I believe we should take a moment every so often to consider the two most telling aspects of our existence: Where and when, or place and time.


You’re thinking, “Don’t you mean Minkowski space or Einstein’s Spacetime? And what about matter and energy? You know that E= mc^2 formula everyone knows? You think you know more than the physicists? Humbly, I’ll say, “No, I don’t know more, but for everyone matter and energy always exist in some ‘place’ at some definite time.”


What Is Place?


By “place” I mean any part of the Cosmos that has affected humans directly or indirectly or that has been affected by humans or human consciousness. “Place” is space that has a history of meaning: Your neighborhood, the Gettysburg battlefield on which the fate of a nation was determined or the waters off Midway where the 1942 battle doomed the Japanese to defeat within a matter of minutes, the Acropolis that symbolizes an epitome of human intellectual achievement, or the location you associate with some success or failure. Place is personal—on both an individual and a collective basis. Although I have never visited it, I have a relationship with the Sea of Tranquility born from my watching Armstrong and Aldrin bounce over its surface. I might say the same for sites the Mars rovers tracked and photographed and for the black hole Sagittarius A that astronomers imaged with the Event Horizon Telescope and the technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI. Through the eyes of others and through technology many locations throughout the Cosmos have become “places” for me.


It’s place that generates deja vu, place that encapsulates a time in your past. Every place has character that is a combination of a physical environment and an experience within that environment. Let me emphasize: Place is more than its physical attributes. In fact, we recognize some places for the experiences of many who preceded us. It isn’t just the physicality of the site, it’s what happened or happens there both in reality and in imagination, or what we anticipate to happen like a good time at the beach, a win at the slots, or a victory over a rival school on the home team’s field. All places have “character,” but some seem somehow to have a richer character, and among those are the places in our personal histories. Ambience isn’t estranged from time; it is time’s safety deposit box. You can revisit a time only because you have a key to the box in your brain’s vault. The key to place is the key to time.


That place embodies personal time is important to me. As the frontispiece of this website asks, “Can you think of ten minutes ago without thinking of place?”


It is this question that drove me to assume a priority of place over time in the human mind. “When I was in elementary school”; “When I was in high school”; “When I had my first job”: All these and similar statements, such as “When I was ten…” conjure images of you in some place, in some physical circumstance. Even if you have experienced one of those rare “out-of-body” moments, you still localize it.”* Every such psychedelic or hallucinogenic experience occurs “in a place,” often seen from a hovering position: You as a drone looking down on you as a person in a place. Think actress Shirley MacLaine meditating on some mountain and suddenly finding herself “observing herself” and then writing a book about it. That journey she took to various sites she visited on her quest for identity began in a place. MacLaine wrote in Out on a Limb that “...Looking back, I can say that making that simple, lazy afternoon decision to visit an unusual bookstore [the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood] was one of the most important decisions of my life.” I’m guessing that the bookstore subsequently became a secular shrine for some of MacLaine’s fans who elevated a particular space to a particular place (imbued with meaning).


It isn’t the time—whatever definition you have of that—but the place that is tangible in the present, or that seems to be tangible in retrospect. And memories of that “ten minutes ago” or “dozens of years ago” can, just as Marcel Proust described in his multi volume Remembrance of Things Past, come from some present day physical experience, such as that smell and taste of a madeleine dipped into tea that led to Proust’s retracing paths like Swann’s Way he knew as a child, a journey not to a disembodied existence, but to a place, specifically Combray (AKA Illiers or Illiers-Combray).


Isn’t that experience common? Anecdote warning; dive, dive, dive…


About a week ago my daughter visited with the specific intention of making me a batch pizzelles, the flat patterned cookies associated with Abruzzo in central Italy and dating back to the 8th century BC. She had kept the waffle-like pizzelle iron that belonged to my mother and the recipe I knew as a child.


As she stacked up the fresh waffle-like pizzelles, the smell of anise began to suffuse my home’s atmosphere as the rising Sun spreads its glow over the dawn sky, rosy fingered as Homer wrote. The anise time machine wafted me to my mother’s fifties-style red formica-countered kitchen. And in the ethereal realm of memory I saw myself, maybe 11 or 12, standing by the gas stove and holding the long handles of the manual waffle iron my mother sometimes delegated me to use before she bought an electric version. A blob of the dough pressed by the manual iron turned into a pizzelle by guesswork and experience: “Donald, put about this much in the iron, hold it over the flame on one side, then flip the iron to do the other side.” It was painstaking work a little boy could accept with the anticipated joy of eating pizzelles and any peripheral cookie matter that oozed out the side of the iron, an excess I broke off and crunched when I stacked the central disks on a plate. Because my mother made pizzelles rather regularly after she entered the age of Edison with an electric pizzelle iron, her house often welcomed any visitor with a slight smell of anise that eventually, I assumed, infused itself in the walls and furniture just as the smell of Schaller’s Fine Bakery used to hang in the dewy morning air above the sidewalk outside the yellow brick building where I peddled my bike slowly just to linger in the hovering smell of fresh bread on my way to see friends. ** Place, not time, reader; place, not time, is primary.
    
Alpha

Are there exceptions to the primacy of place? Well, beginnings seem especially important to us, and we are fond of acts that symbolize the commencement of something new, like breaking ground for a building, all the dignitaries holding gold-plated shovels on which a little dirt covers the tip just at least for the brief moment required for the local newspaper’s photographer to snap a photo: “Everyone say ‘Dig,’ please.” But the most important beginning for each of us is that alpha moment we cannot associate with any place.

The first “first” in our lives we did not imprint on memory. I cannot expect a description or narrative from you if I say, “Think of that first moment of life, your personal beginning in birth as you arrive like a space alien landing on an unfamiliar planet you have subsequently come to call ‘home.’” Unlike you, however, the space alien could describe an arrival because it (he? she?) came from a place already imprinted and ready for comparison. We arrived with nothing to compare, so that birthplace of yours and mine never embedded itself in long term memory in a brain that had no reference place; and thus, the moment itself is gone because you can’t generate from the reference vacuum. Maybe some ideas and ways of thinking are a priori, but a specific time isn’t. Infancy is a timeless time, isn’t it? In late toddler years, placelessness and timelessness are supplanted by the experiences in places that make time incarnate. After that first lost childhood memory, you might in Proustian detail recall the places where you later celebrated the anniversaries of that long forgotten (or never remembered) birth. “We went to Chuck E. Cheese for my tenth birthday.” “I had a party in my house for my eleventh birthday.”  “I met friends at Sam’s Bar for my twenty-first.” “I just sat facing a blank wall at home lamenting my fortieth.”

