Author Archives: Rohvannyn

Matter Transmission

30 Friday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 31, 2013 at 1:25 AM

(Poof! You’re elsewhere!)

Matter Transmission, Matter transfer, Mass Transference, take your pick, has a nostalgic and rather pleasant association for me, with the Holidays. When I was 10 years old I developed the belief that space launches a la Gemini were too large and expensive and an alternative means of getting off earth needed to be found. I had the idea that some sort of energy beam such as a laser might be made to propel a space craft, not by heating a propellant as in the laser rocket concept but perhaps by sending magnetic particles aloft so a ship might be pulled along by the magnetic stream.  When I was flying from Seattle to Michigan on Christmas Eve, 1965 I fell into conversation with a seat mate who first elucidated to me the idea of matter transmission.

My companion explained that someone had proposed that a person might turn his or her body into light for instance and travel at light speed then reconvert to matter. The idea was fascinating and even more so when a couple of days later I watched an Episode of Lost In Space (What there was before Star Trek came along) in which Will Robinson uses an alien matter transmitter to send him to earth and bring him back. He was riding on a “maser” beam (what there was before lasers), and how the outgoing process could be reversed to bring Will home wasn’t ever explained. This was by the way, Lost In Space, Episode 16, Season 1.

I had encountered the concept of sending people through some sort of communication channel on the old 50s/60s TV series Superman in a particular episode where the Professor invents a way to send material bodies over the telephone.  All of the actual matter in a body, he tells us, is less than a pin point so we’re really just empty space and no reason this can’t pass through a wire.  Well, force fields have something to say about all this but Superman wasn’t cutting edge science, nor for that matter was Lost n Space.

Having watched the L.I.S.episode I found myself spending a great deal of time thinking about ionizing matter and sending it’s constituent particles by means of a laser beam from one place to another.  It turns out that subatomic particles and even atoms can be propelled from place to place by laser light but reconstructing the object at the other end is problematic.

In subsequent years I read every matter transmission story I could find.  And of course Star Trek came along to popularize  a matter transmission-related concept in the form of the Transporter.  I say M.T.-related because strictly speaking, people, tools and material aren’t “transmitted” but are teleported by means of a mass-energy/energy-mass conversion process.  We’ll return to this in a minute.

When I was 15 I read Arthur C. Clarke’s excellent Profiles of the Future (Circa 1962) and in one of his chapters Mr. Clarke explained that the essence of transmission is not the sending of sound or light energy but the sending of a “pattern” of information from which sound and pictures can be reconstructed.  The essence of teleportation therefore would be the sending of a pattern of an object or person, from which that object or person could be reconstructed. Now I saw there were actually two types of matter transmission, one in which a solid object is turned into energy, a stream of subatomic particles or copied somehow into another medium such as a forc field so the  object being sent can either be directly reassembled from the original matter or energy, or a sort of “mold” would exist in the transfer medium so the object would spontaneously assemble at point of impact. Isaac Asimov used the force field concept in one of his 1950s short stories in which a human body would be broken down to it’s constituent particles and the pattern of particles would be sent from one place to another as a pattern of force fields.

Returning to the Star Trek transporter which is called in The Next Generation a matter energy scrambler.  (Hopefully not because one would expect the entire process would be carried through with as much “order” as possible.)   What appears to be happening is material objects, including people are being turned into pure energy and photons being held in proximity to one another by means of some influence exerted by the shipboard Transporter device.  The light can be turned back into matter at a distance and the process can be reversed.  The effect can be made to work over a range of about 40,000 kilometers  or about 23,000 miles which is about the altitude of a geosynchronous orbit of earth.  The transporter probably does more to play hob with Star Trek’s credibility as a hard science fiction show than anything else but one would have to admit that few things are more fascinating than the transporter and the show would have a great deal of trouble existing in the form it has without the transporter or something very much like it.

It’s easy to see from E = MC^2 that the transporter beam would need to be so incredibly intense as to threaten much of the continent onto which it touches down upon.  The idea of turning a human body into a stream of particles and sending it along in any manageably-short length of time would also necessitate the manipulation of significant amounts of energy.  It would be cheaper energywise, to invent an inertia-nullifying force field bubble and use a tractor beam to whisk people to the surface and back.

