All About Eve

How God Got Adam’s Left Rib Out to Make Eve in the Garden of Eden
(and what Adam should have used later to find the worm in the apple)

To demonstrate how powerful these little babies are, here’s a red Klapper apple from a German gardening magazine published in Weimar in 1809:


How Not to Pick an Apple

As Adam might have said to Eve:

Adam: Evi, if you pick it with the fruit spur still attached to the stem, you’ve killed our crop for the year after next.

Eve: Just bite it, Adam. Just shut up for once and bite it.

In the interest of furthering the cause of scientific accuracy in a web universe otherwise sometimes inaccurately perceived as inaccurate (even though it’s the first accurate universe we’ve ever really had) here’s an example of what that same apple looked like once the physicists of Stanford university had got at it with their X-Ray gogs:


A Bullet of Light Having its way with an Apple
after escaping from the clutches of a subatomic physicist,
as seen through XRay Gogs

Hot news from the testing labs of the garden of Eden!

A daily, genetically modified apple could one day put dentists out of a job!

Scientists in Kent are planning to convert apples and strawberries into antibacterial treatments that would protect against tooth decay!

Now, there’s a plan.

The following is a free prime-time political announcement provided free to members of all political parties:

Pablo Picasso said: "Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs."

Submitted by The Committee to Reelect Eve

Harold: "Thanks, Eve."

Eve: "People have short memories, Harold."

Harold: "I know. I tell ya, I know."

Eve: "And I know you know. Say, can I just send along a little brochure from my people to your people? Can I?"

Harold: "Sure, Eve. Shoot."

Eve’s election brochure:


Cover of Eve’s Election Brochure

Model of Noble Borsdorfer apples, carved out of linden wood and painted in Northern Czechoslovakia somewhere between 1920 and 1930.

Eve: Well, you can see, Harold, why I picked a pear in the garden instead.

Harold: Sure can, Eve.

Eve: Liable to break your teeth. If you open it, you’ll see what I wrote on the inside:

So, I opened Eve's election brochure and read its core, its heart, its kernel, its seed, its little nut:

A little history of memory down through the ages:

For Plato, memory was a wax tablet.

For St. Augustine, it was a storehouse.

For Sigmund Freud, it was a "mystic writing pad"

For the anti-modernist American poet, Amy Lowell, it went like this: "Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in."

For modern psychologists, it was first a photograph, then a phonograph, then the cinema, then a telephone exchange.

For Palbo Picasso, it was what you did when you did what you did, like this: "We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."

For post-modern psychologits, it is a computer.

For at least one Mexican poet and diplomat, it is like so: Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game. Octavio Paz

Oh dear.

Ah, folks, just to give you a little background, as Canada slides into a holiday election, here’s a little promotional material leftover from an earlier election:


Mary Feeding the Baby Jesus a Persian Pear Under The Tree in 1511

Always the innovator, Albrecht Dürer took this photograph with the camera of his mind. I tell ya, Dale Carnegie said that the essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure, but the baby Jesus does not look amused here, at all. Well, actually, he looks like a pope. Is that the Boy Cub salute he’s giving there?

Adam: Look at the pear. It’s the pear that’s important.

Harold: You mean, in this honourable tradition, in this titillating view of art, in this art as Casanova with a pomade, in this remember-when-we-were-young-and-made-whoopee-all-night view of art, these are our art galleries now, our museums of memory: Super Valu, IGA, Thrifty’s, Save On Foods, Save On More, Safeway, Loblaws? You mean, back in the days of Ronald Reagan and the Evil Empire, back in the daze of Darth Vador and Rambo, we used to hear how the supermarket system, with its ability to provide endless amounts of food, was the supreme achievement of the capitalist system, cuz those Russkies couldn’t even manage to get the harvest in?

Adam: Uh. I dunno.


Damn!
A Pear Seen Through X-Ray Gogs.
Notice the particle of light exploding from the pear at the far left, like the bullet from a gun, or Adam’s good luck coming to an abrupt end. Ouch.

Adam should have thought about that before he took a bite. As Alexander Chase said: "Memory is the thing you forget with."

He got that right.

Still, I remember well when the Iron Curtain fell in Eastern Europe. What everyone in the Western media was talking about then was stereos, about people in the East wanting access to stereos, and I remember thinking, Stereos? Stereos?