Don’t many subsequent firsts tie time to place? The place where you met, the place where you got engaged (“Direct your attention to the Jumbotron above the left field stands”), the place where you got hitched (Pachabel’s Canon in D echoing in the background), and all those other “firsts” and the places where they occurred. All those “times” forever (whatever that means for a finite being) affixed by places. Yes, beginnings occur in places, and it’s only the limitation of human development that erases memories of early years until the conscious mind can retrieve them from the hippocampus. I might ask, “What’s your earliest memory? What’s that alpha moment?” I’m betting it’s not time sans place. The only times sans place for you lie forever buried in a young brain with no recollection, in neurons without memory imprints, synapses connecting nothing before that gradual awakening of self awareness, a baby exploring hands and feet, then mother, and crib, and room, and house, and neighborhood, and town…With one exception: that very first memory of yours of you doing something in a place with walls, or trees, or mother…Search your memories now.

Don’t fret over your inability to remember your birth. That’s a cosmic condition. Your birth might not shelter in your accessible memories, but others can remember it for you. There were older humans around to witness it. But the FIRST OF ALL FIRSTS, no one remembers. In no place—and therefore in no time— the universe arose from a singularity surmised to have been smaller than a proton. The event some 13.8 billion years ago can’t be captured even by WMAP, COBE, or JWST. It lies in unremembered past just like your birth. Having been in no place, it now occupies all places, making each of us the center of the universe with the only memory of it lying in the Cosmic Microwave Background at 2.72548±0.00057 K. Hot birth fading into cold radiation.

In Medias Res

In a frequently used plot development, an author begins a story in the middle of things, then retraces the background story forward to fill in the gaps. We know the technique because it’s as old as the Iliad and the Odyssey. It’s used in many TV detective stories, the detective seen behind bars in the opening scene, the ensuing scene defined by the caption “Ten days ago…” with the subsequent unfolding of the tale to the opening scene. If you were to start today writing that autobiography to lend permanence to your legacy, you might ask, “How did I get to this point?” as a segue to “It all began when I first met Sally on that bench in Central Park. Little did I then know how that chance meeting would lead to my sitting in this office today.”


Well, right now, with no definitive omega moment in sight, you assume you are in medias res, “in the middle of things” between the known things in your past places and the unknown in some future places. But are you actually in an interminable middle? Your finiteness ensures nothing but its inevitable end. You really don’t know that this moment won’t be your omega moment. Not to frighten you, but your horoscope warns you“to look before you cross a busy street today,” and for you to avoid walking down a dark alley in Bagdad or to avoid using your phone to text while you drive. You might run into a handsome or beautiful stranger today, but you don’t want to actually run into him or her.

Of course, knowing what is a “middle time” in your life is nothing more than awareness of your present. “Middle” presupposes a “before” and an “after.” You might note “before,” and after for schooling, a particular job, or a relationship in retrospect, but not during. You distinguish a “before” and “now,” both characterized by the places that mark them, but not a definitive “middle” until there is an “after,” or omega moment. Trust me on this; I cannot in my early eighties think there won’t be mid-eighties, late eighties, nineties, or a brief moment when I hold the current position of being “the world’s oldest person,” a title that I think I would prefer to replace with “the world’s second oldest person.” Everyone who reaches that oldest age pinnacle is destined to relinquish that position, usually shortly after reaching it.


Middle? I don’t think anyone in the Middle Ages thought he was in “the middle.” Sure, one could be aware of a past, but that only put one in the present. It’s only in retrospect that any of us can note some time we spent in some place that had a before and an after.

Omega Times in Omega Places: The Second Law of Thermodynamics in Action

Then there’s that omega moment that the world’s oldest person will reach. The grand finale in a place TBD. It might be a cushy venue by which others, and not you, associate time and place. You don’t need me to tell you that such a moment will come; deep down you know it even if you cannot visualize yourself experiencing it. You cannot say like Christ, “Before Abraham was, I am.” Nor can you say “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” Nor even like Yahweh, “I Am Who Am,” a statement of timelessness and placelessness. A statement of pure existence itself. Being Itself. Being that by fiat wills beings into being.

Your omega moment is inevitable. It will occur in a place, and it will, as much as we surmise, precede an eternity in “no place,” at least in no place like all the places you have used to mark your finite existence. Given the mystery centered on that last moment before you enter a placeless eternity, I cannot argue that you will not carry the memory of that place into forever or find yourself like Shirley MacLaine reliving all those “middle” moments that once lay between the alpha and omega moments of your life, memories that only arise deja vu in the mind of a “reincarnated you” embodied in a slug or another Shirley MacLaine.

Time’s a tough nut to crack. Brilliant St. Augustine of Hippo said he knew what time was until someone asked him what it was. Is time merely our accounting of the amount of entropy in our lives, the organized stuff diffusing into disorder? Is it an accounting of those moments when we discovered a new order in thoughts or circumstances, such moments punctuating the inevitable dominance of disorder? If the entire universe is headed inexorably toward higher entropy, locally, it isn’t, right? Let me explain.

I’m in the process of replacing the degraded shingles on my roof with a metal roof that’s predicted to last 50 years. As the new roof decays into disorder through wind and ice damage and oxidation, I’ll witness some of the entropy, but I have no illusions about being around at age 130 to replace it and establish a new ordering. Things fall apart, and we put them back together for another go round. Or, we replace them in whole or part. Their decay and the moment of our restoration we mark by duration and instant. Not far from my house is Century Inn, a hotel and tavern on the country’s first National Road that opened in 1794. But a few years ago it caught fire, so the more than 200 year-old hotel that had hosted James K. Polk, General Santa Anna, Marquis de Lafayette, Albert Gallatin, David Bradford, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson had to close for extensive repairs to restore its former glory. Is it time that destroys, or entropy, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics mandates? Before the fire and restoration one could walk on creaking wooden floors, the process of decay taking two centuries, the fire taking an hour or two, the restoration two to three years. The inn is now ready to weather two more centuries.