Though today the quantum physicists are learning how to transmit various particles and even atoms via laser beams, we still have the issue of how to put particles back together into a working 3-D solid once they’ve been transmitted.  3-D printers are able to build up particles of metal or ceramic, even living cells into complex three dimensional artefacts, including some body organs but the prospect of actually building up an entire human body with it’s liquid and gas contents is awfully daunting for anything less than instantaneous execution.  The word “instantaneous” is most likely the key if a human or other mammalian creature is ever to be Transmitted.  The operation of any “body” likewise brain, mind personality is a hypercomplexity of energy flows in the form of modulated signals.  They pervade not only the brain but  the entire nervous system.  We can envision a clone or possibly artificial body so constituted as to be able to accept an entire neuronal pattern from a given person.  This body might then be sent to another star system via a “slow route” starship, possibly in cold sleep.  How though could the original nerve energy flow pattern of the original person be gotten into the receptor body, especially at a distance.  Were we to begin scanning at one point in the body, faithfully sending data from this body to that, the pattern would entirely have changed in the original before a small fraction could be scanned and transmitted.

James Patrick Kelly, SF author and Web guru gave me a hint back in the ‘90s in his story Think Like a Dinosaur.  He used nanobots not exactly as I’m about to use them, but as an integral part of a matter transmission process.  I realized that if nanos could somehow be inserted into or attached to each nerve cell in the body, including those in the brain of course and made to record at a signal the present, instantaneous state of each cell then the workings of the “transmitted” person could be shut down (yes, kill the primary) and each of the nanos could be queried for it’s “state” the the data stream could be fed via interstellar com link to the “receptor” body, corresponding nanos could be loaded with the information from the primary.  There is also the issue of the connections previously existing between cells being re-established in the receptor body but assuming the technological achievements necessary to create nanobots of the complexity needed to carry this out, there are ways of recovering the connections.  Our result would be not matter transmission exactly but a sort of transmission and “possibly” the only way a person originally alive on earth might visit a planet in another solar system.  We can say “visit” because if our artificial receptor bodies turn out to be possible at all, there seems no reason that once transmitted the updating mind/nervous pattern couldn’t be recopied for further transmission to either come home again or venture on to some other destination.

I call this potential means of transmitting people “bioteleportation.”  It’s not any good for dropping in on an alien culture from orbit or for everyday commutes to work or school but might help us colonize the galaxy.  Just as enthusiasts of  near-space flight found it necessary to learn orbital mechanics, gas dynamics, thermodynamics and structural shell theory, starfarers or at least those who send them outward will rely upon nanorobotics, autoreplication, neuro science, communication theory, cryogenics and artificial life.

Happy New Year.  May there be many billions to come!

The Problem with Math and Science

29 Thursday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on August 24, 2013 at 12:25 AM

I’m offering this idea to Junior High Math instructors, Academic program designers or anyone else who may aspire to influence the course of Middle School Aged learning progress. I think there are many students who start out in Grade school, very interested in science but don’t carry through with the interest to the college level. I also think there is a very good, or perhaps bad; reason for this. If you ask a cross section of folks what should a person do if she or he is good in Math, a frequent response will be “Go into science.” The problem is, until one reaches 11th Grade or so in high school, science as generally taught, has very little to do with math.

Science in Grade school and Junior High, is full of fascinating facts, fun experiments and a fair amount of “gee whiz” value. Arithmetic and Mathematics however tend to be fairly dry, unappetizing subjects, satisfying perhaps for those who do it well but fairly deadly for many of the same kids who eat up the science experiments with a spoon, (well, hopefully not in a literal sense.) This tends to set up what we might call an Expectation Gap wherein one starts reading the qualitative science books around third or fourth grade then in high school and college, we can run up against the “Here also be Maths!” disillusionment.

We certainly don’t want to make elementary science less interesting and though many have tried, it’s difficult to make Math quite as yummy as say, Art Class. I think though that the real problem stems from the division of Math and Science early on and the solution may lay in bringing the two subjects together much earlier than is customarily done.

There is a fascinating genre of learning which speaks to both math and science which is simply the realm of Formulae (Formulas) Formulae are in general algebra at an understandable level and convey a great deal of power to those who learn to use them.

Customarily we teach arithmetic then we get into algebra with it’s integers and variables and exponents, it’s Xs and Ys with very little attention given to what we use this stuff for in the long run. Yes there are story problems in grade school arithmetic books and much fewer of them in algebra texts. Still algebra is all around us. We talk about Length and height and weight all the time (L H and W) and every half bright kid knows that H2O = water. Let’s design a course in Formulae pure and simple and let it serve as a pre-algebra course.

One needn’t be a propulsion expert to calculate the areas of rectangles and circles. Anyone who can do multiplication can also calculate the volume of solids such as cylinders, cones and even pyramids.

