Saint-Germain
March 7, 2008 – 1:39 amI've come to the conclusion that the Comte de Saint-Germain was/is a time traveler. As far-fetched as that sounds, it strikes me as the only reasonable (or at least the most interesting) answer.
It satisfies all the criteria of the Saint-Germain mythology:
- Disappears and reappears throughout history.
- Appears alive after his recorded date of death.
- Never appears to age.
- Has knowledge of the future.
- Appears to know everything.
1 and 4 are the most obvious. For 2: his relationship with time is nonlinear - his past can be our future. For 3: again, nonlinear time - 1707 and 1750 can be minutes apart to the traveler. For 5: a good con man can appear to know everything if he knows exactly which subjects will come up for discussion, and which questions will be asked. You might be able to discern those things by going to the "future" and reading up on yourself.
We might even be able to narrow down his time of origin - the most recent sighting of him that I could find (not counting that French nutjob who went on TV) is about 1930. Perhaps he limits himself to years before then for fear of encountering himself. Let's give some leeway and assume there are unreported encounters - arbitrarily, let's assign a cutoff date of 1950. Saint-Germain always appears as a man in his mid-40s; that means the "time base" he's traveling from is the 1990s. Give or take, of course - totally unfounded time travel theory isn't an exact science. Heck, he could be among us right now - he could even be reading this (hi!).
Yeah, this is what I think about on a Thursday night. Maybe I should get a life, or maybe I should just be a time traveler - I think I could run a heck of a racket as a money changer for other time travelers (you're in 1950 with bills printed in 1995? No problem - my rates are reasonable).
area code lookup tool
February 29, 2008 – 5:05 pmFor those of you who might be interested, I've slapped together a little command-line area code lookup tool. It's a really simple couple of scripts using grep to locate what you're searching for. It works on Unix-like systems with bash installed (Linux, OS X, etc).
You can download it here. Follow the enclosed instructions to install and use it.
daydreams
February 27, 2008 – 7:47 pmWe punish ourselves and others so often for daydreaming. Get your head out of the clouds, Mom says. Be practical, Dad says. Daydreaming is antithetical to industry, production, waking life in the western world.
I suspect there are many kinds of animals that daydream, but there are only two I'm certain of: humans and cats. I've known many crazy cats, but the worst of them have always been the ones who have truly lost their minds - they cry all the time, need lots of attention, are afraid of everything or angry at everything. The surest way to make a cat this way is to lock it in a room with no view. Cats need a view of the outside world - they need to see birds, squirrels, people passing, clouds drifting by. Later, when they go after that piece of string, they can play at the notion that this string is actually that bird, or that squirrel. To the cat without a view, a string is just a string.
Every string contains a bird, every mind contains a daydream, every person contains a multitude. They are facts as certain and constant as gravity. You may have gotten your head out of the clouds, but look: the clouds are still there. Imagination, like faith, is never lost - but with hard work, it can be abandoned.