Back to the Middle

Are you and I in “the middle” as the Mesozoic was sandwiched between the Paleozoic and the Cenozoic or in tighter frame, the Jurassic sandwiched between Triassic and Cretaceous? Yes and no. Maybe you and I are in the middle of things if the planet is 4.5 billion years old and it lasts to its predicted end 4.5 billion years hence. We ride the seesaw by sitting directly over the fulcrum. On one side of us from closer to farther along the board sit Egyptians making pyramids, unknown people making Gobekli Tepe, the Neanderthals going extinct 40,000 years ago and sequentially farther along the board to T-Rex, to trilobites long before dinosaurs, to the first microbes long before trilobites, to microbes long before before multicellular life and the places where they dwelt in Hadean time. That one side of the seesaw is heavy with past life! On the other side sit potentials—life yet to be. So, are we in the middle? The answer is “probably,”maybe,” or “no” because we don’t know what comes after this. If nothing comes after this, then this, dear reader, this is the end and the middle was 2.25 billion years ago during the middle of the Great Oxidation Event.

No really, is this the middle? What if we considered a larger framework, the history and unfolding of the Cosmos? Well, we can make an educated guess. The Cosmos as a whole might be headed for cold diffusion, high entropy, but locally, it will undergo reordering as Andromeda and the Milky Way merge, forming a new ordered entity, a larger galaxy. The time frame for that reordering is billions of years, but that duration is a pinprick on the universe’s drive to diffusion, a process that might take more than one hundred trillion years—give or take a week. Too long to comprehend, anyway.

On the grander scale of the Cosmos, saying that we are in the “Middle of Things” makes little sense in view of the universe’s estimated 100 trillion+ years till it ends. The approximate 14 billion-year age of the universe is a mere 0.00014% of the predicted lifespan of the universe. The biggest omega moment is beyond our comprehension. And to think! It will be on a cosmic scale either a gradual or accelerating end of all places and time.

That Omega Sentence
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As usual, your insights will serve you better than mine. I hope I provided you with an adequate point of departure.


*Silvia Bünning and Olaf Blanke:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079612305500244


**Schaller’s Fine Bakery is closed now robbing future young bike riders of the experience of smelling freshly baked bread on the sidewalk and street outside. But then, in an age of indoor children holed up with electronics, how many would be out riding bikes?

The appearance of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in February, 2025’s night sky * draws to mind the coincidental (?) conjunction of bizarre incidents in human affairs: Murderers lionized, rapists in schools and women supporting rapists, religious leaders in sin, and other tales too numerous to list. Bizarre because some of us humans have juxtaposed in our brains good and bad, smart and stupid, weak and strong, and just and unjust without commonsense judgment.


You Decide the Appropriate Juxtaposition


My paired opposites aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive categories. In fact, I’m not sure that any of the examples below fit neatly in those listed or in some other sets of categories. You’ve seen the news. Do the following have you scratching your head?


Luigi Could Open a Successful Pizza Restaurant


Take the Luigi Mangione stories. Up for trial on a murder charge for killing a healthcare executive in an act that was captured on street video, Luigi has garnered fans, some of them rabid followers who have not only praised him for killing but also sent him money for legal fees. Luigi has become somewhat of a heartthrob and trendsetter. His female admirers want date him, and his male admirers want to buy and wear the style of loafers he wore into court. * Huh? Is this an example of waIking a mile in someone else's shoes? I find the attraction and mimicry a bit bizarre; maybe you don’t. I’m also puzzled by the women attracted to him, finding all reminiscent of Leidy Figueroa, a woman Joran Van der Sloot met, impregnated, and married in prison. Recall that Van der Sloot became infamous for Natalee Holloway’s disappearance in Aruba before he moved to Peru to murder another girl. He eventually confessed to Holloway’s murder. What went through Leidy’s mind? “Well, maybe he killed two women, but that makes him all the more attractive.” Anyway, like Van der Sloot, Luigi is inundated by messages from admirers. Call me narrow-minded, but, again, I find bizarre the mental and emotional stability of women who want to marry murderers. In our bizarre world some dismiss murder because they dissociate themselves from the loss of life, the pain of relatives, and the reality of blood spurting from the body of a once fully aware human. And for what? Does lust override empathy and commonsense and fog the mind, concealing that such relationships can foreshadow more violence and killing?


It ain’t just women. A also bizarre, the desire of some to imitate Luigi with full knowledge that he was caught. A mimicking perp sprayed SAIF CEO Chip Terhune’s house in Lake Oswego, just outside Portland, with multiple rounds at about 4 a.m. Friday — shattering the home’s glass front door. ** Surely, this couldn’t have been a random happenstance like the conjunction of seven planets. We humans, unlike the celestial bodies can purposely align. Think “celestial,” by the way, not “heavenly.” Luigi, Van der Sloot, and the Lake Oswego shooter aren’t cherubic but are rather angels of death.


Barnard’s Girls Will Fade like Barnard’s Star


Tiresome, isn’t it. Watching a Gay parade in support of Hamas, a terrorist group who would without compunction kill gay people or watching young college women protest for Hamas without knowledge that under Hamas rule they would be suppressed and, if captured for any reason, would be raped, tortured, and murdered. Such is the irony of the privileged young of Barnard’s college, the origin of a group of girls wearing Palestinian keffiyehs as they interrupted a course at neighboring Columbia University and occupied a campus building, and then harassed a female dean on her way to the restroom. *** The consequence? Little to zilch as of this writing though Barnard did expel two girls who had participated in a previous protest. What’s that you say? Yes, some of the young and privileged in American society live in a universe where the black-and-white keffiyehs symbolize good as black and evil as white. The Barnard administration and multiple Jewish students and the school’s Jewish alumni supporters seem as powerless as Gov. Hochul in the face of antisemitism and disruption.


If you squint, you can see Barnard’s star, a red dwarf some 6 light years away. In 1998, the star had some explosive event, but it has since faded. I’ll hazard a guess that the female protestors, once expelled or allowed to graduate, will move on to similarly less explosive lives, but will (some of them) harbor unrealistic Leftist antisemitism that turns moral outage on its head. They will probably never examine closely the degradation imposed by Hamas on the Palestinian people nor the atrocities imposed on more than 1,000 Israelis on October 7 and during ensuing captivity. They won’t recognize how Hamas fires rockets from Palestinian neighborhoods, hospitals, and schools knowing that Israeli response will injure and kill Palestinians.


Righteous Sinners


Also in the news are two stories of religious leaders caught in sin. Thought we were beyond the Jimmy Swaggart/prostitute scandals and Catholic priests/young men scandals, but I guess not. Now, I don’t want to be one who casts that first stone, but…heck, here’s a pebble: Lucas Hunt, 25, from Asheboro, North Carolina, was arrested and charged Tuesday with one count of second-degree sexual abuse of a minor. ** Lucas designed the “Thank you, Jesus” yard signs. Not to be outdone in depravity, the husband pastor of Mica Miller, who committed suicide, is now accused of allegedly using his church as a “sexual playground.” ***** Praise the Lord and pass the condoms!


And Then, There’s the Page from the Mary Kay Letourneau Book of Seductions


Sure, we know teachers are human and thus subject to frailty and folly, but don’t we expect some semblance of righteous behavior in our schools? Following in the footsteps of Mary Kay Letourneau who had children with her onetime student in a scandal that surfaced during the 1990s, is Spanish teacher Dulce Flores, a teacher at Riverbank High School outside Modesto, who is charged with having sex with a 17-year-old while he was a student in 2023.****** May we say “Shame on you”? Should we deem love between a thirty-something-year-old teacher and her hormonal teen boy student as wrong? Is this a perversion of the teaching profession? The word teacher derives from the Anglo-Saxon tacn, “guide” or “guidepost.” Don’t we expect teachers to be guides for children? We don’t expect the conjunction of student and teacher to be conjugal.


Endless Conjunctions of the Bizarre Turn Ideals into Nightmares


Almost every day one can read a couple to several stories that show how we humans live in constant juxtaposition and conjunction. The juxtapositions reveal our hypocrisy and folly, our ignorance and hubris, our immorality and morality, and our gullibility and subsequent disillusion. The conjunctions and human syzygy of juxtapositions reveal that a commonness of contradictions pervades our species.


We are a species of opposites, opposites of intentions and actions, opposites of ideals and realities, opposites of freedoms and restrictions, and opposites of knowledge and ignorance. Unlike those planets gathered by chance in the night sky, we are self-conscious; yet, by chance our stories merge in the daily news.

*https://nypost.com/2025/02/24/lifestyle/luigi-mangiones-fancy-trial-loafers-spark-1400-google-search-spike-the-new-summer-footwear-fashion/

**https://nypost.com/2025/02/27/us-news/hooded-gunman-shoots-up-saif-ceos-oregon-home-who-received-email-threats/   
***Barnard’s spoiled protesters expose the spineless leadership of colleges and New York’s pols — again https://nypost.com/2025/02/27/opinion/barnard-protesters-expose-spineless-leadership-of-colleges-and-new-york-pols/   
****’Thank you Jesus’ sign creator charged with child sex abuse as ministry removes all references to him https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=%E2%80%98thank+You+Jesus%E2%80%99+Sign+Creator+Charged+With+Child+Sex+Abuse+As+Ministry+Removes+All+References+To+Him&eventans=1&eventland=0&eventrel=0&qpvt=%e2%80%98Thank+you+Jesus%e2%80%99+sign+creator+charged+with+child+sex+abuse+as+ministry+removes+all+references+to+him&FORM=EWRE
****https://www.msn.com/en-us/crime/general/mica-miller-s-pastor-husband-allegedly-raped-15-year-old-girl-used-church-as-sexual-playground-lawsuit/ar-AA1zUSNP?ocid=BingNewsSerp
****** See NY Post: “High school Spanish teacher, 33, accused of having sex with 17-year-old student: police” and multiple reports.

The numbers are there. They say “billions” wasted, misspent, stolen. And eventually, we’ll know the exact numbers because knowing exactly how much money American taxpayers lost through mismanagement, fraud, and giveaways is what accounting is all about. Sure, we can generalize, but what we want is specificity. That’s why the math is important. The numbers will tie the bloated bureaucracy to its bloating. They will show a relationship between numbers of dollars lost and number of unnecessary programs, such as the funding of transgender operations for Guatemalans in Guatemala. You want that revealed because you went to an accountant, an online tax form, or your savvy Uncle Bernard to do your taxes last year and you’re about to go through the anxiety-ridden process again before April 15.


The Arrow of Accounting


If the “arrow of time” can fly in only one direction (forward, in case you don’t live in this Cosmos), the “arrow of accounting,” when released, does the opposite. It does fly into the past. And the archer who shoots that arrow, shoots at a target in the recent past. Like a statute of limitations that eliminates every crime but murder as a target of justice and accountability, the deep past restricts the aim of the accountant-archer. Past waste is a moot point. Whatever the government spent farther back in time, say in the recesses of the 1960s, on overpriced wrenches and pens that work in space (The joke goes, “Russians used a pencil”), might be a target, but it’s not worth hitting. The target of the recent past, however, lies within the arrow’e easy reach. In fact, a meticulous accountant can hit the bullseye unless someone purposely obstructs the target.


Hitting the Bullseye


Numbers reveal relations in very specific ways, like those associated with SOHCAHTOA, the mnemonic device you learned in trigonometry. Those relationships called the sine, cosine, and tangent are framed in simple rational numbers, the opposite over the hypotenuse, the adjacent over the hypotenuse, and the opposite over the adjacent sides of a right triangle. There’s no fudging, no room for making up whatever pleases you because you belong to a political party, religion, or race. The numbers are the numbers, and the accounting numbers like the ordinary “natural numbers” you learned on your tiny toddler fingers, one, two, three, four…. “How old will you be tomorrow, Suzy? Three fingers! Yay! Big girl!”


As David Berlinski writes about the ability of numbers to reveal connections in his A Tour of the Calculus, “It is this enviable specificity that makes mathematics something other than as form of magic” (100). Otherwise, the number of tax dollars misspent, lost, or stolen can be the stuff of dark magic. “Don’t concern yourself, citizen; we have your back; we have it ALL in hand. Besides, it’s too complex for you anyway. Trust us. We aren’t trying to trick you. We’re not magicians who make a scantily clad helper disappear from a trunk only to reappear from behind a curtain, or even more spectacularly, from the back of the room, sitting in the last row. How did he do that? Where did she come from? Wasn’t someone else occupying that seat?


No.


No, we shouldn’t trust them, those government magicians to whom we gave our wallets. They have spent; they have made the contents of many wallets permanently disappear. We won’t reach into another pocket to find that money. The magician won’t even pull a quarter from behind our ears.


DOGE’s Archers


DOGE seems to be in the process of revealing, tens, to possibly hundreds of billions of dollars spent during your recent lifetime, the money gone, much of it unaccounted for; some of it to your enemies, the people plotting to kill Americans—you specifically. And that “possibly hundreds of billions of dollars”could actually have yet another trio of zeroes—10 not to the ninth power, 10 not to the tenth power, not even to the eleventh power, BUT to the twelfth power (trillions?!): $1,000,000,000,000+ during your lifetime, not your entire lifetime, mind you, but your relatively recent lifetime, close enough in your personal past for even an amateur archer to hit.


But there are some who would obscure the target. Who knows why? Some even intend to stand in front of it, willing, it seems, to take an arrow in defense of waste, fraud, and abuse like mercenary North Korean soldiers on the battlefields of Ukraine told to rush across a flat muddy and mined field toward a battery of Ukrainian soldiers or like the French knights and mercenary crossbowmen during Battle of Crécy that were routed by Welsh and English longbowmen in 1346. Foolish battle tactic to achieve what? More waste, fraud, and abuse?


The accountants of DOGE have the high ground like the forces of King Edward III on that hillside above the muddy lowland. Why do Democrats want to make that perilous charge?


The numbers don’t lie. The numbers are irrefragable. The targets are so numerous the archers don’t even have to aim.

How would you react if you turned on The Weather Channel to see the staff talking not about weather, but rather about weather forecasters on other channels or on YouTube?


You’d probably say, “What?” Or maybe, “Whaaaaat?” Followed by, “Does that tornado watch include my area?” Or maybe, “Just give me the weather.” (Sorry, I’m guessing here; you might say, “#%&@^*^@@#$$%@&” for all I know, or WTF—“What’s the forecast?”) Point is, you don’t turn on the weather report to hear reports on weather people.


But that’s where we are today, finding ourselves inundated by reports about “reporters.” Thus, the recent shakeups at CNN, NBC, and MSNBC have become the message. Remember Marshall Mcluhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium Is the Message? * The shakeups have dominated the news, podcasts, social media, newspapers, and YouTube videos. **


Who Cares?


Honestly, who cares? Yeah, I feel bad that someone lost a job, but people throughout the nation have lost jobs on which they depended for their family’s well being, even for their family’s “survival.” That gajillion-dollar news people have lost their jobs is still a loss, but those firings aren’t tugging on America’s heart strings. They will make it; they'll survive unless they live extravagantly,  especially since those former network stars have made more money than and live in homes much more valuable than many in their audiences combined.


And honestly, aren’t we all a bit worn out by the bickering vituperative hosts and biased reporting? As the cartoon shows, networks could just as easily and with less cost put microphones and speakers on news desks to shout prerecorded and predictable slurs and epithets at one another.


I don’t want the media to be the message. Do you? I want to know whether or not the tornado will hit my house.


*The idea preceded the co-authored book and was encapsulated in a chapter with title “The Medium Is the Message” in McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In Understanding Media he wrote: "The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name."[11] The light bulb is a clear demonstration of the concept of "the medium is the message": a light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence".[7] Likewise, the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself (the content), and more about the change in public attitude towards crime that the newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect being brought into the home to watch over dinner.[12]


**MSNBC host Rachel Maddow rips own network for axing Joy Reid’s show and other ‘non-white’ hosts’ programs ; MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Rips Her Own Network In Fiery Tirade Over Joy Reid Ouster: ‘A Bad Mistake’ at https://www.mediaite.com/tv/maddow-rips-msnbc-for-axing-joy-reid-a-bad-mistake/
Don Lemon Blasts Megyn Kelly for Rejoicing in Joy Reid's Cancellation at https://www.newsweek.com/don-lemon-megyn-kelly-joy-reid-msnbc-show-canceled-2035492
YOUTUBE: Just go to YouTube and type in “Joy Reid Cancelled” to see all the videos
https://nypost.com/2025/02/24/media/lester-holt-leaving-nbc-nightly-news-after-a-decade/

Here’s there problem with some of us humans: We believe we can master society with mandates. It hasn’t worked for morality; it won’t work for California’s legislators. If a widespread moral code hasn’t prevented full to the brim prisons, why believe a zero emissions policy in California will result in universal or even high percentage compliance? And what happens when mandates aren’t met? More penalties? More economic hardships? More people trying to find loopholes? Outraged protestors at the Capitol? Articles online about hypocritical politicians driving gas guzzlers? Trucking firms charging more to transport products? Brownouts and blackouts in a strained energy grid?


“Starting next year [in California], at least 35% of manufacturers’ new passenger car and truck sales must be electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids or hydrogen-fuel cell vehicles, known as ZEVs (zero-emission vehicles) for short. The percentages step up each year until hitting 100% in 2035…While some carmakers like Tesla are selling more than enough ZEVs to meet the mandate, it’s estimated that sale rates for other manufacturers hover at 10% to 12%.” * So reports The Detroit News, a paper with some skin in the game since Detroit is the country’s center of car manufacturing.


The Folly


California has long been in the forefront of environmental regulations. That position makes sense in a state with more than 30 million people and a history of decimating redwood forests that stood for one to two millennia only to be chopped down in mere decades. Habitat destruction and deforestation merged as the population exploded. Sure. Take care of the environment. Try to manage the water supply in a land of droughts and floods. Enact strict building codes in earthquake zones.  


But then California’s population also included dreamers, not just in Hollywood, but in Sacramento, also. People who bought into super environmentalism that engendered ever tightening controls on the populace, each control purposed to save this or that corner of the environment from a particular stream to a particular animal to…holy cow! All the air? All the emissions? The state's politicians are Greta Thunberg's puppets. 