Simple demos with hollow shapes and graduated cylinders of water could help classes see that their numbers are correct or at least close. Elementary Trig could be done with a board, and angle measure and a measuring tape. How big a board do you need to cover this side of the slanted roof. Clubhouse builders would love it! Starting with cooking recipes we could move fairly directly into calculating how much oxygen you need to combine with two grams of hydrogen to get 18 grams of water. (Basically look at the formula and have a look at the Periodic Table.) Before Course’s end we could be able to calculate things like how much kerosene do you need to burn to heat a tubful of water from whatever the cold tap gives us to a temperature we wouldn’t mind using for a bath. Lots of cool, hands-on stuff here and nothing all that expensive. Kids love knowing how to do things, what things are made of, how to mix things together and come up with exciting new things. Let’s get formulaic and take the myth out of science and the snore out of math!

Glynda Shaw

Prelude to Apollo Day

29 Thursday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on July 16, 2013 at 12:30 PM

Today is the 44th Anniversary of Apollo 11’s liftoff. On July 20th the Lunar Module Eagle landed on the moon. The 20th of July which I and some others call Apollo Day has become the mid-summer event of choice for reasons of patriotism and for the celebration of technological achievement. I still revere the Founding Fathers (and Mothers) am stirred by the words of the Declaration of Independence and honor the Fourth.

We have heard so much of war and violence over the last decade and a half however that it’s natural enough to seek for a more cerebral, more peaceful means of celebrating the country and thinking people everywhere than by setting off bombs and filling the skies with chemical incandescence. (Yes I know Apollo involved the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy but it was relatively localized and didn’t contribute to the terrorizing of pets and wildlife across the entire continent.) So it’s Apollo Day forward to which I look each year for the celebration of High Summer and the fact that I am Human and an American.

Apollo Day is a pretty much do it yourself holiday. As I’ve said elsewhere you should do something that has to do with the moon; eat a Moon Pie, drink moonshine, Howl at the moon, moon somebody; anything that lifts your rocket. It’s also fun to read or watch something moonish; read a good science fiction novel or a true account of the Moon Landing. While we’re at it, isn’t it interesting and sort of unfortunate that there are so few available movies about going to, landing on or living in the Moon? From the Earth to the Moon, Destination Moon, The Mouse on the Moon, First Men in the Moon and of course Apollo 13 are obvious choices and there are a couple other moon movies around but hard to find.

Refreshments for Apollo Day have varied from year to year. This time I’m probably making a blue cheese spread which I’ll spread on Triscuits and eat with malted rice brew. Sometimes I’ve been fancier. Once I had the event catered by a young woman who made me a moon-shaped cake, complete with gray frosting, craters and an astronaut with a rocket, molded from taffy, standing on the surface. Both of the latter were quite artistic but the rocket was streamlined with conical nose and had tail fins. I mentioned to my daughter that neither feature would be necessary or appropriate on the airless Lunar surface. She responded that I must be the only person who would analyze the aerodynamics of a cake decoration but I mean, Really!—

Happy impending Apollo Day all you Earthlings!

-Glynda

Hate Groups

29 Thursday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on July 5, 2013 at 5:00 PM

I’d been meaning to write this entry on something else but felt I needed to clear this topic first. The Westboro Baptist Church has been in the news again of late; first for their predictably reprehensible attempts to disrupt the funerals for the 19 heroes who recently gave their lives fighting fire in Arizona, then for a predictably cowardly response from the White House. The WBC, we are given to understand, isn’t a hate group? My response is “why the hell not?!” I’ve got a feeling that if NAACP conventions or memorials for Dr. Martin Luther King were being invaded by spiritually diseased bigots, said bigots and the church they hide behind would quickly become a hate group.

I want to be very clear in saying that no, I don’t want NAACP meetings or King memorials to be invaded by diseased bigots, in the same way that I don’t want somebody burning flags, whether it be mine or someone else’s. There are just some things that honorable people don’t do. No one’s memorial should be a venue for picketing and castigation.

Freedom of speech? Horse droppings! We’ve never truly had absolute freedom of speech in the days of the founders (When a man was dragged out of a tavern and jailed for saying he didn’t care if they fired a cannon ball through John Adams’s ass, he wouldn’t watch the presidential parade), or now when persons who threaten the President are rounded up prior to a visit by the Chief Executive. We also can’t run through a building yelling “fire!” And racial slurs are fast on their way to becoming illegal.

