Risk conscious- really ? ( Commonwealth Essay 2013 )

You notice yourself getting ever so hyped over things that in normal circumstances,  really aren’t even logically justifiable by any rational mind ; not taking the tube after reading news of a train wreck in a remote village two continents away? ; Stopped using your iPhone because you read from a magazine pullout that it could increase your chances of getting alzheimer’s? Or maybe  thinking  the black plague  is going to resurface, mutate and cause a  bottleneck-epidemic and possible extinction of the human race.

If this is you, or almost you, you have fallen victim to the ever so dramatized, inflated  part of media and also the lunacy of sci-fi Hollywood movies. 

'

and not to mention

( really ) 

The brilliant thing is, you’re not alone! 

However disappointing and however feeble that depiction of humanity is, you cannot deny that the media blows things out of proportion. Sci-Fi-Hollywood, a genre on its own doesn’t do much help either.   You may however,  be reassured by the fact it’s not completely down to your personality - its the things you’ve been left vulnerable and defenseless to that predominantly is just bogus.  Inevitably and most unfortunately, this is why young people are more prone to contracting this paranoia-inducing-syndrome more than anyone in the world. 

Let’s face it, young people - we may not ever want to admit it but we’re not very good at making the most basic and coherent decisions when we’re reading articles from pop-up windows over the web that were designed to attract the attention of the ignorant. The odds also aren’t in our favour as we are also the children of the world wide web and spend nearly a third of our lives in virtual space. 

However In reality, when looking at things in a more general perspective, it doesn’t matter if you’re a school teacher, a lawyer, a housewife, a business student, a bus driver or even a paleontologist because after reading that blog or article attached to a forward-email,  you’re undoubtedly going to experience that psychological process  occurring at the far corner of your subconscious mind ; contemplating the text that you’ve just read ; somehow relating it to yourself and the people around you and then gaining a mild sense of panic. Before you know it,  your brain has developed a new fear. And as far as fear goes, the magnitude absurdity is of no limit. 

The one key factor here is we’re all mostly exposed to the same sort of content and information like news-headlines and celebrity-scoop and stories and myths and articles and urban legends and movies and posters warning us about the horizon of the black hole that is about to engulf our solar system next month.

The media, more specifically the internet plays a tremendous role with the spreading - or shall I say, infecting of paranoia  which directly decreases our enthusiasm and  also sheer ability to take risks because we’re always imagining  the worst possible outcome out of every situation. You could end up living your life in severe anxiety thinking that something awful is about to happen every second of the day.  

The aversion to taking risks inevitably isn’t only narrowed down to more apparent fears  like contracting diseases, being held hostage or being a part of a plane crash casualty. Lets talk about more a relevant sort of fear that is the overprotectiveness of parents in this modern era. Parents today are more paranoid than they were thirty years ago. Nanny-cams, helicopter-moms,  strict diet plans are just some of the things you here in the paranoid parent vocabulary. There is more manufacture of products to aid to the unnecessary anxiety  of moms and dads now more than ever.  

As parents, being constantly on edge is one of the many things you have a free pass to. Its natural instinct to be afraid for your children and have this inclination to constantly hover over them because you want to protect them as much as you can in all forms possible. This ever so commonly heard of tendency in parents today has become so evident to the extent there have been TV shows screened on an episode-basis dedicated to depict such rigid parenting namely “ World’s Worst Mom “ starring Lenore Skenazy who urges paranoid parents to change their stringent parenting ways for the better. 

Putting the relationship between media and paranoia aside, I think it is more important to analyze risk-taking amongst teenagers in this day and age. When given an opportunity or a choice, would a young person put their popularity, social status or pride on the line? Would they try out for cheerleading even if it meant the chances of making it were one in fifty? Or would they sign up for two extra curricular activities because they trust themselves about their personal time management?   

There very scenarios has been played out in so many mainstream movies. Underneath all the exaggerations and editorial-ruche, the whole idea sadly isn't very far from the truth.

In my opinion, teenagers of the 21-st are very pessimistic creatures. We fear being judged; paranoid at the idea of mockery  and just afraid of the sheer thought failure.  Social image matters to every one of us so deeply that we fail to realize that sometimes the world doesn’t  revolve around us . It is utter shame this paranoia is affecting young people more than anyone considering the fact this is supposed to be the time of our lives when we’re supposed to get rid of all our inner  inhibitions and conquer the ever so obstructive dimension of hesitation. 

To be continued...

Kung Pow : Enter the Fist

This is going to be a review of one of the best motion pictures of all time. 
But first . . . a taste of marvelous-ness.

Master Betty: I have been called bad before. Many have said I do things that are not correct to do. I don't believe in talk such as this. I am nice man, with happy feelings. All of the time. First, a joke. What do you get when you cross an owl with a bungee cord? [pause] 

Master Betty: My ass. Nyah, haha, haha, haha, ENOUGH. 