Should Californians be required to ride in soapbox cars? "They do work downhill," one might argue.


Vehicles on California’s highly trafficked city streets and highways do produce nearly half the state’s greenhouse gas emissions in nitrogen and carbon compounds. But the mandate to reach 100% zero emission vehicle sales won’t convince the ordinary citizen to buy electric even when car dealers don’t have vehicles powered by internal combustion engines to sell. Nevada and Arizona are not far off places. And ten-year old and older cars exist because people would rather fix than buy.


I think of those other mandates humans have tried since Moses: “Thou shall not kill,” for example, and “Thou shall not run around with your neighbor’s wife.” Yeah. Those mandates worked out for California, where murders and extramarital affairs never occur.


Dostoevsky also comes to mind, his character Raskolnikov in particular. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov deemed himself superior to others and plotted to kill to prove that superiority. Although you might think this is an extreme analogy, I hazard to say that individualism and the desire to prove its existence will undo the universality of California’s emissions mandate. I’ll note that there are numerous vehicles on today’s roads that have “forbidden” alterations that improve performance that the owners desire.


And personal economy will supersede state mandates. People mostly do what is in their personal self-interest. And most of us believe we know what’s best for ourselves. And then, there will be those like Nancy Pelosi going for her hairdo and Gov. Gavin Newsom going out for a dinner when most Californians were denied both activities during the pandemic. Were the two of them immune to the disease? Exceptions to the mandates because, like Raskolnikov, they believed themselves to be superior? Hypocrisy and privilege will abound to punctuate the folly of universal mandates.


*https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2025/02/21/should-california-back-off-on-2026-zero-emission-car-mandates/79427217007/

Years ago I read a clever article in some education journal that addressed the issue of college campus sidewalks. Should they be laid down in predetermined parallel and perpendicular patterns or laid down on trampled grass paths worn by students? If you have walked on a number of campuses, you will have noted that students take shortcuts, making diagonal paths that as seen from above would provide a trigonometry  instructor with homework assignments for students. Hypotenuses abound.


It really doesn’t matter whether or not a campus architect waits to see where students make paths. They will over the course of a few semesters find alternative routes, shortening even the shortcuts they previously made through the grass. And every year a  new generation of fresh walkers leaves some new mark on the campus lawn. One might  just have paved the entire campus to avoid any pedestrian changes.


And that brings me to consider how we humans develop our cultures and subcultures.


Beards


Recently, New York Yankees’ owner Hal Steinbrenner announced that New York has amended its 1976 facial hair policy. The organization now allows players to sport “well-groomed beards.”


Now an anecdote: I’m a reluctant shaver, so I’ve had at least a little stubble on my chin for decades and during the early seventies even a beard. At best I’ve been a Don Johnson/Miami Vice-facial hair guy: Almost, but rarely clean shaven. I suppose I adopted the scruffy look when the seventies made it more acceptable and my then rather stoic university president had passed on—literally. The rise of the Hippie movement probably influenced me without my knowing it. I remember not ever liking bell bottoms, but being unable to find more straight leg jeans and pants in stores at the time. Just leave it at: I have worn stubble. Recently, my grandsons and sons, all sporting beards of various sizes, asked me to grow mine longer. I complied.


With more men sporting beards nowadays, I believe I have been unconsciously influenced. But isn’t that what happens in every society? Fashion usually creeps in, maybe getting an impetus from someone famous or some event. It’s the college campus sidewalk effect. Someone starts the shortcut; others follow.


So, here we are, many years after the NY Jets initiated a kerfuffle over Joe Namath’s facial hair and George Steinbrenner’s iron hand rule forbade facial hair. The Yankees can now sport beards that are the fashion of the times. The muddy paths have been paved over in acquiescence to the culture at large, all those “random walkers seeking shortcuts.”


Is there a lesson about political trends in the foregoing?

​One wonders how they survived the last 25,000 years. I’m talking  about bears, polar bears, specifically. Or more so, survived the last 300,000-500,000 years. What with climate change and all that. The last 25,000 have been especially cruel: lots of warming interrupted by the cooling periods like the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age.


Polar bears are supposedly not long for this world, at least according to a report from CBS. They’re going to succumb to a glacier-free world. Surprising, I’d say, because polar bears don’t live on glaciers of which there are two kinds: 1) Continental, a category that includes ice sheets, ice caps, and ice fields like those of Greenland and Antarctica and 2). Alpine, also called valley and mountain glaciers.


No, polar bears aren’t in danger because of retreating glaciers. They roam sea ice, tundra and taiga in some 19 subpopulations. They should not be affected by the comings and goings of glaciers. If the diminution of glaciers were an extinction event for polar bears, the species would probably not still exist in their current numbers.


But this isn’t a blog about polar bears; it is, rather a note about the laziness of reporters—and their gullibility. CBS has, it seems, bought into the extinction of polar bears hook, line, and Nunavik harpoon. That CBS would throw up a video on the demise of polar bears that associates them with glaciers reveals a laziness: How long would a brief perusal of polar bear literature take? And then there’s the just plain ignorance revealed in the report.


The polar bear is classified as Ursus maritimus. See the cognate? Yes, “maritime.” Yes, polar bears are classified as an oceanic species, not as hard land sheet glacier or mountain glacier dwellers. They do hunt on sea ice, but not all year, and as human victims of polar bears can attest, in addition to purely marine environments, they also hunt in shrubland, forest, grassland, marine coastal/supratidal, and marine intertidal environments, so all apply as the habitats of polar bears.


So why the CBS interest in polar bears? Well maybe some young editor or reporter who grew up when children were making posters and wearing t-shirts with pictures of polar bears said, “Hey, let’s do a story on….” After all, it’s been awhile since the world’s children were conned into believing pictures and a National Geographic video of emaciated polar bears indicated the status quo of all polar bears was dire. The video was seen 2.5 billion times, too many for National Geographic’s subsequent apology for misleading the public to counter the belief the video generated. Goodness! Even the supposed site (Baffin Island) where the videographer shot his film was a lie (it was Somerset Island in the Canadian Arctic).


And that sea ice?