There is no biblical justification whatever for the activities of the Westboro Baptist Church does and as far as I can see, it’s not truly a church. Religious Freedom? Road apples! We don’t allow human sacrifice in America even with the First Amendment, even though human sacrifice has a venerable history. With George W. Bush’s Faith-based Initiative, Wicca was excluded as a religion even though it clearly is; and I heard very little protest except from Wiccan folks. If our president and Federal law-keeping agencies haven’t the grit to put the Westboro Baptist Church on a par with people who hurl racial invective let’s at least deny them tax-exempt status. Perhaps that will cut down on travel funds.

Derestricting Automated Firearms

29 Thursday Sep 2016

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First posted on February 8, 2013 at 1:35 PM

When I was six I remember my cousin Dave Ville telling about a dream he had one night about being in Red China. He said there were bombs which followed everyone around and if you said or did anything wrong, you’d get blown up. Dave said he got killed right away and had evidently lain dead for a while then at the end of the dream there were a lot of bright lights and things looked “real pretty.” There may’ve been more to the dream but this was the gist.

What did all of this mean? Perhaps just a manifestation of the pervasive fear of Communism common to most of us from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, followed with a hope for the Day of Judgment which might reverse death for the Just? Who knows? My cousin’s dream has just been something I’ve recalled from time to time when contemplating what it might be like to live in a totalitarian society. It was just a 13-year-old boy’s fantasy of course and no nation could actually have bombs following their citizens around.

Alas, things change though, and fantasies sometimes come true. For all of the bashing George W. Bush got during his terms as president (and I am no particular admirer of Past President Bush) I think it’s chillingly fascinating that the president who has actually deployed drone missiles (possibly the ultimate in automatic weapons) is held to be a liberal and a champion of human rights. And now we are told American citizens are subject to robot bombing, even without evidence. Is there any difference at least at the higher levels, between a war-mongering militarist fundamentalist and a war-mongering humanist, social agendaist or does it all have to do with who holds the reins (or the remote control?) I think most of us wanted a change in ’04 and we got one sort of, but is anything improving or were we better off with what we had?

Glynda

Insulting Emails

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on February 8, 2013 at 1:35 PM

Yesterday at work I got three versions of basically the same E-mail entitled “Lean For Dummies.” A very brief inspection I gave the first iteration indicated that employees in our agency were invited to join an online chat group centered around a book by the same name which presumably deals with issues such as diet and exercise. I didn’t check further versions since in my opinion the first one should have been deleted prior to sending.

No, I don’t have anything particularly against either dieting or exercise. I try to indulge in both from time to time. The thing that angers me is this use and overuse in contemporary culture of book titles of the form …For Dummies. I never read such books and don’t believe anyone else should, in fact I think those who do read such books are probably the audience the authors are seeking. No, that’s not really fair. I am afraid that a lot of people allow themselves to be called condescending names and allow themselves to think of themselves in diminishing terms because they don’t possess much self esteem which is certainly unfortunate but does not mean the persons in question are stupid, unable to speak or clothes mannequins which so far as I know are the three common definition for the term dummy.
Glynda

Second Things First

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on January 16, 2013 at 12:25 PM

I’ve written about this before obviously but would like to clarify and add to something I touched on in one of my entries last month. The shootings of December 14 continue to occupy a fair amount of media attention though now not so much in terms of the victims, perpetrator or survivors, but what this and other events might mean to the debate over gun control. Let alone that nothing being proposed in the Senate or by the President would have had any realistic effect on what happened in Connecicutt, there is a News Void which has scarcely been scratched through all of the coverage of these tragic events.

The preponderantly leftist media has spent a good deal of time crowing about the iron grip of the NRA finally being broken (perhaps) and the NRA appears to be shifting blame to persons labeled as mentally ill. Let’s make those folks bear the scrutiny and restrictions and let us Normal folks alone. In all the hype pro and con about the Second Ammendment, we still have heard precious little about the First. Our society has been spoon fed for generations now the notion that the First Ammendment, Freedom of speech in particular (only part of the amendment) is not only inviolable but noncriticizable as well. TV, Radio stations, newspapers, electronic media feel they can inflict not only whatever content they wish upon the public but in whatever manner they choose and to whatever degree. Still the First Ammendment contains limitations and safeguards.

Persons for example are not allowed to run through public buildings shouting “Fire!” In many places and for many years we’ve tolerated limitations of First Ammendment rights when the names of rape victims for example, juvenile victims and some other protected groups have not been published. We know that not all free communication is necessarily good.

