A Rain of Frogs

Once, a long time ago, the web design company I was working for was exhibiting at a dot com trade show in the Sheraton hotel in Toronto. Anyone who’s been in the industry long enough to remember Netscape 2 will know what I’m talking about, but we had to do it anyway.

Exhibitors parked on P3, which was way far underground. At the end of the show, we packed up out booth and loaded it into my very awesome 1983 VW Rabbit Diesel, and started the long spiral up the ramp to ground level. The exit to the parking garage is a fairly steep ramp that goes right up to the sidewalk, where it levels out.

I was driving and came up the ramp far too quickly in a rush to get home after a brutally dull day nobbing with sweaty sales folk, only remembering at the very last second to slam on the brakes inches from the pedestrian on the sidewalk at the top of the ramp.

This pedestrian turned to look at me, slamming his hands down on the hood of the car, quite possibly to create the right mood for the glaring look he gave me. After several seconds of this, he put his hands back in his pockets, turned, and continued on, presumably to his destination.

I was still stunned, partly from the glare and partly from the proximity to sales people, and remained stationary for quite some time. Eventually, the person sitting beside me in the passenger seat, a guy named Ben but affectionately known as “Bend” for his sickening servitude to the company owner turned to looked at me and said “Dude, you could have been famous. Why’d you stop? You almost killed Kiefer Sutherland!”

verb

1 Turn down, refuse, decline, say no to, spurn.
2 Rebuff, spurn, shun, snub, repudiate, cast off/aside, discard, abandon, desert, turn one’s back on, have nothing (more) to do with, wash one’s hands of, brush off.

noun

1 Substandard, discard, second.
2 Failure, loser, incompetent

None of the verbs has really been done to me. Not really, in the true sense. None of the nouns seem to apply, though a couple of them had resonance points dangerously close to my heart strings.

I don’t feel bad about being excluded. I feel bad that the need to exclude was there in the first place. Take from this what you want, since you’re reading this, it probably wasn’t directed at you.

Is it your fault a little girl
dressed as the statue of liberty
is on her hands and knees on the floor
of a sumptuous leather-bound office

she’s choking on the scepter of
progress pushed down her throat
by Mr. Industry in front of her with
steely eyes and oily hair and pants undone

who is shaking hands with a bloated
old white man with jowls who keeps
telling the girl he loves her and keeps calling her
Jenny because he’s forgotten her real name

no price is too high to ensure the march of progress
in the land of the free and the home of the brave
everyone is entitled to pursue happiness
but only the rich can afford to achieve it. ☿

Can a human being ever be truly random? While we are all aware that computers can only ever make an attempt at simulating randomness in their relentlessly digital way, humans are the pinnacle of complex analogue machines, and should therefore be completely capable of authentically random action.

Food for thought, to be sure. I am going to follow a rather twisty thought process here for a moment, so bear with me. It might be messy. I am going to postulate that not only are humans incapable of random action, but that there is no such thing as random except as a logical concept (like zero).

It is possible (but difficult in many cases) to ascertain the probability of something happening as a ratio, and in fact some brilliant quantum mechanic has pretty much determined the probability of everything (I can’t back this up with an online link, but it was done to determine the maximum number of universes possible in the “Many universes” theory).

You could, in theory, figure out the likelihood of my continued rape of the comma, or my enslavement of parentheses. You probably have enough statistical data at this point.

If everything has a probability that is less than 1:infinity, then can anything be random? Unlikely, for sure, but not truly random, right? One can calculate the odds of someone killing someone else, or the odds of someone committing suicide, or the odds of someone falling in love with someone else, because it is less than infinite.

It got messy, as I said it might. I’m not sure what to make of randomness. I know the appearance of randomness can be achieved, but I lack the statistical mathematics to back up the idea that true randomness is unachievable.

But I managed to get you to read to the end of the post, just like I knew i would. ☿

Picture the scene: An Air France Airbus A-340, one of the largest planes to ply the skies, crashes at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. It slides off the runway, across a field, and into a river ravine, where it bursts into flames.

Three hundred and nine people survive the crash – everyone on board in fact. None of the injuries were serious. A genuine miracle, in my opinion. Maybe they can canonize the late pope now.

I swear, it took the news stations 12 seconds – count them, twelve! – to use the phrase “nine-eleven.” Yes. The very first sentence uttered by the anchor on Canada’s largest television network made a reference to an attack on New York city four years ago.

What the hell? The only thing the two incidents had in common were fire and the involvement of an airplane! This is like including a mention of tourism in the Sahara desert in a piece about cancer treatment (the sun causes skin cancer, you know).

When are people going to move on? Other countries have terrorist attacks daily. Britons moved on the day after their terrorist attacks. Unlike Americans, who preached resolve but couldn’t muster it, everyone else moves on.

The terrorists have already won in America. You can tell by the fact that every tragedy since – from a four car accident to a plane crash in a different country – has reminded them of September 11, 2001. ☿