Alright then, here’s a link to the live in-store web cams of Super Stereo Warehouse. Their salespeople are trained in product knowledge and system design. Just so you know: they do not stock or sell Factory Refurbished or used equipment.

As Willa Cather said: Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

She got that right.

As Eve once said, primly setting down a cup of tea in her living room, "It was tough in the earlier days, trying to decide whether to become a particle or a wave."

"Or just to stay as both," piped in Adam from his Lazyboy.

"So what did you decide?" I asked, holding out my panasonic portable voice recorder.

Whrrrrrrrrr.

"Particle," said Adam.

"Wave," said Eve, at the same time.

They both burst out into laughter.

Well, at least they could still laugh about it.


Stalin and Lenin Talking About New Stereos.

Bizarro.

But that’s the way it goes when the world is poetry, isn’t it.

(Don’t mind me. Just think of me as Franz Kafka scurrying around in the basement, unscrewing fuses from the circuit box, screwing in new ones, sticking pennies behind some others so they don’t blow again, while waiting for permission to enter The Castle.)

A note from the Castle Administration:

Dear Franz,

we have received your entrance for admission, blah blah blah, duly processed, blah, blah, ...let you know when your application has been reviewed...et cet era.

Signed,

Adam.

p.s. If you’re going to blame anyone, maybe you should blame the futurists.

okee dokee!


Adam in his Days as a Futurist Poet
in disguise as an Einstein Action Figure
trying to break into Kafka’s Castle.
For the full text of the script for the movie, go here . Yes, a script!

OK, take Pound, if you like.

Adam(Interjecting): "Not a futurist, really."

Eve: "Oh, he’s close enough, dear. Leave the boy alone. Don’t tease him so."

Harold: "Yeah."

Adam: "For instance, in the company of such other amateur philosophers as T.E. Hulme, Pound devised a theory that poetry was an art best made through the principles of the assembly line."

Eve: "And your point, dear?"

Harold (Helpfully, and forgetting my own advice not to get involved in domestic disputes.): "Well, in Pound’s way of thinking, a poem consisted of words set side by side, without links between them."

Eve: "Well, sure. He was an American, after all. The poem wasn’t in the words, but in the thought that was generated by a person, a living person, who observed those objects." Eve looks at me pointedly. "So to speak. It was a way of using mechanization to free people from mechanization."

Adam: "So to speak."

Ah. Kind of like playing cards, really.


Ezra Pound Playing Cards With Eve
from Canto XLIX

When Adam saw that, that’s when he typed up a cease and desist court order and had it nailed to my door:

By 1939, Pound’s card game had been going on for years. Way too many years. He had bet the shirt off his back. Everyone had bet the shirts off their backs. On the eve of war, Pound interrupted the game to make a last trip back to the States from Italy, to convince Henry A. Wallace, then American Secretary of Agriculture, and his longtime correspondent, Senator William Borah, to convince the Franklin d. Roosevelt, the President of those United States, that war was not in the interests of American society, or the President, or the Secretary of Agriculture, because going to war would violate, and maybe even negate, the principles of the American constitution.

If Pound was my lawyer in my case for admission to the castle, the case might have gone like this:


Transcript of the Trial of Ezra Pound or
when a plea of insanity is the same as the admission of the writing of poetry.

Pound figured that as a poet, and, what’s more, a poet writing propaganda tracts about economics and submitting letters to the editor, under pseudonyms, in newspapers around the world, literally, that he was the man who knew, that everyone else was groping in the dark.


Transcript of a Radio Broadcast made by Ezra Pound from Radio Rome or
imagine if he had been broadcasting this from Hanoi in 1968.

Sounds like he hadn’t quite given up on the caviar by then, doesn’t it.