What greater curtain call could a person of diseased morals and hatred toward all humanity itself itself make but to announce it’s presence and ability to wield a very cowardly but pervasive power than to evoke literally international fame? It may only last a few days but kill enough innocents and you will be known to almost everyone!

I lay a good deal of the terrifying trend toward mass murder at the door of Media and it’s cherished, unassailable First Ammendment. When a mass shooting or other multiple murder occurs the degenerate perpetrator’s name, face, and exploits saturate the media. A story is repeated many times during a single hour with no addition of new information generally but keeping the human refuse at the center of the story front and center in our minds.

I submit that were persons not assured of instant if perhaps transitory fame and the thrill of knowing that what they do is burned into every aware consciousness within transmission range, the incentive to commit such acts would be lessened, probably to a very large degree. If reporters and their editor/programmers would perhaps make one announcement, whenever something new was actually known, leaving out the perpetrator’s name, giving no pictures of the event, and having a limit of how many times the story can be mentioned per day, we might knock a lot of the romance out of killing tiny children and innocent movie goers. (Sounds sort of like limiting magazine size doesn’t it?) As things stand today, Media personel, editors, program directors, reporters, commentators are acting as parasites on the misfortune of the least fortunate and aggrandizing the worst of human nature as much as any gun runner or fringe paramilitary partisan ever did. Sure let’s try not to sell guns to people who are likely to kill others (though let’s not always couple this with “likely to hurt themselves” these are separate issues.) I don’t really care if you have 7 or 30 rounds in your clip but I’m willing to accept the lower number. While we’re doing these things and hopefully developing strategies to guard our schools and our children (somehow) let’s start forcing the Media to recognize and do something about the intrinsic part they play in encouraging and sustaining gun violence.

Glynda Shaw

Armed Citizen and Pregnant Women’s Social Worker

Closing In for 2013

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on  January 3, 2013 at 12:20 PM

For those with chickens you probably know that egg production goes way down in the winter months at least for those of us who have more or less aux naturalle coops. I’d known that light played a role in the disposition of hens to be active and possibly produce but I didn’t know quite how significant that role might be.

I’d rigged a power line from the house to the coop, a distance of about 75 feet, with intentions of providing a heater if temperatures dropped too low but the weather has been reasonably mild most of this season. Our six hens were behaving very sluggish and egg production was down to about .666667 per day with one valliant hen following through with the goods. Last Saturday I bought a high intensity reading lamp with one of those newfangled bulbs which draw only 20 watts of power. I hung the lamp from a coop rafter with a piece of wire and we plugged the power line into one of those nifty light switch sockets that let’s you turn things on and off without bending and unplugging. We’ve been turning on the chicken light in the morning sometime before 8:00 and letting it burn till about 8:00 PM. Immediate results; Chickens are active, seem happier. Egg production is up to more like 1.75 a day (Those fractional eggs are a bit messy but we’re hoping for an even number any day now!) I’ll keep you posted on the recovery rate of egg production and mental health of hens.

Glynda

New Year’s Message

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 31, 2012 at 11:55 PM

Dr. Bill Aimes, my U.W. Communications History prof, told us that if we wanted to be assured of of being remembered by succeeding generations we should take time every day and write down what was going on in the world and what impressions we had of it and what other people were saying about it. He said that diaries are typically tedious sources of historical information, adding that the diaries of Women from the 19th Century were especially bad because accounts of overland journeys for example were typically filled with ruminations on bowels and bladder. (As it happens I’m having some intestinal complaints at the moment but won’t take further space discussing them.)

I’ve never disciplined myself to do a current events journal on a daily bais what I guess we’d call a news blog today but I do take time every January 1st to set down what I’ve accomplished in the past year, what I hope to do in the following year and what events in the news over the past year have seemed particularly significant to me. Of course to more recent event from last year will more likely tend to be remembered than those from last January. I started this practice when I was a Junior in high school, back when nobody owned personal computers and nobody suspected that personal computers would be primarily used as communication devices when they were available. I think the first time I did my annual summary I simply had a few items of interest of which I wanted to keep track and decided to handle it as a short report. The idea seemed good so the following year I wrote something longer and more structured. I kept up the practice through college and most of the years after and I’ve been pretty faithful for the last couple of decades.

