Change the Channel

So here I go again with a new blog page. Myspace and Facebook had been good to me so far. I'll have to link or archive those ones here somehow. But I wanted a change of scenery. And possibly a slightly larger readership. You'll probably find my page fairly Spartan. I'm a fairly Spartan person. Besides, when I write, I like to convey an idea or thought, not a fancy-smancy links page to everything you could dream of all over the internet. Do your own surfing. There's nothing quite like the feeling of a smooth crisp sheet of paper under your hand waiting for that first smudge of ink to mar it. It has a few problems, though. Distribution for one. The fact that it doesn't remain a smooth, crisp, clean piece of paper very long for another. Other's not being able to read my teacher's scrawl for another.

I'm turning a corner in my life, being finished with school (as of next Wednesday evening) so I thought perhaps it would be a good idea to take on a new challenge with this page. I won't lie to myself or to you and say I'm going to write here every day. I won't. Keep your goals realistic, they say. After work or school and all the million things that need to be done in a day, this is a secondary thing. Still, I would like to project a somewhat professional version of myself to the outside world and maybe even score myself a sweet writing gig out of it (not likely but let me dream). Truth be told, this isn't going to look all that professional anyway. I don't habitually edit my own work. Nor do I often research what I say. It's just opinion and observation like any other blog. I'll post whatever comes to mind that I would like to talk about from essays to fictional vignettes to scribbles of stories and anything in between. I lead a fairly dull life so assume a certain amount of generalizing, opinion, and fiction.

You want to know a little about me? Not much to tell, to be honest. A hard working baker with delusions of grandeur and an ego to match. A gentleman and a scholar. A hack of all trades and a master of none. Did the backpacking thing, did the work thing, did the university thing, about to do the work thing some more. Been writing since my early teens. Influenced by Hemingway. Have a bad habit of omitting pronouns (and using too many parentheses). Like to travel. Hate stupidity about the most common things. They teach left and right in kindergarten, make a point of learning it before coming near me, please. Don't know much about setting up webpages so bear with me. Link here if you like though headers and layouts are bound to change. Feel free to make comments or suggestions. If there is anything you need to know, just ask. I'm an open book. I love a good debate. Please keep in mind however, these are just my opinions and not usually quantifiable fact. And be civil. Though I am not bound to those rules.

Thanks for tuning in. See you next time, same Foxx time... well, you get the picture.

Uh-Oh, SpaghettiOs (R)

Imagine if you will, a hole in the universe just a few kilometres across. This hole isn't exactly a hole. It has it's own existence of a kind. It is spherical, like a planet. Only there is no planet there. It has as much mass as several of our suns. You can't see it and if you shone a light at it, you would merely see ring around the object as light bends around it and comes back to you. If you were on the doorstep of the hole, turned your head 90 degrees and shone a light directly in front of you face but away from you, the image you would see would be the back of your own head. How's that for mind bending?

A black hole is where time stops and light hits a brick wall at 300,000 km/s. Well, not really. Time never stops. Nor does anything make light come to a halt. But both are meaningless to the hole. It eats them for a light breakfast. Yet strange things happen. If time and space are different aspects of the same thing (relatively), then a hole in space must also be a hole in time. But not one in which you can travel through. Aside from the gravity ripping you apart, where the hell else in time are you going to go?

The event horizon. The point of no return. There must be a point of return, also. A finite line in infinite space. This it the point at which you can stick you foot in and not notice anything untowards. Nothing untowards, that is, until you try and get your foot back out. It's still there. Still attatched to you. The nerve impulses are still firing. The blood still flowing. However, within a few seconds of sticking your foot in, your foot is several hundred thousands kilometres long and getting longer by the millisecond. The nerve impulses don't move fast enough to make it back up your leg. The blood that flows in will never flow out. My physics professor says you can live - theoretically - for three years in this state, before the tidal forces of the swirling mass tear you to less than atoms. To you it would feel like eternity in freefall. This is the point at which gravity is so much stronger on your foot than on your head, that you become what astronomers so scientifically call "spaghettified." You get sucked into a long noodle. Still human, still alive, still in one piece. But millions of kilometres long.

I find this a little disturbing. Not so much the spaghetti thing, but there simply being holes in space. Holes that are made of nothing but contain all the makings of small galaxies and lord knows what else. Much of it's compostion, one assumes, must be anit-matter and anti-energy. But we have no idea what those things are. Where do these infinitely large yet minutely (on a universal scale) contained holes go? Are they the big bangs of other universes? Do they go anywhere? Is the universe full of holes pouring into itself, the black holes worm holes that suck matter from one point and dump it into another? What happens if two black holes collide? Do they simply converge making one even bigger hole? Or does the bigger one eat the smaller one, the anti-matter in one swallowing the anti-matter in the other creating... matter? Anti-anti-matter? These are the questions that plague me in the dark when I'm trying to sleep. What do you think about when you eat your SpaghettiOs?