[the intermission begins] 

Master Betty: Go get some snacks, perhaps a carbonated soda!

Ling: I hope they have Icees!
Chosen One: I have chosen the large tub.
Wimp Lo: My nipples look like Milk Duds!
Master Tang: I've got some yellow liquid for your popcorn, and it's non-dairy! 

As you can see, simply through a minuscule fragment of the entire script and the sophistication of this masterpiece is so clearly depicted. I mean; seriously. 

I can't imagine how Kung Pow has received so much stick considering it is meant to be deliberately bad - and I mean - it's Steve Oedekerk! Thats a free pass to blatant brainlessness.

It hasn't been rated very highly at all on sites like rotten tomatoes and imbd. I have suddenly lost hope in all of the viewers. Like Gah. Are there really only "5/10" stars worth of people out there who actually have a sense of humor? -- Disgrace

The issue here with viewers I think is that the classiness of the humor is questionable. In fact, its pretty bad. And again, I must keep stressing that it is so obviously supposed to be bad in the first place.

If you haven't seen the movie, I insist you do. All of what I'm  saying would make complete sense to you assuming you are in fact a good-natured person with an open sense of humor.

Tiger and Crane Fist was a movie made in Hong Kong and then released in 1976 and starred some apparently not very well-known or publicized actors - considering its minimal hits on google-searches. I reckon the movie did relatively well among the Cantonese-speaking market ; 69% of viewer votes overall - I think that's rather decent keeping in mind the era in which it was made.  Nevertheless, it was still, for some reason, dubbed in English a little bit after it was released ( high demand in English-speaking countries. {?} ) Inevitably, this dubbing had revolutionized to a whole new level of dubbing in 2002.

I think of the point and style of the whole movie pretty ingenious. 

Original visuals from the one released in '76 ( mostly ) + 99% manipulated audio + complete inadequate re-dubbing by Steve Oedekerk + shallow and sometimes distasteful old school humor  = I present to you, Kung Pow ; Enter the Fist ( 2002 ).  I feel the tears of pride emerging already. 

A little visual taste of what it's all about - and trust me; to get a thorough picture you must indeed listen to the audio sometime. 

When the moon left.

The Universe is a great show on the History Channel especially if you’re an amateur-astronomer-wannabe such as I. It takes you through the basics of outer-space physics and theories and other universe-marvels like black holes and the Sun and quasars and supernovas and so on with amazing generated-imagery plus animation.  And of course, those experts they bring in to speak about concepts a little bit more in depth such as Alexei Filippenko and  Laura Danly - who are my favorites. 

The show got me wanting to write the following. So after a decent amount of reading and digging, I put all of the jumbled facts together in the neatest way I possibly could. Sorta. Many theories and ideas in the text require much more elaboration but that would just be sadistic to most readers. And to me, of course. I shall attempt to explain facts a bit further. One day, perhaps. But for now...

The moon is a barren lifeless rock but it plays a surprisingly important role toward the story of life on Earth. Just to know how important it is exactly, lets remove it from the sky and its orbit around the globe just to find out. I mean, what could go wrong anyway? 

The Earth and our only natural satellite, the Moon have a very complex relationship. And because of this, the moon tugs the Earth’s mass towards it, forming an invisible gravitational bulge on the side of the Earth facing the Moon. However, through a strange quirk of gravitational physics, an identical bulge is formed on the side of the Earth farthest away from the moon. As the moon revolves around the earth, the position of these bulges change on the planet; and this is how our tides are controlled.  You get the picture. 

Now imagine a water-filled balloon stretched horizontally. Then imagine suddenly letting it go. You would imagine the balloon snapping back into its original spherical shape abruptly along with all the water in it. On a much bigger scale, thats exactly what our planet would go through if our moon were to be suddenly removed from the picture. Our oceans would slam against each other forming not one, but two ( depending on the lunar stage at that point. For example, on Gibbous Moons and Crescents, the number of waves formed would multiply. This would be one of the many the facts that require more explanation as I said earlier. ) massive tsunamis on either side of the globe; one moving from the direction East to West and the other West East. The formation of the waves would be similar to the ones in 2004 except they won’t be just 5 to 15 meters high. In this case, we would have to face waves with an unimaginable height of approximately 1 mile. Thats 1600 meters. A small costal city like Florida, wouldn’t stand a chance being pummeled by a mile high wall of water taking away lives of 11million in that small region in the United States alone. And keeping in mind these tsunamis are global; imagine the death and destruction throughout the entire world. 

With such a titanic and sudden shift in water, you would picture be more unpredictable results. Scientists believe with such a huge shift in our oceans, the currents in the water would be badly altered. There could be two possible consequences to this.

