In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 75-78

Our traffic count was back down yesterday. It was just a one-day spike. We must find another way to promote this blog. Out of disappointment, and because we are almost caught up with Jeff's Facebook postings, I am allotting only four stanzas today:

So, will the founders have an easy go?
Not if someone can change the comet’s course.
The founders are involved, so they must know
‘twill take a lot of raw atomic force.

The nation-states can scrape up some of that,
but to be sure, they’ll want to send it all,
and even though each power’s thought a rat
by others in the club, they make the call.

Accordingly, a plan is drawn in haste
to gather all the nukes from ’round the globe.
Some weather satellites will be displaced.
As well, a would-be astronomic probe.

I guess the founders aren’t so off-the-hook.
It’s possible that J-1 will be beat.
If they’re to clinch the deal, it starts to look
like they are back to practicing deceit.

©2010 Louis A. Merrimac

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 67-74

My, we had an upsurge in activity here yesterday. Jeff, did you tell people we have lurid pictures on this blog? Or was it the advertisement you put on the employee bulletin board? Whatever the cause, I shall celebrate by increasing the number of stanzas in today's posting:

Now, don’t infer a lack of self-control.
They know the cost and what they can afford.
Like you and me, they calculate the toll.
Like us, they measure risk and seek reward.

For all incentive systems to perform,
we need something to want or to eschew.
With critters, pain and pleasure are the norm.
As humans, we have moral values, too.

When one of these yet ill-defined things grows
to where some feel they lack the strength to opt,
we still blame those who hold it, for they chose
to let it happen, and they could have stopped.

But stop they not, and after some delay,
a few of them drop hesitating hints.
Some others listen; some express dismay.
They all come to, but guess what happens since.

Before they get a chance to try their hand
at tricking politicians to the brink,
a comet is discovered that will land
on Earth. We’re dying sooner than we think!

The founders are ecstatic when they hear.
They hadn’t really planned the whole thing through,
and this way, they’ve no punishment to fear.
The comet’s dust cloud will be cleaner, too.

The comet won’t receive its spotter’s name.
Astronomers have simplified that job,
though some suspect it’s merely out of shame
at having one that sounds so like ‘Hail, "Bob"!’

A letter and a numeral have we
to catalogue this ball of rock and ice.
The ‘J’ is for some mythic deity;
the ‘1’ must be an ordinal device.

©2010 Louis A. Merrimac

Hail, "Bob": No doubt nearly all Subgenii, when they first heard the name 'Hale-Bopp', thought a comet had been named after J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, the High Epopt of their church. They usually refer to him by his first name with the quote marks.
J-1: Another Subgenius reference.

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 63-66

Yesterday I began by questioning whether the links to this blog are working. I intended that to appear as the preview in the link from Facebook, but the mysterious workings of the internet failed to cooperate. Today I am attempting something similar.

If you arrived here by way of one of Jeff's links, please start by reading the preceding paragraph. If this is your first visit to this blog, please click the Older Posts link at the bottom of the page to read the opening stanzas. If you have read yesterday's post, please start at the beginning of this paragraph. I am well aware that these directions do not cover every possible scenario and are not mutually exclusive. They should be taken as guidelines rather than instructions. If you have yet to find a place to start, please proceed to the oldest posting that you do not remember reading. This paragraph is meant to address Noemi's concerns about its counterpart in yesterday's posting. It is not meant to reduce the confusion level among its readers or its writer.

With that out of the way, here is today's smidgen of verse:

Would it be right to throw a little spark
onto the pyre? Would they be justified?
Would it be worth some centuries of dark,
a hidden candle’s shelter to provide?

That they would even think of such an act
reminds us of the power of a thought.
It struggles for existence when attacked.
That’s animal behavior, I was taught.

Now, don’t infer a lack of self-control.
They know the cost and what they can afford.
Like you and me, they calculate the toll.
Like us, they measure risk and seek reward.

For all incentive systems to perform,
we need something to want or to eschew.
With critters, pain and pleasure are the norm.
As humans, we have moral values, too.

©2010 Louis A. Merrimac

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 58-62

Jeff, are you sure those links are working? I am seeing very little traffic over here. Do your friends require greater incentive to visit my blog? Did you tell them how much intellectual stimulation they can obtain by reading it?

If you did not arrive at this page by way of one of Jeff's links, please start here:

So Project SIRE emerges as replanned,
with little notice given of the birth,
and few will know for what the letters stand:
Survival In Rejuvenated Earth.

A few unnoticed journalists protest,
but most have been conditioned to such waste.
What’s underwater can’t hold interest
with presidential scandals more the taste.

The founders know, however, that they can’t
rely indefinitely on their source.
They’ve built a most impressive cart, I’ll grant.
To pull it, though, they’ll need a mighty horse.

You see the rub: They have no guarantee
that what they fear will ever come to pass
unless they do what seems (at least, to me)
unthinkably immoral, even crass.

They’ll get their chance to save what they esteem
if the destruction that they would avert
occurs before the light falls on their scheme.
To take this medicine will really hurt.

©2010 Louis A. Merrimac

Presidential scandals: This was written shortly after the Monica Lewinsky scandal of 1998.

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 54-57

They’ve new criteria now for the crew:
Each one should worship as the others would.
One-half a married couple will not do.
Though they don’t know it, they are in for good.

Good physical and mental health is still
essential for the staff committee’s picks,
but military status henceforth will
be less important than the gender mix.

The books they read and copy now include
less for the mind and more to reach the soul.
As one book says, their spirits too need food.
What’s read alone just wouldn’t keep them whole.

Once these and other changes have been made,
and all the lot is tested as can be,
some seven of these tubes can be arrayed
beneath restricted portions of the sea.

©2010 Louis A. Merrimac

Read alone: See Deuteronomy 8:2-3, Matthew 4:4, and Luke 4:4. I don't know whether to call this a play on words or a paraphrase.

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 50-53

I have decided to stop writing gratuitous introductory text. Starting tomorrow, when I have nothing interesting to say, I shall present only the daily bit of verse. Here is today's:

You want to know what bothers me the most?
I’ll tell you what it is, in case you do:
These aren’t the people who think we’re all toast.
They’re dreamers, and they’re taxing me and you.

The likelihood that anyone will find
a planet that is livable at all
is very slim, and that is being kind,
so popular support is pretty small.

The people who imagined this thing, then,
are anxious to preserve its lower key.
They know they’ll lose their funding if and when
it’s argued as a public policy.

It’s easy for our group to get involved,
for some of them at NASA HQ reign.
Their lack-of-resource problem now is solved,
and none who’ve been supplanted can complain.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 46-49

Stanza #47 engendered some discussion on Facebook a few weeks ago. As I am disinclined to assume a higher degree of comprehension among the readership of this blog than among Jeff's friends, I would like to call attention to the absence of an annotation at that point.

Here’s how it works: Each carrier has two
computers, using one to run the ship.
The humans sit inside and make one new.
They duplicate the second, chip by chip.

Both parents, then, have three brains when they breed.
The daughter gets the copy from each set,
and all three carriers will thence proceed
with two brains and a third one coming yet.

This method works for many other parts:
the furniture and lighting, I suppose,
the pumps that work the legs, and all the charts
that tell how all this works and where it goes.

The circuitry, while intricate as hell,
is reproducible by human hands.
Don’t tell me it’s impossible ’cuz, well,
we have to take the story as it stands.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac