Did it never rain?
For the past 18 years I've been sitting in church listening to self-professed Bible 'know-it-alls' ranting about among other things how the Earth, The Blue Marble, cannot be more than 6000 years old. In addition I sat there open mouthed listening to them say that it never rained before Noah's time on Earth. The entire congregation agreeably nodding their heads up and down shouting: "PREACH!" and "AMEN TO THAT BROTHER except for me, thinking "SHADDAP" ...and "BULLSHIT!"
No rain. Lets give that a think. The atmosphere, the stuff in which we breathe and live in is made up of 5 layers decreasing in temperature from the surface to the exosphere, the layer closest to outer space. On an ideal day the temperature decreases from 59 degrees F on the surface, 3.5 degrees F every 1000 ft. Doing the math at some point up there in the first layer, the troposphere, water vapor hits its dew point and becomes visible. It was never explained to me from the pulpit what they may have called that visible moisture back then. Today we call it a cloud. We know as a fact that without clouds there cannot be any rain. It now follows that we can safely say, if what I've been listening to for 18 years is true, that there were no clouds before Noah.
If there were no clouds then how can it be that water never reached that level in the atmosphere; the height at which water vapor becomes visible? Evaporation never existed? or there were no large bodies of water to evaporate. Without evaporation air conditioning didn't exist. Now there is something that I can believe because I lived as a child without airconditioning because it wasn't invented yet and believe me it was heck on Earth. I digress.
Without evaporation it is believable that there could have been large bodies of water on Earth. They simply defied Gods laws of physics and never evaporated. There are two possibilities here: No evaporation or no large bodies of water i.e. oceans.
First lets explore the evaporation angle. No evaporation meant that no one worked and we know that's not true because God said they would have to earn their keep by( dare I say it? "The sweat of their brow") working as he was kicking their disobedient butts out of Paradise, or if they did the Earth was so cold that they couldn't sweat. Lets follow that for a minute. So it was Paradise on Earth in Eden, but just outside: Ice Age? Sweat is what keeps the body cool. When water evaporates it absorbs heat. Its called the latent heat of evaporation. By sweating a person's surface temperature is cooled by the sweat evaporating and carrying away heat with it from the body surface. So lets say the Earth was covered with ice and everyone toiled on the ice without sweating. Ice Age. That's a fact isn't it? So now here is Noah's ancestors toiling away doing what ever they did then to stay vertical. Somewhere they must have had shelter from the elements, caves, igloos..whatever. Its a safe bet that necessity being the mother of invention, someone invented fire. Noah's grand dad to Noah's grand mom. "Hon, that fire is awfully hot in here and its making my clothes wet. Can you crank it down a log or two or I'm gonna have to take some clothes off 'cause Baby its just too damned hot in here."
At some point in all those thousands of years between Adam and Noah someone must have got, somehow, overheated. Were the pulpit people actually saying to me that no one ever got over heated for some reason or another? Even by following Gods orders of going forth and populating the Earth, by making little cavepersons? I know for a fact that people can get over heated making little cavepersons. I got all sweaty in a dugout once on a hot night..never mind. So instead of cooling the body by sweating they had to run outside and jump in the snow? What a bummer that must have been.
Now the no large bodies of water to evaporate tack: No oceans. Duh? No fish. No fish, no fishing, no boats, no swimming, no diving... this is beginning to sound like a lifeguard sign at a military recreation area. Back to no fish. What did our ancestors live on? Ice Age so no veggies. Polar bears? What did they eat? Seals who hadn't learned to eat fish yet because there were no oceans or didn't know how to swim because..fill in the blanks yourself.
So logically there had to be oceans. Without oceans there is no life. Man is 70% water and 30% bullcrap. Except for pulpit preachers insisting that it never rained before Noah. They are indeed unique among men: 0% water and 100% bullcrap.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Shit Hot
The origin of the saying is unknown, but merits pondering.. Early man would have noticed that his/her feces was only body temperature and not actually hot so the saying probably didn’t come from him. No, with one exceptional possibility, the saying most certainly must have come into existence after the invention of fire.
Adam and Eve probably didn’t invent fire nor was it in existence in the Garden or shortly after they got kicked out. Now consider this. Adam takes a dump on a flat rock one hot summer day. Leaves to attend to his nashing of teeth. Eve happens by to see steam hissing from Adam’s sun hot leavings. Eve very well may have been the World’s first pervert. I mean there are people who get turned on by feces and their lineage certainly leads back to the Original Aboriginals. Here is the possibility of not only the beginnings of vocal communication but indeed, the first words. Eve points at the steaming pile whilst enthusiastically yelling in her Neanderthal Mid-Eastern dialect: “Shiia tot!”, loosely mimicking the sound of the steam, hissing and popping on the hot rock. It logically follows that after a few generations of Eve screwing all her relatives that ‘Shiia tot’ could have possibly evolved to Shit Hot.