So, they don’t have caviar in my local supermarket, but, I tell you, what they do have is the next best thing: pears. You bet. Think of them as the poker chips in Ezra’s card game with Adam and Mussolini. Really. You know that tree in the Garden of Eden, the one that caused all the trouble by hiding a ssssssnake, and some juicccccccy fruit, and Eve picked it and all, and said, Adam, bite me, I mean, blush, bite this. Well, darn thing was a pear tree, actually. Yeah, yeah, I know, that little sapling, that weed, that sprout, actually, that wee slip of a thing nudging aside the lips of the grass to show itself usually comes up at Sunday dinner table conversation as an apple tree, but it doesn’t say apple tree anywhere in the Bible, actually. Not really. Here’s what it does say, really:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. Genesis 1:11

A Day’s Take from Safeway’s Eden, or
I don’t do no catch and release.
Bosc, Beurre D’Anjou, Yellow Williams, Concorde, and a Shy Little Japanese Number with a Clipped Stem so She Doesn’t Poke her Sisters
Now, ain’t that nice.

So, some artists, like Dürer, thought they would clarify the issue. You gotta remember that in those days apples were for making cider. Darn things tasted like wood. You gnawed on them. It was like eating the knob off the end of a stair banister that had been soaked in honey. It was like, oh, eating the snake’s head off of your walking stick, grrrrrrrrr. No, if you wanted to actually eat something, if you wanted to get your teeth into a little tenderness, like a love poem from old Provence, strummed by a troubadour blowing kisses to his master’s mistress, you bit into a pear, hands down. Or at least a woman did. No gnawing on banisters for them. Besides, the things grew in every meadow. Wasps crawled over the fruit. You went out amidst the cows and picked them up.

Bzzzzzzzzz.


Orchard Scattered Across a Meadow like Stars Across a Night Sky.

Adam’s cows used to graze under these trees. As you can see, the trees — like the church steeple in the background — had to be extra tall, so that the cows couldn’t nibble off all the fruit before it got ripe. In the fall, my father told me, those trees roared with wasps.

The German word for a fruit planting like this is Streuobstwiese. Just so you know.

Try saying that ten times real fast with oatmeal in your mouth!

When my father (Well, he was only 12 years old then, but you get the idea.) got really hungry during the last year of the Second World War, he used to sneak down to the Siegfried Line, Germany’s so-called Western Wall of defence, and in those abandoned farming fields along the Eastern side of the river and facing the big bad American Army in Alsace, he used to sneak amongst the pillboxes, out past the concentration camp where the French Resistance was sawing wood, and pick the pears off of the trees like that, which had been completely abandoned to the Yankee guns, and God.

God.


A Particle of Light that has Divided Itself into Two, Two, Two Conference Pears in One
(one coming, one going)
This picture was taken using now historical Copperplate technology

Besides, the darn things looked like breasts.

And it didn’t stop there. In the early twenty-first century, women’s magazines advertised different weight loss and fashion strategies for women with apple-shaped bodies and women with pear-shaped bodies. Who knew!


Eve the Pear Picking a Pippin in the Neighbourhood Streuobstwiese,

as Hugo Van der Goes saw it (some time before 1470), sandwiched between Adam of the big feet and the handshake, just back from the NBA finals by the looks of him, and, what’s that on the right, his agent?

Oh, it’s a dance! I got it. It’s a square dance in a country hall. The guy on the right wants to butt in. Maybe it’s me!

Adam: "Harold, you’re going to need a bolo tie. Honey, do I have a tie Harold could borrow?"

Eve: "Allemand and Do-se-do, Follow-your-neighbor and Explode the line!" She takes me by the hand and around we go.

Adam: "Remake (the Column) and Scoot & Weave!" It’s getting dizzying.

Eve: "Slip, Slide, Swing, Slither!"

Adam: "Chase Your Neighbor"

Eve: "Cross Your Neighbor."

Harold: "Whoa!"

Adam: "I’m going to chase you, that’s what I’m going to do!"

Eve: "Do your best! (Squeal.)"

Ahem. Blush. Well. Let’s leave them now, shall we, flounced skirts and petticoats and bolos flying.

To set the scene: on one side of the dance hall there is reason. On the other? Why, counter-reason. These black-suited boys are lined up like missile silos in Siberia and Nebraska. They are lined up like particles of light trying to decide between candidates in a Canadian election.

In this card game gone wrong, in this trading of jokes between Heisenberg and Dürer, in this Siegfried Line and this We’re Going to Hang our Washing on the Siegfried Line, in the American version by Jimmy Kennedy & Michael Carr:

We'll just rub along without a care.
We're going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line

Four American Soldiers Crossed the Rhine, Taboo, Taboo,
(showing how stiff their clothes can get
in the good old fashioned German snow on the Siegfried Line).
Either that, or those doughboys used too much starch.

and the German version, which my father sang when he visited the pillboxes with his youth group:

When the big German washday is finally here, man,
you won’t need to ever wash your clothes again.