Well currently there’s a patch of sea water around Nova Scotia that has less ice this January (2025, see image) than it has had during some years. But there’s no way to predict that the same area will be ice free next year, in 2050, or in 5025. Was the same area ice free when Erik the Red, founded the first Norse settlement in Greenland (Grœnland)? Was it open water when his son Leif “The Lucky” Erikson and company explored Vinland during the Medieval Warm Period? If so, what happened?…Oh! Yeah, the Little Ice Age that followed the Medieval Warm Period. And today? Could a repeat of the Maunder Minimum (Sun spots) throw the Arctic into another super freeze?


But why ask CBS, once home of venerable Walter Cronkite, to fact check? Isn’t it too busy fact-checking Donald Trump to fact-check its own reporters and editors? Doesn’t CBS have an obvious culture-driven agenda?


Journalism Schools


What do journalism schools teach other than obedience to causes célèbres pushed by entrenched vocal groups or political parties? For US undergraduate journalism students that means mostly following assumptions and goals of the Left and the Democrat party—as evidenced by the number of politicians who have been reeled into climate frenzy by hook, line, and Nunavik harpoon.


Is any of this worth talking about? After all, how many will see the CBS report? And isn’t the world already convinced that polar bears are headed for extinction? Those kids wearing “Save the Polar Bears” t-shirts are young adults now, pretty much with fixed assumptions and ready to spend a trillion of their future dollars on the Green New Deal, risking their supply of cheap and abundant energy.


I’ll bet that CBS and other news outlets will continue to prophesy the demise of polar bears even as some of their subpopulations proliferate. It’s the message that matters; not the facts. They’ll repeat Al Gore, who said, “The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our very eyes. It's been the size of the continental United States for the last 3 million years and now 40 percent is gone and the rest of it is going.” “Entire,” mind you, “entire.” That “40%”? You be the judge: look at the map. Hey, I said, “LOOK AT THE MAP.”


And those journalism schools? I say revise the curricula. Make all journalism students take at least two courses in biology (one in genetics), two in earth science (one in climatology/paleoclimatology), and two in history (one in 20th century history). Require them to take historical geology, physics, statistics, and geography. And, of course, require them to take a course in logic. Skip the sociology course and replace it human geography.


The result of the curriculum change will be fewer agenda-driven journalists and more inquisitive journalists with no skin in the game of reporting. We’ll get more truth and less official narrative.


If the polar bears are (THEY AREN’T) headed for extinction, they’ll be late goers to termination. Journalism has already died.


https://www.cbsnews.com/video/polar-bears-increasingly-under-threat-as-glaciers-melt-faster-than-ever/

In a Gary Larson cartoon panel one farmer stands next to another outside a barn as he says, “It’s the only way to go, Frank. Why, my life’s changed ever since I discovered Stackable Livestock.” On one side of the panel there’s a stack of chickens; on the other, two stacks of animals, one of sheep on one another’s backs and one of cows. NY’s Governor should have seen the cartoon before she instituted a congestion tax that could have cost drivers up to $500 per month to go to work in NYC.


Hochul is now protesting President Trump’s declaring the tax null and void. “NYC workers, commuters rejoice over Trump’s axing of congestion pricing toll: ‘I’m ecstatic’” reads the headline in the NY Post. * Had the President not acted, I would have suggested the Gary Larson solution to overcrowded streets: Stackable cars.


*https://nypost.com/2025/02/19/us-news/nyc-workers-commuters-rejoice-over-trumps-axing-of-congestion-pricing-toll-im-ecstatic/

Poor us. Hit from all sides by unrelenting abundance and ease, we need a break from all the stress. Fortunately, we have an out in wellness centers and spas, even home spas. Whew! Don’t know how people used to hammer out their days of drudgery and woe.


A Bit of Background


According to Statista, Americans spent 300 billion bucks on wellness/spa tourism. That’s up from the low of 149 billion dollars spent during the pandemic of 2020. In 2023, the spa “industry” provided services for 182 million people, down ten million from the high in 2019 before COVID decimated the economy.


But we Americans aren’t the only people who seem to need days of respite. The worldwide wellness business raked in 6.3 trillion in 2023. Trillion, yeah, with a “t”; you read it correctly; it’s not a typo. Does such an outlay of wealth by customers (clients?) say anything about us? Anything about our priorities or character?


A Bit More Background


Although I question the validity of his conclusions because they ultimately came from self-reporting surveys, I see some value in Hans Eysenck’s classification of personality “dimensions.” Those dimensions are extroversion/introversion and neuroticism. I believe they might in a cursory way explain the modern need for wellness centers in a society not bogged down by a global war. (Eysenck surveyed soldiers in the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital during WWII, drawing conclusions from his extensive surveys of hundreds of soldiers) War resets priorities of people formerly living in relative safety and comfort. That Eysenck derived much of his thinking for Dimensions of Personality from a wartime world probably makes his work a little less applicable to today’s cushy life for the wellness crowd. Nevertheless, see whether or not you might want to draw your own conclusions from the following characteristics associated with extroversion, introversion, and neuroticism (summary statements by Tom Butler-Bowdon*):

Extraversion
    The extravert’s brain is the opposite of what we would expect; it is less excitable than the introvert’s. Because there is less going on inside, extraverts naturally seek outside stimulation and contact with others to really feel alive.
Introversion
    The introvert’s brain is more excitable, making them more vulnerable to moods and having intense inner lives. Introverts have a rich inner life, so they don’t need much social interaction. They have a deeper and more anguished response to life.
Neuroticism
    Apparently both extraverts and introverts can be neurotically minded. In Eysenck’s view,     for example, neurotically minded introverts over-respond to stimuli and are susceptible to phobias and panic attacks whereas neurotically minded extraverts tend to  undervalue the impact of life events and might develop neuroses of denial and repression.


Eysenck drew on Carl Jung to formulate his classification of personality dimensions.  About the same time that he was interviewing soldiers at the hospital Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, also based on Jung’s work, that categorizes individuals into one of 16 personality types based on their preferences in four dimensions: extraversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving.