One, if the current belt stops moving, we would go through the second ice age in Earth’s history. And the other consequence, assuming the current conveyer belt happens not to stop, however starts cycling the opposite direction, we would have a huge change in water temperatures.  The currents are responsible of keeping the water at the poles warmer than they should be and the water at the equator cooler. So millions of species of aquatic life would be endangered and of course possibly extinct.  The climate is a very delicate system, if we tweak one part of it, the other responds very abruptly. In the same way, changing the temperature of the waters does not just effect the water and what it inhabits but also has a huge role towards the shores. A  good example to show a similar phenomena in our Earth’s history is  the Sahara Desert. Before the ice age, the Sahara was a green and lush place, fertile and full of life. But after the ice age, the waters around the sahara got warmer and now leaving it  a barren vast piece of land. So the climate plays a huge impact on our survival. 

Unfortunately for us, it would just stop there. Not many people realize that the moon is what keeps us to a 23 and a half degree and very stable tilt. Without the moon around anymore, our axis would be a free fluctuating one. Our axis would be as vulnerable as a compass needle in a bunch of magnets. We would be at the mercy of the gravitational pulls of other planets orbiting around the sun. Our axis would fluctuate so frequently, that for a hundred years or so Antarctica would become a tropical jungle and the next century, glacier sheets would be covering Central Africa. Its unclear if human beings would be able to survive because we don’t know how rapidly we’d be able to adapt to a constantly changing environment. One things for sure, our livelihoods and would be horribly thrown into havoc. 

Human beings do not solely depend on the environment but also the the other organisms that reign the planet. In this sense, the moon plays a vital role in keeping the whole plant and animal kingdom going. 44 percent of the living organisms on earth interact with the moonlight just to keep up with the lunar phases; its like keeping up with their body clocks or calendars so they would instinctively know when to breed, when to migrate and so on. Without it, they would be so disoriented that these creatures would be vanishing from the ecosystem so rapidly, causing other organisms in the food-energy chain that rely on them them to be in a situation just as unfortunate. So the moon is a big influence towards the  intricate ecology on earth. 

3 billion years ago, a Mars-size planet had crashed into Earth letting out 40 trillion tons of debris into space that had orbited in a “chain” around the Earth.  Most of it was light metal and  molten rock from our planet’s outer core. And just after a year, only 350   (+/-) days or so,  these bits of debris clumped together to form our moon which had slowed down our planet’s rotation to 24 hours today ( at that point it had only slowed it down to 18 hours. However after four billion years,  we have come to a 24-hour rotation; it will only increase as the bileniums go by ) and  this had also stabilized our axis. So we owe our lives to this mere error that occurred in Earth’s early history.  It wouldn’t have mattered that Earth was in the perfect “Goldilock” spot in the solar system; neither too hot or too cold, without the moon however, its safe to say evolution would have been severely stunted. Life would have never been the same.  ( Gah. This also requires much justification )

I think its important we’re aware how unique our moon is in  the solar system.  Many planets like Jupiter have got dozens and none of them are large enough to influence their planet in any way. For one, our moon is significantly very large ; a quarter of the size of the Earth. It really is the odd-satellite-out in the solar system. And it JUST happened to be the driving force of such vibrant existence on our planet to the extent that some experts ( and a couple of UFO-fanatic-junkies ) have jokingly insisted that extra-terrestrial life from light years away had deliberately put the giant orb there to spark the flame of life on Earth. Sounds reasonable enough although I’d still go for the whole Mars-sized-planet-crash theory. 

Its a fact that the moon moves away from the Earth, about half an inch every year. Even in retrospect, it doesn’t really have much of an impact on the way our planet is functioning. However, in 5 billion years, the moon would move so far away from Earth scientists believe it would just fling out of its orbit into space. Luckily for us we would never have to experience that day  because in THREE billion years, our sun would be at its peak growth stage ( A red giant ), it would be SO hot and expand so rapidly that it would devour the first three planets of the solar system, which would include Mercury Venus and us, Earth. Yay.

 Fingers crossed - that by then human beings would be witnessing this phenomena from a  safe distance millions of miles away but its almost comforting, in a very twisted way, to know that when our Earth would have to go through this, our anchor in the sky would still be there with us.  

Spongebob and Other Social Hazards.

 

I won’t dig through all the research-based-proof that suggests SpongeBob SquarePants (often referred to as SpongeBob) that is an Emmy - award winning American animated television series  ( pfft ) deteriorates a child’s way of thinking. I will, however, express how I feel towards the social and subliminal messages telly-shows such as these portray ( the kind that are really threats to the human race ) because I have wanted to trash-rant about this for ages now. And yes, I think I did just make up the word “trash-rant".  Score. 

Don't be deceived by the vomit-inducing-happy-yellow-smiling-and-almost-staring-into-your-soul face as it is really the spawn of the devil in disguise sucking out brain-power -  one unsuspecting toddler at a time. 

To be continued..