I'm old or something

I have been known to say that “I can’t wait till I’m an old man and I can get away with anything.” When I say this I am usually referencing the many times I have seen/heard old men eying up young girls and throwing some bizarre slang comment at them (i.e. “you’re prettier than a hog tied to a circus clown”).

I still stand by my affirmation about being an old man, but my last encounter with the elderly has put some perspective on the subject.

While working in the produce department of a grocery store an old man commented to me that he didn’t like his celery “pithy.” I assumed that he meant old and soft so I said “yeah, me neither.” He then asked me if I’d ever heard a “smiley joke?” Despite the creapy feeling this old man was giving me I played along “no.” “Well, a smiley joke is 100% clean, but only a 1.5 on the funny scale from one to ten.” “OK.”

“How much does it cost a pirate to get his ears pierced?”
I knew the answer, but said “I don’t know.”
“A buck-an-ear! You’re smart, would you like to hear another one?”
”Sure.”

“What did one mountain say to another mountain after an earthquake?”
This one I didn’t know “I don’t know.”
“Wasn’t my fault!” After which he gave me an all to long of a tush-tap.

The jokes were fine, in fact they were some of the better jokes I’d heard from a grocery store customer. But the tush-tap was a little too much. At first I felt that this old man was going to be creapy, but all he wanted was to feel my butt, and that should be every old mans right. He’s lived almost eighty years, through a world war, and a gas crisis. If he wants to touch a young mans smokin’ posterior he should not have to feel obligated to assuage his victim with humor.

And I thought he didn't like his celery pithy?

A different star in the sky

Somehow the notion of the earth rotating around the sun has really caught on lately. I’ll admit it’s an attractive notion, but I’m skeptical.

While reading “Einstein’s Universe” I came up with the idea that if everything in space is relative, than why can’t the Sun rotate around the Earth. Really, the idea of relativity in space is a much more bizarre concept than most realize. Time, for instance, can change so drastically near a black hole that you could watch yourself being sucked into it for near eternity. And space has just as bizarre principals when given extreme situations.

So, I got thinking, “sure, the earth moves around the sun in a relative circle, but why a circle? If you were sitting on a planet, (lets say Earth) everything else would appear to move relative to you. If you were stationarly situated above this planet a few thousand miles, the other planets would take on a peculiar motion relative to the earth.”

Really, space is so relative that no one can dispute the idea that the Sun is rotating around the Earth because it all depends on where you are (i.e. if we perceive the universe from an even greater distance we might recognize that the planets are actually rotating around something altogether new).

So, I decided to map out the path of the first five planets if we could do as I suggested above (perceive the solar system from a few thousand miles above the Earth as if it were fixed and the others were moving). What I found is that instead of those boring circles, the planets take on brilliant star patters. I was so entertained by the picture I highlighted the paths and took a picture of it.


(For all the planets I plotted biannually and then just played “connect the dots.” The small green star is Mercury, the large green circle is the sun, the red is Mars and the blue is Jupiter. I don’t know why, but Venus just didn’t make a good pattern so I left it in pen.)