Oh, please do.


Early Set for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: Germany, 1945.
American soldier inside a pillbox on the Siegfried Line.

After the American takeover of the film, and a few months after my father came with his youth group, and the soldiers there, deep underground, stuck their fingers in their mouths and sucked and made bad sexual jokes. I think the sign above the telephone pretty well says it all: "Don’t talk secrets. The enemy is listening."

It’s enough to make a guy want to just abandon words altogether. Here goes:


Albrecht Dürer
after eating too many apples on the Streuobstwiese outside Nüremberg.
poem by Harold Rhenisch

Adam: "You know, people have blamed the ruin of the world on Eve and me for a long time. It’s getting a bit tiring, actually."

Eve: "They’re just jealous of the things we do in bed."

Adam: (Smiles.) "In our modern world of destruction and environmental decay, poetry and physics are not innocent bystanders, either. Why do people always look to us, then?"

Eve: "They’re the ones that started all this. They replaced the world, not us."


Physicist About to Look at Adam Through X-Ray Gogs
from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil

Right. So, I asked Adam and Eve about the snake in Goes’ picture of the Streuobstwiese. It was indecorous, I know, but I just had to ask.

Eve: "Does he look like a snake to you?"

Adam: (Putting his arm around Eve and giving a squeeze.) "Actually, he looks like a poet, don’t you think?"

Well, let’s look, shall we? Here’s our poet, viewed across the span of history:


Adam’s Poet (left) and Chagall’s, too (right)
Harold: Psssst! It looks like Chagall ate too many little green apples, actually.
Adam: To tell you the truth, Chagall’s looks a lot like Isaac Newton,
after taking a bite out of Einstein’s physics. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Eve: "Oh, you boys. Would you stop it. All you’re doing here together in our virtual selves in this virtual space you like to call Canada is fussing with the leftover pieces of God’s smashed creation on the wall of my refrigerator.


The Last Shards of God’s Creation
scattered across the front of a nuclear winter.

Harold: "Our lives depend on it, Eve. Our souls depend on it."

Eve: "Souls! Oh, don’t get me started. If I think of all the trouble in the world that has been started because of these souls!"


Next week: The varied positions of a love affair with pears.

How Nice it is to Have Central Heating

You know this story. You know this one by heart.

You just gotta look up at the night stars, and it all comes back to you.


The Cone Nebula
Jesus on his Crown of Glory

Only lightly photoshopped in. For the real thing, though, you gotta go here. Only US$6. Postpaid. With Paypal! I was visitor number 428. You?

No, not that picture!


The Eye of Jesus in the Eagle Nebula

"And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory." (Matthew 24:30)

No, not that picture! Sheesh.

Look, as Andre Gide said, Art is a collaboration between God and the Artist, and the less the artist does the better.

No, I mean the stars that arch over my house like pebbles on Agate Beach on Haida Gwaii, a hundred different colours, or like flowers in a spring meadow. A love for physical measurement maintains that by looking at those stars we are looking back to the beginning of time: 14.5 billion years, give or take a weekend. In fact, certain members of those slide-rule and abacus crowd are arguing that some of the stars they are viewing in their telescopes are older than the universe itself. That kind of thing is enough to piss a 14-year-old science student right off, I tell you.


Default View through the Hubble Telescope

Notice Adam and Eve Slinking Away After Stealing Fruit from their Own Orchard. Like, what’s that all about?

Eve: “Me, I’m waiting for the electronic version of a slide-rule.”

Adam: “Yeah, we got electronic calculators, we got graphing calculators, but, well, so what, you know. And where’s the electronic abacus!!”

Eve: “How's a girl supposed to feel romantic?”

I tell ya. Physicists didn’t invent the idea of an older universe surviving in the cracks of this newer one. Listen:

Eve: “Knit 3, pearl 2.” (Eve’s been making baby booties from a Redbook pattern I faxed her down the evolutionary wormhole.) “Pshaw. The gnostics were talking about it 2000 years ago, for one.”