I suppose these generalizations are insufficient for one to conclude what kind of personality dimension dominates the wellness crowd. If you peruse the Web for wellness testimonials, you will see numerous success stories, that is, autobiographical tales of people who suffered from physical and psychological maladies that disappeared during treatments of various kinds. And I have no reason to question those testimonials, but some of them simply indicate the need for a push to change lifestyle. I read one testimonial from a man who accompanied his wife to the wellness center to have a common experience with her. At the wellness center he learned to cut out bread and sugar, resulting in his “feeling” better. Sugar. One has to ask how new the concept of refraining from its consumption was for the man. My hasty conclusion by extrapolation is that much of what drives people to spas and wellness centers is common sense and already known.


Who Might Not Go to a Wellness Center


It’s a cultural thing, this wellness craze upon which people have spent $trillions. It’s a sign of the times, also. People barely subsisting and people in the midst of war just don’t have the time or wealth to support their desires for luxurious lifestyles. But in times of relative peace the affluent do have the time and money to pursue wellness. The absence of personal physical threats makes a society somewhat “soft.” Anecdote alert! Dive, dive, dive.


My father, a marine who fought on Okinawa, was reared in a home without a father (he died when my. Dad was 8). He went through the Great Depression with his mother and two sisters, not a life of luxury. In 1980, when I was on sabbatical leave and living in Miami, both he and my mother visited us. Showing them around, my wife and I took them to Bal Harbour. As we walked around, I saw a quaint courtyard with a little coffee shop that served baked goods. I walked them in and said, “Come on, I’ll get you two a piece of pie and coffee.” He looked at the suspended chalkboard that listed the prices and said, “Three dollars for a piece of pie? I’d choke before I would eat that.” It didn’t matter to him that I said I would pay for the pie and coffee and that it would cost him nothing. He had been through Depression and war. Both combined to make him “hard” rather than “soft.” There would have been no way I could ever have gotten him to go to a spa or wellness center, even though it might have eased what I later believed was PTSD buried in his brain since World War II and the horrors of fighting in Okinawa.


Pavlovian Desires


So, in a “soft” society of affluence, I’m of a mind that Pavlovian conditioning might be at play. Keeping up with the Joneses doesn’t just apply just to owning stuff. We keep up by adopting lifestyles and behaviors. Going to a wellness center can be a matter of “They did it, why can’t we?” And possibly the free-wheeling anonymity of modern communications via social media might make extraverts flock to wellness centers for needed outside stimulation.


But at the risk of contradicting myself, I’ll note that those inward people, the introverts, might also use wellness experiences to intensify their feeling in the presence of strangers with whom they will never again interact. The eventual separation protects that anguished brain from outsiders. And the wellness center experience can enhance the moodiness.


The Search for Identity


Long a theme in literature, the search for identity has been a goal for many since the rise of the modern world. I suppose the culture of “finding oneself” entered into everyday consciousness during the Romantic period of the nineteenth century and then turned into the existentialism of the twentieth century. Going off to discover one’s “real Self” has motivated many to travel to exotic places, mountain vistas, and gurus of various leanings stereotyped by the shaman, the monk, and the astrologer. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalists at Brooke Farm and others set in motion a widespread notion that one could a’find oneself,’ or indeed that one “needed to find One’s Self” to be a “whole person.” That “wholeness,” a unity of selves, appears to be the goal at holistic wellness centers.


To Sum Up


There might be as many reasons for people to go to a wellness center as there are people, but that seems to be a silly statement in light of similarities among humans. Those personality dimensions identified by Jung and refined by Briggs, Briggs-Myers, and Eysenck link all humanity. Someone, maybe you, could identify a limited set of reasons. To a common search for identity and meaning that drives some to those centers, I might add boredom in an affluent society. Even those who have not experienced much of the planet by traveling have nevertheless experienced much vicariously through TV and books (as Emily Dickinson wrote, “There is no frigate like a book”). Many have “seen and done IT ALL” either in person or through those media. What’s left but frivolous luxury?

*50 Psychology Classics.2007.

​As one who has taught both vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology to college students and taken them on field trips to dig fossils, I was attracted to the recent story about billionaires who sought and purchased dinosaur fossils. * Apparently, owning a dinosaur fossil is a status symbol. Hmnnn…Do I belong to an exclusive club of the ultra rich?


Think I’ll go downstairs to stare at the giant dinosaur footprint that’s leaning against the wall. It’s quite heavy, so once I carried it into the house years ago, I haven’t moved it. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t identified the species other than to say it belongs to the theropods like T-Rex and that it, when I see other full skeletons, appears to be from an animal as large as a full grown Allosaurus, but it might be from a juvenile T-Rex. Its origin in Utah’s section of the Upper (Late) Jurassic Morrison Formation makes me think “Allosaurus.”


Dinosaur footprints aren’t dinosaurs, of course. They are “trace” fossils that are evidence of dinosaur presence and that sometimes reveal the herding of dinosaurs. Their spacing also can reveal both the size of the animal (by stride length and depth of the imprint) and its velocity (both the vector of travel and the speed). Often the footprints are easily separated from the matrix rock in which they are found. The reason is that the impression in soft sediment is later infilled by other sediments washed in or blown into the depression. Differences in particle (clast) size between the matrix and the infilling make a boundary of separation. The sizes and compositions of sediments in matrices and infilling, coupled sometimes with plant fossils also found in the area, reveal the nature of the original landscape the dinosaurs crossed. A great display of such environments can be seen at Dinosaur State Park and Connecticut’s dinosaur museum at Rocky Hill that houses Early (Lower) Jurassic footprints. *


So, I guess my trace fossil excludes me from the class of billionaires who own actual T-Rex heads and full skeletons though I do have a friend in that category of wealth. I do on occasion mention to guests that if they want to see the footprint, I’m happy to show them. As impressive as it is to most people, it doesn’t match for me the significance of an even older fossil in my possession, a stromatolite that dates to the Devonian Period (419.2-358.9 MA), that is, millions of years before the first dinosaurs like Alwalkeria maleriensis and Eoraptor walked around Argentina in the Triassic. The stromatolite is upon a cursory look, just a plain dark grey rock. It was formed as bacteria mats and fine sediments accumulated to form mushroom shapes in shallow water as they still do today in Shark Bay, Australia. If fossil age bears significance, I’m one up on owners of dinosaur skeletons.


Take that, you ultra wealthy showoffs with your younger Mesozoic fossils.


*https://nypost.com/2025/02/16/us-news/billionaires-are-bidding-on-dinosaur-bones-as-the-ultimate-status-symbol/