Jim Archives

March 24, 2008

Jim: All Nice and Nietzsche

Sitting by the stairs, Rancher Sterling watched a cowhand slump away from the hiring table and out through the saloon’s door. He summoned his foreman over.

“Yessir?” asked the foreman.

“I told you we needed every hand we could get for the branding. Why did you turn that man away?”

“But that’s Zeb Hoskin’s boy,” the foreman explained. “We can’t hire him.”

“Why not?”

“Darn kid spends every off minute reading from college books. Mathematics, sociology, things like that. But mostly philosophy.”

Sterling scowled. “Reckon you’re right,” he said. “We can’t hire a man who puts Descartes before the horse.”

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April 14, 2008

Jim: Season Ticket

Our primitive devices strained to hear the music that we could not.

The underlying rhythm is soft: nothing more than a whispering hiss of random microwaves reverberating across the cosmos.

With each technological advance, we heard marvelous new sections of the celestial orchestra. Every star, from massive red giant to wildly spinning pulsar, throbbed its own deep beat. Cold matter, magnetic fields, dark matter, and dark energy combined into the eternal symphony.

Whole societies formed to compile, record, and catalog the glorious anthems of creation and existence.

But the technologies were misused; malignantly twisted and perverted.

And the music stopped.

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