As I go through life, the depths of my ignorance never cease to amaze me.

For example—-as kids often do—mine will fight with each other on road trips…. As I try my best to keep them separated—I’ll often hear “Dad, MacKenzie is looking at me!!!”

I’ll reply with something like, “Looks don’t hurt—now keep quiet and let me drive!”

Well—turns out I was wrong. Really, really wrong.

Apparently—looks not only can hurt—they can destroy objects!

This story linked here says cosmologists believe “by observing dark energy the universe has been nudged closer to its death .”

It all gets rather complicated—and involves quantum mechanics and physics that require calculations too complicated for me to do on my fingers.

The bottom line is that we apparently are sucking the life out of the universe by using telescopes and such to observe things like dark matter.

As best as I can understand it—it’s kind of like water spilled on a counter top and a paper towel.

The spill stays there until we lay the paper towel on it. The water still exists—but it’s now sucked into the paper towel instead of being on the counter top.

The same thing is apparently happening in space when we look at objects. We suck up their photons—slowly draining them of their existance in their present state…

Now— the good news is that we’re not going to kill the universe tomorrow.

We’ve got a couple of YAZILLION epochs before it occurs.

(In case you’ve run out of fingers, that’s more than a milliondy-trilliondy-gazilliondy years)

So, we’ve got enough time left to accomplish what needs to be done in our lives.

In my case—that means finding a way to get the kids to ride quietly in the back of the van so I won’t miss that turn we were supposed to make 2 miles back….

—Steve

Regular readers of these posts have probably come to the conclusion that although I was born at night—I wasn’t born last night…

But, despite the copious amounts of birthday cake I have ingested to mark the passing years—there are still some things I just don’t understand…

For example:

Puzzlement #1

I know Hillary Clinton spent a lot of time in the White House—and she is trying to get back there again… But, as this link shows, she was recently quoted as saying she is “excited to be the first woman president”..

Now, I’m no expert—but isn’t there supposed to be a contest or election or something to actually CHOOSE the president? She’s talking like she’s ALREADY running things…

Now maybe it’s a misquote on the reporter’s part—or a misspeak on her part.

Maybe she meant she was HOPING to be the first woman president.

Or TRYING to be the first woman president…

Or maybe they held the election and I just missed it..I dunno..

PUZZLEMENT #2

This link details a story about how ABC network is hiring actors to run around Birmingham, Alabama to pretend they are gay while shooting video of people’s reactions to them….

I have NO IDEA why ABC would do a dumb thing like this…Maybe because all the writers are on strike—they’re just throwing actors out on the street and saying “make up a TV show for us! Hurry up! It’s Sweeps week!”

PUZZLEMENT #3

There’s a strange new drug kids are using… This link takes you to a story that explains how kids in Florida are using the smell of human waste to get high…

In my house—when that certain “aroma” is detected by my kids—they run for the air freshener—and spend the next few minutes holding their noses….

I can’t imagine anyone willingly trying to inhale that smell…

I guess these 3 things are among the great mysteries of the universe—mysteries that I’m just too stupid to understand…

—Steve

Link here to the story Steve covered today on NBC-17