Adam: (Poking his head out from underneath his Volkswagen.) (Hey, look, the guy was sitting around choking on dust and wormwood, with nothing to do.) “You know. The idea that we’ve been stranded on this planet, this zone of matter and death, and only through our minds are we going to get back to God.”

Eve: “Oh, gosh golly, there you’ve made me lose count again.”

Eve Knitting (previously confused with a Roman Abacus).

Adam: (Warming up to the subject and wiping his greasy hands on his overalls -- Thanks to my advice, Adam shops at Workwear World now). “In fact...Pass me that wrench there. Yes, that one. Thanks! (Clang! Clang! Clang!) It is through using those minds that we are going to make it there, (umph) back to Mr. G. himself, off of this frozen floor, on which, umppphh (beads of sweat), God’s beautiful crystal stars lie smashed, under this...night...sky...which is just a re...flec...tion of the fragments...There, done!”

Following this logic, every child that is born divides the little bit of God within us into smaller and smaller pieces.

Adam: “Now you’re talking.”

Kind of like the poetry of Ezra Pound, or the minimalist poetry of Aram Saroyan.

Adam: “Now you got it.”

Eve: “What do you think? What about pink? Pink’s nice, isn’t it?”

The Stars of the Night Sky in the Cariboo, and the End of Philosophy.

When I moved to the plateau in 1992, this night sky was masquerading as a lawn of Kentucky Blue Grass. Once it relaxed in my presence, though, it took off its mask. Et voilà.

Adam (peering over my shoulder and chewing on a grass stalk): “That was God’s first operating system, OS1, slowly grinding through its tasks.”

Eve (from the kitchen, stirring a pot of potato and leek soup): “Meanwhile, it seems, while it chugs through its bites, everyone is alone on a huge and uncaring earth, aren’t they.”

Adam: “Uh-huh. Where a grizzly stares at you and stares at you and stares at you and stares at you.”

Harold (tentatively): “Where if you hang around long enough you become dinner?”

Eve: “What a beastly world!” (She sets a bowl of steaming soup in front of me.) “Don’t you think?”

Adam cocks an eyebrow and passes me some bread.

I, of course, try not to get involved in domestic arguments.

I change the subject.

(Here’s the poem I told them instead -- kind of like putting your fingers in your ears and saying ahhhh!)








A Lighter than Air Poem by Aram Saroyan

In the American Senate, this poem was used as an example in an argument for discontinuing all arts funding in the United States of America. Whoever said that poetry had no power?

Everybody’s a philosopher. For instance, a grizzly stalked my wife and the kids and me once, for two and a half miles in Wells Grey Park in October.

"Grizzly Warning!"

The Oregon Department of Fish and Game recently issued the following bulletin: In light of the rising frequency of mountain biker/hiker/grizzly bear conflicts, the Oregon Department of Fish and Game is advising mountain bikers, as well as hikers, fishermen and hunters to take extra precautions and keep alert for bears while in the field. We advise bikers to wear noisy little bells on their clothing so as not to startle bears that are not expecting them. We also advise mountain bikers to carry pepper spray with them in the event of an encounter with a bear.

It is also a good idea to watch for fresh signs of bear activity. Mountain bikers should recognize the difference between Black Bear and Grizzly Bear droppings: Black Bear droppings are smaller and contain lots of berries and squirrel fur; Grizzly Bear droppings have little bells and smell like pepper.

Well, I guess, sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees, that’s all.

Up here on the plateau, for instance. In between the philosophers, we got trees and we got snow. They don’t stare, not like a grizzly stares, but the snow does fall. In fact, the snow falls wherever whenever. Sometimes it falls in October. A lot of it falls in December and January. The worst snowstorms are often in March. Sometimes it falls in the middle of July. You get meltdown in February and hail in December. You get black ice pretty well every month between September and May. And you got trees. The trees, well, you just can’t stop the trees, can you.


Philosopher Contemplating Eating a Poet
before hibernating under a tree stump.
Now a movie by Werner Herzog.

For a little animated preview of a bear making his move, go here. Awww. The real bears are almost anti-climactic, aren’t they.