That considered lets move on. Suppose there were no really hot days back then. Under that supposition we must conclude that the expression emerged after Adam’s time. Sometime between Adam and Noah, fire must surely have been discovered. We are talking a lot of time here because by the time Noah shows up the Earth is covered with animals and people who still don’t know how to act with God in process of ending their days, and he did say that the next time he destroys the Earth he will do it with fire. Noah most certainly must have known about fire because he would have had to use pitch to seal his boat and pitch is heated tar. Now there’s a thought. Would he actually have called it pitch or tar? Back then he may not have had a word for pitch just like Eve’s bewilderment with Adams steaming pile. What use would there have been for the sticky stuff? No one else had boats because according to the fundamental interpretation of the Bible, it had never rained so there was little use for a water sealant such as tar. (No rain means no large bodies of water to evaporate or contrary to the laws of physics: no evaporation. Lets think that one through in another tome.)Now Noah is building a giant boat and sealing it with his unknown sticky stuff. For lack of a better utterance did he call it shit? Picture Noah returning from lunch one day and vaguely pondering a long-forgotten word , asks his kids, who he had tasked with heating the pitch : Shit hot? This makes sense because the hot pitch is a good thing. It means that it is ready to pour in the seams between the planks of the boat. What would their answer be? No Pop, Shit cold? Noah would have interpreted that as either a typical teen-age sarcastic response, or they hadn’t been attending to the task he had set before them before leaving for lunch. Shit cold never made it into the lexicon so chances are they responded enthusiastically: “Shit Hot!”
This could have caught on quickly because the sooner the tar was ready the sooner they would leave for lunch. No there was obviously no money in Shit Cold. Shit Hot became the call sign for success. There is a remote possibility that pitch and shit came to be used interchangeably. FF to two nerd engineers and like all nerds realize they are such but can barely help themselves. “Jeepers Herby. Your warp speed idea is really swell..er shit hot. Lets pitch it to the boss.” The boss has three ways to respond: “Rootie Kazootie fellas! This idea of your is really swell..er I mean Shit Hot! or Are you shitting me a load of pitch? Or pitching me a load of shit?” Either way this “shit hot” idea of yours will never fly.” From boiling tar to manufacturing Jet airplanes, shit hot has survived as a graphic description of something exciting.
Adam and Eve probably didn’t invent fire nor was it in existence in the Garden or shortly after they got kicked out. Now consider this. Adam takes a dump on a flat rock one hot summer day. Leaves to attend to his nashing of teeth. Eve happens by to see steam hissing from Adam’s sun hot leavings. Eve very well may have been the World’s first pervert. I mean there are people who get turned on by feces and their lineage certainly leads back to the Original Aboriginals. Here is the possibility of not only the beginnings of vocal communication but indeed, the first words. Eve points at the steaming pile whilst enthusiastically yelling in her Neanderthal Mid-Eastern dialect: “Shiia tot!”, loosely mimicking the sound of the steam, hissing and popping on the hot rock. It logically follows that after a few generations of Eve screwing all her relatives that ‘Shiia tot’ could have possibly evolved to Shit Hot.
That considered lets move on. Suppose there were no really hot days back then. Under that supposition we must conclude that the expression emerged after Adam’s time. Sometime between Adam and Noah, fire must surely have been discovered. We are talking a lot of time here because by the time Noah shows up the Earth is covered with animals and people who still don’t know how to act with God in process of ending their days, and he did say that the next time he destroys the Earth he will do it with fire. Noah most certainly must have known about fire because he would have had to use pitch to seal his boat and pitch is heated tar. Now there’s a thought. Would he actually have called it pitch or tar? Back then he may not have had a word for pitch just like Eve’s bewilderment with Adams steaming pile. What use would there have been for the sticky stuff? No one else had boats because according to the fundamental interpretation of the Bible, it had never rained so there was little use for a water sealant such as tar. (No rain means no large bodies of water to evaporate or contrary to the laws of physics: no evaporation. Lets think that one through in another tome.)Now Noah is building a giant boat and sealing it with his unknown sticky stuff. For lack of a better utterance did he call it shit? Picture Noah returning from lunch one day and vaguely pondering a long-forgotten word , asks his kids, who he had tasked with heating the pitch : Shit hot? This makes sense because the hot pitch is a good thing. It means that it is ready to pour in the seams between the planks of the boat. What would their answer be? No Pop, Shit cold? Noah would have interpreted that as either a typical teen-age sarcastic response, or they hadn’t been attending to the task he had set before them before leaving for lunch. Shit cold never made it into the lexicon so chances are they responded enthusiastically: “Shit Hot!”
This could have caught on quickly because the sooner the tar was ready the sooner they would leave for lunch. No there was obviously no money in Shit Cold. Shit Hot became the call sign for success. There is a remote possibility that pitch and shit came to be used interchangeably. FF to two nerd engineers and like all nerds realize they are such but can barely help themselves. “Jeepers Herby. Your warp speed idea is really swell..er shit hot. Lets pitch it to the boss.” The boss has three ways to respond: “Rootie Kazootie fellas! This idea of your is really swell..er I mean Shit Hot! or Are you shitting me a load of pitch? Or pitching me a load of shit?” Either way this “shit hot” idea of yours will never fly.” From boiling tar to manufacturing Jet airplanes, shit hot has survived as a graphic description of something exciting.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)