Rocket Science

     I've always wondered what my number is.  You know, that IQ number. 
     One day a few years ago I spent several hours with an intern at a psychologist's office taking a variety of different tests designed to reveal my IQ mystery.  Unfortunately (or fortunately), the intern moved on and so did I before I could prevail upon them to give me my number.  The only feedback I got was from a therapist who told me, "Let's just put it this way, you're too smart for your own good."  I took that as a compliment.  It wasn't.
     I never did particularly well in elementary or high school, but I managed to squeak by with minimal effort.  There would be comments from educators from time to time like, "Gee, Mike, you're really capable, why don't you apply yourself?"  I wasn't even sure what they meant by "apply yourself," but I do remember having a sort of thinly disguised contempt for education in general because I couldn't see any practical use for it.  "Motive" is the force in "loco-motive" that pushes that big, long, heavy train down the train tracks, and this loco student couldn't seem to muster any motive for taking notes or finishing homework.
     College was different.  By the time I got serious about "higher learning" I was in my early thirties, and I had several motives to move my train down the track.  I had a family and an ego to support, and besides, it cost me real money out of my own pocket.  The motivating pain of being hit in the wallet is probably superseded only by being cold or hungry.  I did well in college.  I rarely got anything but an A.
     Now.  Lest you make the mistake of thinking there may be a hidden genius in this story somewhere (I certainly made that mistake), let me paint for you portrait of some of the more "geniusey" things I've done.
     When I was 19 I had a dirt bike, a Husqvarna 250, that I liked to ride in the desert around Phoenix.  As I prepared for a ride one day, I noticed that the chain on my motorcycle was all gummed up with a paste of grease and pulverized dirt, aka dust.  So of course, I began to think of how to remove this impedance to my bike's performance and the solution immediately presented itself.  Gasoline!  Gasoline dissolves grease.  Warm gasoline would surely be preferable to cold gasoline, but how to warm it up?  I know!  I proceeded to fill a large cooking pot, a stock pot, with about two quarts of gasoline, dropped my chain in it, placed it on the natural gas stove top in the kitchen, turned on the burner, and went back out to the carport, about 20 feet away through a side door of the house. 
     Presently I went back in the house and noticed that the pot of gasoline I'd placed on the stove was boiling.  That's probably hot enough, my superior intellect reasoned, so I touched the handle on the pot.  The next thing I remember was a loud noise and mushroom cloud of fire about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle that shot up to the kitchen ceiling, curled back toward me, and in the process removed my eyebrows and arm hair.  This had not been part of my master plan.  Once I realized I hadn't been killed or seriously injured in "a freak gasoline boiling incident," I ran outside, grabbed the garden hose, and extinguished the conflagration that used to be my kitchen.
     While the harm to my body was minimal, the economic consequences, at least to the insurance company, were considerable.  Charred paint hung in long strips from the ceiling, and the cabinets were damaged.  What did I learn from this experience?  Gasoline boils!
     Fast forward to the early '90's.  It's Friday morning and my eldest child, Kelly, and I have come back from breakfast and are looking for something to do before it's time to head off to school and work.  The family trampoline was always good for a few thrills, but this morning I guess I needed a little more than the usual woo-hoo.  "Hey, Kell," I suggested, "Let's move the trampoline over next to the playhouse and jump off the roof of the playhouse and do butt-bounces!"  One tiny detail I neglected to factor in: there were railroad ties (part of our landscaping) under the trampoline.
     We climbed to the top of the playhouse roof, about 12' above the trampoline mat and, not wanting to be a thrill hog, allowed Kell to jump first.  She did, and bounced off the mat, butt first, with an exclamation of glee.  I followed and, as I outweighed my young daughter by about 100 lbs, the laws of physics demanded that my sorry ass depress the trampoline mat considerably further, and my tailbone was introduced to the railroad tie lying in wait beneath the mat.  All I could do was lie on the trampoline and groan in pain and tell Kelly to have Mom call my friend John Rhodes, a physical therapist.  Later that day, X-rays would show a vertebrae had cracked, a chip missing from the corner.  Narcotic pain pills didn't save me from my worst night of agony ever, not from the broken spine, but from the trauma to the abdominal muscles.  What did I learn from this experience?  Choose a heavier partner to go first when leaping from high places!
     These days, I'm content with not knowing my number.  Maybe it's better that way.

Perfect World

    PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, credits a sponsor, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with a motto that says "Dedicated to the idea that all people deserve the chance to live a healthy and productive life."
     I listen to NPR because I really hate having my intelligence (see Rocket Science blog) insulted by stupid radio commercials.  Also, I can get titillated from shocking news stories, then share gory details without guilt.  Oh, by the way, did I mention I heard it on NPR?  So you know it's true.  Plus, it's fun to wonder what some of the broadcasters are like in "real" life, that is, life outside the radio personality world.
     The first several times I heard "Dedicated to the idea that all people deserve the chance to live a healthy and productive life.", I didn't hear it.  You know.  I heard it, but I didn't hear it.  I wasn't listening, I was filtering.  It was just white noise, an ad on NPR - which is NPR because it doesn't have ads - it has affiliates, which have annual fund drives, which are sometimes more annoying than ads, because they bust out the guilt hammer to get me to send money to KJZZ, my local station.
     But one day, the devil's advocate in me thought, "Wait a minute.  That's an ideal that sounds so irrefutable, someone needs to refute it."  So I stepped up to the plate: it was my turn at bat.
     To be fair, there is a sort of disclaimer that it's only an "idea" that all people deserve the chance to live a healthy and productive life.  It seems to me a pretty good idea, but apparently nature doesn't think so.  Communism seems like a pretty good idea, too, it just doesn't work.  You know that pie we wanted to cut up into equal sized pieces and distribute to everyone equally?  Half of it just got eaten by some of the distributors, so now our ten-inch pie is a five-inch pie.  And there's the rub.  Human nature, being what it is (that's right, what it is, not what I'd like it to be), won't allow communism to work in practice.  Of course this is a bit of an oversimplification, but but you get the idea.
     Many ideas turn out to be ideals, and it's good to work toward an ideal, which is what I think the Gates Foundation is up to.  But if we think it's going to happen before some river can carve another Grand Canyon, we're setting ourselves up for disappointment.  If Mr. Hitler had gotten his way, and achieved his ideal of racial purity, the world would eventually be populated by a bunch of Aryan mutant freaks, the result of too much inbreeding.
     If you search the Gates' Foundation's website for "Dedicated to the idea that all people deserve the chance to live a healthy and productive life," you won't find it.  Instead, at the top of the page, on the same level as the name of the foundation, the motto ALL LIVES HAVE EQUAL VALUE appears, just like that, in capital letters.  Now there's an idea I find irrefutable.