I guess if I had to justify the human race to an interstellar council like in Heinlein’s “Have Space Suit Will Travel” I’d just as soon not base my defense on 2012. Between many public and mass murders, a shooting of a high school girl advocating for women’s rights in Afghanistan, a gang rape of a woman in India on a public bus! And the general background bellicosity with which we’re all too familiar, it appears that some portion of us at least are bidding for attention of a very negative sort. Our presidential election was another glum choice between unpalatable alternatives. Again our Congress is holding the country to ransom because they’d rather be premadonnas than do the work they are elected (and paid) to do.

Even at the worst of times, there are rays of light. A couple of decades ago a young girl being shot because of daring to seek education for herself and others might have passed entirely unnoticed. In the wake of the gang rape, women (and some young men) in India are militating against the common abuse of women. There appear to be some signs, however sluggish that the economy may be rallying. We may as a country be trying to come together around the idea that we aren’t providing adequate protection for our children. As to how we should address this of course, we’re as divided as ever but at least we have a common ultimate objective. We have probes on Mars. We have commercial orbital resupply capability for the International Space Station and near-at-hand human transport capability from the same source. We have good directions in which to turn if only we will take them. On my three acres I’m trying to show sustainability potential and a sort of eco-techno ambassadorship.

The year just past was a questionable one but not a lot worse or a lot better than some others in recent memory. If it has a lesson to teach I think it is along the line of remembering. I mean let’s remember what’s going on right now and next time we get a chance to stand up and make a choice let’s remember and act accordingly. Keep track of your State and Federal Representatives and if they appear to be part of the deadlock rather than part of the across-the-aisle reachers, remember that and vote those folks out of House and Senate, State Legislature and City Council. Let’s get some new blood flowing, some new idea perculating. Let’s see what we can do about reintroducing statesmanship instead of inventorying Deadwood. To many people the number thirteen is unlucky but I’m not aware that there need be anything wrong with two thousand thirteen!

Blessings to all for the New Year.

Glynda

 

The Santa Message

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 24, 2012 at 12:30 PM

Well tonight’s the night and NORAD makes it official. Santa has 24 hours to visit something like one billion homes, some of them Down Under and in South America where it’s summertime now. There’ve been some cute items on NPR lately, an interview with United Postal Service administrators concerning the size Santa’s organization must be to transport and eviler so many parcels. Another item was a physicist asserting that Santa must use wormholes to reach our houses as even travel at the speed of light couldn’t get him everywhere fast enough to get the job done in one day.

I think I was pretty young when I decided that it just wasn’t on to visit all of the houses in one night for one man no matter how magic. I hadn’t thought yet of parallel time lines allowing a person to loop back in time and perform a lot of things simultaneously but I’d heard of Santa’s helpers and had pretty much decided that there was a large crew of sleighs out there in the Christmas Eve sky going down chimneys and bringing cheer. When it came time to bring our daughter somewhat out of the open-eyed fantasy of childhood and a bit at least into the Adult Conspiracy we told her that Santa was very very busy and we needed to help Santa do some of his work so we delivered presents to certain neighbors. Later at a feminist gathering in Seattle we learned of Ms. Claus and how she was about bringing food, clothing and feminist literature to deserving children large and small.

However we imagine it happening and however we picture the personage himself, don’t we all still believe at some level in Santa and if someone comes to our house, down our chimney, through our window, out of our closet, however he gets there, that we were singled out to have a visit from the Real Santa?

It’s been said that Santa doesn’t come to poor people’s houses. Jesus does. That’s a fine sentiment in it’s way but I’ve known Santa to visit the homes of Jewish, Budhist, Islamic children- in a secular way perhaps, but bringing joy all the same. Christmas is overcommercialized. Of course it is. We’ve known that for decades but there is still magic in Santa, in those gifts that are small, nearly incidental, yet having the ability to charm as much as the big-ticket items.

I gave my friend a pack of modeling clay in Seventh grade and we spent hours making things together, two blind kids sort of coloring together in a way but shaping rather than crayoning. When I was much, much older I got one of those bendy rubber animals which you can pose. Mine was a bull I believe. My daughter and I spent I don’t know how long doing the most non PC things to that poor bovine that we could think of; having it take a poop, thumb it’s nose, anything a child and an often childlike adult could imagine.

Yes, Santa is out there. We all know him/her but Santa’s a busy person and can always use the help. Try sneaking a crate of Manderins onto your neighbor’s stoop or mailing an anonymous package of Anything to someone you hardly know. Use the address of the corner store of local tavern as return. Buy a kid a gyroscope. Learn how to make butterscotch. It can be secular as hell but still magic. It really is better to give than to receive because generally it’s more fun but we need to know how to receive and that’s really what Santa is all about.