The little trees seed themselves in my driveway, if I don’t rake it for a couple weeks. They peak up between the grains of gravel like sequoias in the Jurassic. They grow like weeds along the natural gas pipeline, and along highway rights of way, and in the ditches of logging roads that cross-stitch the plateau like one of Eve’s dropped knitting projects, and on the clearings of old logging shows, and pretty much every place in between. They grow like that for two hundred miles in any direction.

Hot Tip! For a picture of Eve’s sewing machine, go here.

Well, Christmas, right. It's coming quick. What's a guy to do? Thing is:

either you cut one of those wild and woolly trees down for a Christmas tree and set it up in your living room with gingerbread, or in a decade a crew is going to come along with saws and cut it down themselves. Leave the trees lying there by the tens of thousands. Let them turn brown and drop their needles. Trip over the damn things. In a world like this, what the point is of getting a Christmas tree from a box under the stairs, I dunno.

It’s like eating caviar, I think.


Caviar for the Masses!

Not if these guys smiling out of the cover of Orion magazine can help it! Here’s a quote to whet your whistle (I tell ya, it looks like a film set of Gooooood Morning Afghanistan!):

In less than seventy years, Soviet communism turned the breadbasket of Eurasia into a nation dependent on American wheat and grateful for foreign aid in the form of frozen chicken legs (which Russians affectionately called nogi Busha -- Bush's legs -- for George Sr., who sent them).

Nope. It’s just best to set the tree up in the corner and break out the cards and the rum and cokes. Shuffle the deck, see what comes up, see what game we are going to play this time. Put your environmental attention elsewhere. Why cards? Simple:


God Does Not Play Dice,
but Eve sure does play cards (and bingo too).
Casino advertising sign. Sugarcane, B.C., November 24, 2005.
Eve’s cool. She doesn’t let it bother her that Einstein said that any physics that maintained that a beam of light was both a wave and a particle at the same time was an incomplete physics, does she! Her knowledge is, shall we say, more elemental than that. By the way, that’s $100 she’s flashing. As was said in the days when Soviet Socialist Realism was official policy in Russia: Art is memory; propaganda is prophecy.

Or, as Andy Warhol said in the days when Soviet Socialist Realism was still the official policy in Russia: An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he -- for some reason -- thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

Yeah, kind of like that tree that God planted in the Garden of Eden. Kind of like that. Kind of. Like that.


Eve on the Problem of Being a Particle and a Wave
in a Vast Universe of Eligible Men with Money
“My horoscope says I should expect an exciting time with my partner today...
if I only knew which one!”

Bild Lilli (from West Germany’s Bild magazine, the Life of the Wirtschaftswunder) was Barbie Doll before she crossed the Atlantic, and after she danced in the cabarets as Marlene Dietrich, and after she ate pears with Adam under The Tree.

So, we’re playing cards. Ok.

OK, these were the rules for the card game that was Germany in 1941; this is how we got into the position of being in a nuclear winter: in Germany in 1941 there wasn’t enough heavy water to cool a nuclear reactor, but there was enough methane, really cold liquid methane, 162 degrees below zero Celsius liquid methane, actually, cold as Jupiter methane, cold as Saturn methane, cold as the beginning of the world methane. There was enough of that natural gas cold as a comet’s breath methane to get a reactor running very slowly, enough of that cold as the bent space around the burbling sun methane, enough of that pay no royalties to the government of British Columbia methane (like one of those gas-powered heaters they used to put in Volkswagen Beetles), enough of that don’t-you-pump-that-methane-from-our-ocean-floor-methane, enough of that Lethbridge feedlot methane, to end the Second World War before it had hardly begun.


The Wirtschaftswunder was Heated by Carbon Monoxide.
Wirtschaftswunder: wave version, particle version.
Those heaters did not keep the cars warm.

I remember driving around with my friend Nancy in her little blue VW Bug, and reaching my hand out the window to pull the wipers back and forth in the rain. That was back in 1977. The slightly older picture above is of the launch of one of the first models by the German army on its invasion of Poland. Here is an excerpt from Hitler’s speeches about the launch of the VW line, on February 15, 1936.

...the intensive development of our most modern sector of the transport industry depends on the complete freedom of a People to make use of it, and I mean by this the absence of legal and psychological restrictions. It is no more asocial to buy a car than it once was to use a sheet of glass in a window instead of the traditional piece of oilskin. In the beginning only a few people use an invention of this kind; then it attracts more and more people until it gradually includes everyone...

