created from and continuously bombarded by, rocks and stuff from space for billions and billions of years (sorry Carl), and guess what… the planet is still here. Maybe once in a while, something falls out of space randomly still. We are told to build a planetary defense system to save the earth or the species… just in case. Like the War to End All Wars, this is going to do the trick. Right. The universe is dynamic. While you can likely map all the cooperating asteroids and such and predict where they will in a day or two, reality is that the universe is just too dynamic. Some new rock or hunk of ice can come whizzing in from way the hell out there unseen and all the effort made useless to save anything. At best, such a system would work like a religion, keeping a bunch of otherwise redundant scientists and engineers employed to do…. a whole lot of expensive nothing. Worst, it might not be something solid to shoot at, but a mass of dark dust and gas. trying shooting that down.
Only YOU can prevent forest fires. One of the worst things to actually hit the environment that humans could ever conceive. Fires in forests are natural (like the ice coming and going), and nature uses it regardless of what the bear of the poster told you as a child… nature uses fire in forests and prairies as a part of the natural self cleaning and reproductive order. Fire and the earth and the species that live on the earth have evolved and been active with fire again for billions and billions of years (sorry Carl), and we, as humans are arrogant enough to think we should stop that? Its been lately observed that by preventing fires, all we really do is insure a steady buildup of incredible proportions of fuel for a fire when (not if) a fire does come. Meanwhile, how many species did we insure the extinction of because they could not reproduce or drop seeds that could only happen when there has been a fire. Gads. Your dream home in the forest did not burn down because of global warming or climate change caused by your neighbors. It burned down because you built it up against and within a unnatural pile of perfect fuel for a fire. Oh, remember that if you are lost in those same woods, set a signal fire….
OK, now we finally get to what I wanted to address… having set all the poetic metaphors in your mind of how hype is just the big lie that we WANT to believe.
The self-driving, driverless, computer controlled car. The latest of the super hypes, a few people with more money than they know what to do with, are promoting. My image is more like the riderless horse, just a stampede of damage coming down the trail. Its promoting all safety. Its going to be so safe, you will not need to insure it because it will never have an accident, never hit and kill anyone, because the computer, that darling of all conspiracies theories, has taken over. There are those that think it will allow must faster traffic, driving closer together (platooning), safe and secure. And just in case, a driver can take over.
Lets see, I am in my driverless car, and after the newness wears of, I get used to not paying any attention to what is going happening on the road because the computer is handling it. I have lost pretty much all situational awareness and trained responses when suddenly the klaxon horn sounds, the red lights swirl and flash, the idiot light on the dash board relates that the computer has given up and surrendered control to you, so you must take oven in 3 milliseconds or die!… Right. I can see that happening right now. 300,000 vehicles an hour out on the 12 lane interstate and one (only one?) has a failure.
Some developers do as well. They now offer the future and all that safety with that computer that might fail, by completely removing the steering wheel, break and gas pedals, and other driver controls. They now won’t be needed as the car will be tooooo safe to crash. (Are they naming the first model built to carry your family The Titanic?).
You are bleeding to death, and you are in your driverless car proceeding down the farm road at the 25mph speed limit to the hospital miles away, unable to go any faster, arriving at the ER drive … dead?
Will your 3 year old with a smart phone summon up such a vehicle and just randomly drive off someplace, say, Mexico?
Will the government subsidize the poor to step up to these costly devices?
Will the legally blind be able to own one (remember, some models may require the owner to take over driving in event of a failure).
How does a driverless car battle it out for a parking space at the mall on Christmas Eve?
There are what... 7 or 8 trillion dollars worth of automobiles out there. That order of financial invest is coming out of what pocket? Half a billion of these things an be built just over night? What the hell do you do with the half a billion obsolete vehicles that have suddenly become valueless?
And it is likely that the guys that wanted to build that asteroid defense will get a job building these things instead, so you will have an electric driverless car. Drive an hour or two, and spend the rest of the day paying roaming electric recharge fees at some remote recharge station. Worst, the electric infrastructure is known to need trillions of dollars invested in upgrade and additional capacity to provide the current to re-change half a billion electric cars and all their computers and sensors. When is this going to happen, the day before or the day after you get one of these new vehicles?
Get a driverless car on demand – meaning you do not own it, but have it for hire. Americans love to go shopping, and oddly they buy things. Often, a lot of things. Where do you keep them as you hop from stop to stop, store to store, mall to mall? Does yet a new industry spring up next to the remote power recharge stations with hourly storage binds? Going to do all this in the rain and snow and 120 degree Las Vegas heat? Or do you now submit to do all shopping online just so that the vehicle in your life can be driverless.
Then you get into one of these driverless, on demand cars, you know, for a service like a cab. Who is that that is also getting in with you... thief, rapist, drug dealer, runaway kid?
I could go on, but life is, at least for me, is too short to be even partly responsive to the driverless car hype.
My dearly loved readers, it is an immutable universal law (its called entropy) that you do not get something for nothing, that you never get more out of something that you put into it, or even equal what the impact is of making it. If things really are bad now, it will only get worst with driverless cars.
Hypenologoly will never change that universal law, but will continue to drive (get it?) human nature and fantasy and beliefs over facts and truths, only to reveal the harsh and often deadly result when it is all too late.
Say NO to drugs, and to hype, and you can start today with the driverless car.
And let a few more forests burn naturally before the really big one gets you.
05/29/2014 Author's Note: Hypenology - Hey, I coined a word...
Posted on 05/29/2014
Copyright © 2024 Steven Craig
| Member Comments on this Poem |
| Posted by Chris Sorrenti on 05/30/14 at 07:58 PM A lot to chew on here, Steven, but very well delivered, and so true. New word, Hypenology, quite appropriate for the subject. I'm currently using Windows Vista, have been for the past 5 years, and never been totally satisfied with it. I found Windows XP even more disrupted. When it became available, I had spent a small fortune in video games, none of which worked anymore. Not to mention the drivers for various hardware I had hooked up to my PC. All of which needed patches or new software to make them work again. |
| Posted by Chris Sorrenti on 05/30/14 at 07:59 PM Oops...disrupted should have been disruptive. |
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