Multi Ponderings

Researchers at the University of Bristol in England conducted an extensive study measuring the intelligence of 2,980 dog and cat owners. The results of their study indicated cat owners are smarter than dog owners.

Does an association with cats impart higher intellectual abilities on cat owners? Are dog owners dumbed down?

None of the above.

Supposedly, more educated people work longer hours and having less time for pet care they choose cats, which require less pet keeping time than dogs.

Why do I get the feeling this study was designed by a cat owner?

And, dog owners, take heart. Albert Einstein never owned a cat.

In the Philippines a 35 year-old man, Romeo Vargas Tambo-boy Sr, jumped into a well 13 feet deep with his 9 month-old son and hid in the well with the child for 16 hours. The rescued child is in the hospital. The police are going to charge Tambo-boy with child abuse. I don't think they should, which may sound illogical to you, and you may be right.

I say the police shouldn't charge Tambo-boy because he had gone a little crazy. I don't think he meant any harm to the child, or was cognizant of any harm.

Why?

He had lost his wife recently. She died giving birth. According to Tambo-boy's family, he hadn't accepted her death and had been acted strange. When the police arrested him, he kept blinking and couldn't answer questions. I say Tambo-boy's grief has driven him temporarily mad, and he's not accountable for his unnatural behavior of hiding in an abandoned well with his child. Clearly not the behavior of a sane man.

Rather than arrest him, get him psychological help and grief counseling. Don't punish him. He's lost his wife. His heart and mind are hurt and broken. Get this grief stricken man help.

In a village in North Yorkshire, England a pheasant has attacked men, women and children. The pheasant’s wrath is so ferocious the postman’s afraid to come into town.

Are these people serious? A lion you get terrorized by. A pheasant you terrorize.

According to one of the locals, it’s breeding season and the bird is just protecting his territory. Nonetheless, one bird at an estimated bodyweight of 5 pounds holding an entire village hostage. C’mon!

In the hallowed tradition of art imitating life, next we’ll see a horror movie with killer pheasants gobbling up villagers, which, to me, will seem more believable than one pheasant terrorizing an entire village.

If the pheasant were smart, he’d hit the villagers up for a bribe to make him cease and desist, and move onto the next village to ply his extortion trade.

Not to belabor the point, but a pheasant? What would these people do if a goose were on the loose?

When I was a child, my family had a cat that died. On the night of its death, several neighborhood cats wailed at our front door. Never had I seen this happen before or after the night of our cat’s death. And I’ve never read about anything like this with cats.

I have read elephants mourn their dead, and seen a documentary about it, but I’ve seen nothing about cats exhibiting this kind of behavior.

In the case of our deceased cat, other factors may have accounted for the neighborhood cats’ strange behavior. Though, I can think of none.

A semi-spooky element accompanied the mourning cats. They came at 12AM, which to a young impressionable mind that had seen too many horror movies, cast an eerie shadow on the event.

It would be interesting to see if anyone else ever experienced anything like this. Meow.

Supposedly a cat named Oscar has predicted 50 deaths in a Rhode Island nursing home. When he senses a resident’s impending death, Oscar hops on the resident’s bed and curls up with the resident. A few hours later, it’s lights out for the resident. The cat is so renown at predicting death that when he curls up with a resident, the staff notifies the resident’s family.

You could say, “Yeah, but that’s no big deal. People are dying all the time in nursing homes. So the cat curls up with some that die later. The averages are in the cat’s favor.

Good point, and one I arrived at myself until I read the cat only curls up with residents he senses death approaching. The rest of the time, the cat doesn’t bother with the residents.

Here’s a spooky take on this. Years ago I was involved with a meditation group that warned us about letting cats sit on us when we meditated. “Cats steal your life energy”, the group leaders claimed. I never believed that … but it’s not too far a stretch to presume Oscar somehow benefits from a resident’s release of life energy at the time of death. Meow.

After a three day search for the missing 30 Million Dollar Lottery Winner, Abraham Shakespeare, of Polk County, Florida, police found his body today buried behind a home under a slab of concrete. His family believed he was murdered for his money. Ironically, he died poor. What money he didn’t share with friends, people scammed from him.

A friend of Abraham said he was the kind of person who would just give someone money if they needed it. They didn’t have to kill him.

It’s sad to see such a caring, generous person’s life taken from him. Sad, too, his fortunes led to his passing. I hope he’s gone to a happy place in the afterlife. A place there filled with people like him, I’d call heaven. Goodbye Abraham Shakespeare.