In the latter part of the 1930s, German factory workers had a fee deducted monthly from their pay to pay for the purchase of their very own people’s car.

Adam: “Yeah. Joke at the time among the boys was...”

Eve (Rolling her eyes): “Funny thing about these cars we’re making: they look more like anti-aircraft guns.”

Adam: “Yeah.”

Eve: “To hell with Henry Ford.”

Adam: “Yeah.”

Eve’s right, though: with the dirty radioactive byproducts of such a reactor, kind of like the soot you get out of a wood stove when you have it damped down too tightly and the wood hardly flickers in there, you could, you know, poison London, or New York, even, but at least you wouldn’t blow up your lab in Heidelberg or Berlin. When the German Post Office asked for permission to go through with its cold reactor experiment, Werner von Heisenberg, who was a clever subatomic physicist and official head of the German Atomic Program, said, pshaw, it wouldn’t work. Just in case it did work, though, he requisitioned all the available uranium from the mines in Czechoslovakia’s St. Joachimstal, just, coincidentally, at the time that the post office trial had lined up all the available dry ice. By the time the dry ice had all evaporated, there wasn’t any more available for a long time. It was, after all, war. Things were rationed, you know. That was that.

Ah, but I tell ya, after the war, my uncle Joe got TB in the Russian camp in the Joachimstal, mining that stuff. Before that, he had been the town engineer in the resort town of Reinerz (think palm trees in tubs on the streets and skiers in the winter) just over the German frontier.


Heisenberg’s and Stalin’s Uranium Came from this Valley in Czechoslovakia.

Joe Schreiber got out by swimming a river in the night. His last words in Canada were about how nice it was to have central heating. Then his heart gave out.

Sometimes, though, I wonder who did win the Second World War. I think Heisenberg’s missing methane gets pumped right into my house. I think I use it every day to keep the place warm. I think it cooks my Christmas goose every year, complete with stuffing and all the trimmings.


Is this The German Post Office’s Missing Nuclear Reactor?
Well, yeah. This is Canada, folks. We, um, allow for certain practicalities here. We know how to turn, like, a blind eye, you know. Here on the northern lung of the world, this is a culture of cold: pressurized gas (cold) to heat our (cold) houses when the weather (normally cold) gets, normally, colder; refrigerators (cold, colder, coldest), inside those (over)heated houses to keep our beer cold; air conditioners to cool our houses when they are no longer cold; meat lockers; frozen pizzas; tins of compressed air -- for cleaning off computers that you bought cheap on eBay cuz some dude left a cigarette burning in an ashtray beside the fan for five years -- that can give you frostbite, that kids sniff, sometimes, and their lungs seize up and they turn blue. It’s bloody tragic, that’s what it is.

I think those gnostics were onto something.

There’s a bunch of that liquid methane pouring through the valley just two kilometres from my house, and there’s a whole bunch of cows pouring out the warm stuff, and Timothy Treadwell filmed himself cupping his hands around a pile of grizzly scat, and cried out gleefully that he felt her heat, that this was her life, man, and the Government of British Columbia is swimming in cash from the stuff, and the Government of Alberta has got so many royalties from the stuff that they are just giving the money away, because they’ve come to think that’s what government is for, and the Americans are burning the stuff up to provide electricity, because they’ve come to think that’s what government is for, and the Post-Carbon Institute is pointing out that if we are drilling twice as many wells to get the same amount of gas out, that, in effect, we’ve almost used all of the stuff up, and our whole cold earth, spinning in space like a pear, is getting just a little bit warmer, and we all know what happens when a pear sits out too long on the counter without being eaten: turns to mush, that’s what it does.


NASA Picture of the Gnostic Earth in the Throes of Global Warming.
That’s my house in 150 Mile House, right in the blemish on the upper left.
But wait! The methane is not all gone! There’s still, tada!, super-cooled stuff frozen at the bottom of the sea, left over from the creation of the solar system, like the black chunk of concentrated evil at the end of Time Bandits, just waiting for a sequel.

Chills your hands, it does.

As Samuel Johnson said: When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Do Not Enter Sign God Nailed to the Gates of the Garden of Eden
After He Booted the Freeloaders Out
Next week: Everything you wanted to know about Eve but were afraid to ask.