A man in Slovenia lost his three bullmastiffs to the courts after they bit a person passing his house. Authorities confiscated the dogs and planned to put them down. The owner fought for the dogs lives in court for years. When he was about to regain custody of them, the dogs bit a handler. More court battles followed. After four years of wrangling in the courts, the owner finally rescued his dogs from death and got them back.

And how did the dogs show their gratitude? They bit him to death a few days ago.

This reminds me of the saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

All Humans Are Aliens From Outer Space, the headline read. A scientist said microbes hitched a ride on comets that smashed into the earth. The microbes then multiplied, seeded, and eventually morphed into humans. “Evidence is pointing inexorably in this direction,” according to the scientist.

Is he right? I think the theory is creditable. What I’d wonder, though, is why we haven’t detected microbes that morphed into life like humans, or otherwise, on nearby planets NASA probes have landed on and high powered telescopes have examined?

I’d think if the seeding theory were true, on other planets we’d have seen clear signs of civilizations as advanced as ours. Maybe not like our species because of differing planetary conditions, but still advanced, beginning as comet riding microbes and undergoing thousands of years of evolution until some scientist on one of those planets arrived at the same conclusion the earth scientist has today.

Whether or not the scientist is right, his theory is fascinating. I can’t wait to see if time and research validate the scientist’s speculations; that is, if anything get proved in my lifetime.

Before Harry died, he asked his brothers and a few close friends to hold a seance so that he could one day do the impossible and escape death. Still to this day on every Halloween a seance is held calling for the great Harry Houdini to return to Earth.

- From Wikipedia

Houdini who could escape from almost anything never made it back from death. I find this a little disturbing. If Houdini, the king of escape artists, couldn’t escape from death to send a signal from the Great Beyond, like “It’s beautiful here,” what does that say about life on the other side?

Do we just die and that’s all there is, as atheists contend? Do we blank out like in sleep and become forever obliterated? Or is there really more?

You can say religious books promise an afterlife, yet, all that is going on belief. You can say some people have died and gone to heaven and come back to tell their incredible accounts, but they were only dead for a few minutes and skeptics provide plausible arguments, such as the mind conjuring up childhood religious images, why these near death experiences may not be the final word on the afterlife. And, of course, some people claiming fantastic after death experiences could be lying.

Maybe when you’re dead you’re dead, at least to returning this world with messages from the beyond, though if you do a little research you will find some compelling accounts of after death communications where loved ones believe they have heard from deceased family members.

I choose to believe there’s more. If one of the greatest escape artists failure to break free from the chains of death portends our lives end in the grave, I could deal with that. After all who be around to worry about it, if you get what I mean.

I remember reading two separate incidents about bear experts killed by bears. Some people suggest these experts grew too confident, or believed they’d become one with the bears and gained acceptance with these enormously powerful animals that possess astonishingly fast reflexes and incredible strength.

Maybe these people were right about the bear experts. I can see where a bear expert could become so fascinated with bears he’d forget the split second dangers just long enough to make a fatal miscalculation. I can see where he could become so focused on a bear’s behavior his survival instincts would recede, like a turtle’s head into its shell, that in the time it takes to draw a breath, a bear could be on him and rip his last breath out of him.

Still, as an acknowledged authority on bears, you’d figure he’s know every nuance of a bear’s behavior. Know how to avoid any, and would have some tricks in his bear bag to save his life in the most dangerous encounters.

Since that wasn’t the case with the bear experts slaughtered by their subjects, there must be something like a Murphy’s Law in bear behavior, some unpredictability that experts cannot fathom, that in seconds can shred decades of bear knowledge and send an expert to his grave.

At an elementary school in Texas, a nine year-old boy hung himself to death in what the police described as an apparent suicide.

Why? Is the obvious question. What would drive a child to suicide? And, why, do you read of so many children killing themselves in this generation? Usually the suicides are tied to bullying. Children who kill themselves because for whatever reasons they can no longer stand the unacceptable abuse, that no child should ever be subjected to.

Maybe this child had emotional problems too big for his small life to handle, and he saw killing himself as the only escape from his private hell. Yet, for a nine year-old just beginning life to even think about ending his existence seems so implausible, so alien to an elementary school kid’s life.

I just hope when these children kill themselves they go to a happier place far beyond whatever miseries forced them out of this life. So sad.

Read an article about third generation robots evolving through “natural selection” and becoming able to hunt prey and help each other in the hunts, according to Swiss researchers.

Is it me, or does this robo revelation bring visions of a possible iRobot on humanity’s uncertain horizon? Robots getting more and more intelligent until they can think, act independently, and work as teams …. and maybe revolt one day like in the worst case robot movie scenarios, near indestructible machines with brains that rampage and slaughter slews of humans.

I’m a bit baffled by how robots start hunting and working as a team through natural selection? Do robots already have an artificial intelligence capable of evolutionary leaps?

I once read the Japanese believe robots have souls. Perhaps, they are right. And perhaps robots have an evolutionary future beyond the confines of metal bodies and electrical circuits with, like humans, the power to choose between good and evil.

In the Catholic faith, it’s presumed a personal God resides in the heavens who answer prayers and has benevolent intentions for his faithful followers. If that presumption is correct, why would this personal God stand by as pedophile priests across the world sexually abused children of the Catholic faith? With patron saints, guardian angels, Mother Mary, and Jesus presumably looking down from the heavens, why did no Divine hand or winged proxy intervene and spare these innocents the ungodly molestations?

And consider the priests, according to the Catholic faith Jesus Christ’s personal representatives on earth. Why did no Divine hand stay their impure impulses to save them from themselves and spare their victims incalculable suffering? And why did these priests, presumably surrounded by graces, immersed in blessings, and called by God to serve, run so afoul of their teachings and any semblance of sanctity?

There are undesirables in the depths of prisons locked away for life who would have intervened to save those children. There are unholy people disdainful of their supposed religious betters who would have stepped in to stop these crimes against children. Yet, no hand on high moved to stop this most heinous sexual abuse of innocents. And many a bishop looked the other way, dispatching pedophile priests to other churches unpunished and free to molest more children.

Some people play the free will card to explain away why a personal God fails to rescue believers from earthly horrors white-collared monsters, but did these children have any free will in being prey for the predatory priests, the assumed earthly representatives of God in heaven?

I have three possible conclusions, you can draw your own: 1. No help on high came for the children because three is none. 2. No personal God exists. 3. If a God lives, it’s an impersonal force, like the Tao, that answers prayers not.

A man in Goshen New York stands accused of having sex with horses, at least 12 times since July.

“This guy makes Michael Vick look like a charter member of PETA’” the Goshen Police Chief remarked.

The accused lived in a room near stables at the New York Historic harness track and would sneak into the stables at night to frolic with the fillies. Can you imagine? Sure, cheap dates. Instead of flowers and chocolates you bring the ladies hay and oats, but, honestly, shagging horses? Sheep I could see, but horses? Okay, I’m kidding about the sheep. I just cannot understand how anyone could have screws so loose he’d get hot to trot over the back end of a harness horse. Are there no females of the human persuasion in Goshen?

What possessed this man, 18 years old, to seek the sexual favors of horses? Why was he unable to rein in his unbridled perversion? Whey didn’t his conscience pony up and say, “This is wrong!”? And where did the authorities get the “12 times since July”? from? Did one of the horses come forth with a written complaint, or did the horse stamp her hoof 12 times on the ground when asked how many times the young man violated her? And will this guy get served some sort of court order to stay at least a mile away from any horses?

By the way, the police caught him on a surveillance camera. Imagine the police sitting him down and playing back the tape. Oh, the embarrassment. I can see him now, the sinking feeling, the sheepish look, his mind searching frantically for excuses. The glory days of being a stallion wanna be reduced to public ridicule and legal problems for being a jackass.

To put a serious spin on a tongue and cheek take of this man’s equestrian sexcapades, maybe his getting caught will lead him into some counseling and cure him of his perversity. Hard knocks often yield dramatic changes.

Can you believe this? In Nairobi slums, elderly women are having to take self defense classes to protect themselves from young men breaking into their homes and raping them.

What enters the brains of young men that possesses them to rape anyone, let alone frail, elderly woman? What in their cerebral circuity overrides the “she’s elderly and should be respected and unharmed” response?

Supposedly, the driving force behind these rapes on old and defenseless women is the fear of AIDs. It’s perceived in Nairobi the elderly don’t have AIDS, and are, therefore, safe targets for sexual abuse. Many old women in the slums live alone, making them easy prey for rapists prowling the streets.

The oldest woman raped was 105 years old. Amazingly, she lived.

The good people of Nairobi are fighting this menace. Organizations like the IWD (I’m Worth Defending) have risen up to do battle with the rapists by training elderly women in self defense skills and referring them to counseling and health services. Their Rape Survivors Anonymous Forum helps victims connect and heal together.

Hopefully, the authorities in Nairobi will crush these abominable rapists and elderly women will live in peace again. Hats off to the IWD for its heroic compassion in action.