Latest global warming update: The temperatures in South Africa dropped to below freezing this week and they had their first snowfall in over 25 years. Also, Australia has had their coldest June ever with heavy frosts and temperatures as low as four degrees. Brrrrr, mate. Oh, wait a minute … this was supposed to be a global warming update. Uh … well, it’s been kinda hot here in Cleveland. We’re finally getting some rain, thank goodness, but it’s sure been hot. In the 90s. Of course, it is summertime and summertime is historically a hot time. Okay, update all done.

Actually, the weirdos are backing off the label “global warming” and are now using the term “climate change.” Which is more accurate. Except climate change is a natural global cycle and can’t be exploited politically the way global warming can. But hang in there, weirdos … you’ll think up some other way to make natural occurrences sound like the end of the world, as well as a way to place blame on George Bush.

Speaking of weirdos, a bunch of them are pushing for censorship in the … uh, I mean, pushing for fairness in the media. Hillary, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, John Kerry, some of the other shady double-dealers. They’re tired of being placed under scrutiny by the media. They’re right, of course. Everyone knows when Thomas Jefferson spoke of the importance of a free press, he never intended it to apply to rich white Democrats.

And yes ~ Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and even Obama fall under the category of rich white Democrats.

Speaking of media bias, though, MSNBC.com has reported that, according to the Federal Election Commission, out of 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the beginning of the current 2008 campaign, 125 of them gave to Democrats and “liberal causes,” while only 16 gave to Republicans (only two actually contributed to both parties). Using that as a barometer for the quote, unquote bigger picture, it kind of proves what the lefty crybabies are saying about media bias ~ evidently it does exist … just not in the way they want folks to believe.

No, I’m not a shill for the right. I’m a conservative, true, but I vote Republican by default, not because I’m excited about the ticket (with the exception of maybe Fred Thompson). You need look no further than our own local Republican party to recognize we have mostly morons running the show. No disrespect meant to any honest, hardworking morons who may be reading this.

By the way, do you know what we never really heard much about? Cindy Sheehan getting fed up with the so-called peace movement and quitting. If the press is so biased against the left, why didn’t they jump on that story? I barely heard a peep … maybe a mention on Drudge. Poor ol Cindy said the whole sorry business destroyed her marriage, estranged her from her kids and family, wiped out her finances and alienated her from the “movement.” Welcome to the real world, Cindy … extremists are never your friends. They are users. Now that you’re no longer useful to them, your name is mud. Mud Sheehan. But really, I found it sad to hear her say, “I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost.”

Actually, here’s your Quote of the Week ~ let’s call it Cindy’s revelation: “(I) was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party … However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the left started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used.”

Poor Cindy. Her revelation came too late. In fact, poor all of us. We have no leaders in this country at all anymore … just mean-spirited, self-absorbed users.

(Here’s you three old Out Of My Mind columns for the price of one new one, circa 1996. You know, back in pre-history when I was working with a 300-word count? In fact, “Do Hogs Go To Heaven?” was the first OOMM I ever wrote. Enjoy. Or not.)

DO HOGS GO TO HEAVEN?

Speaking of whether or not hogs go to Heaven, I got some family lore for you. One year my grandfather ~ Daddy B we called him ~ was going to visit his parents (my great grandparents, Granny and Pop) who lived out of state, and he wanted to take them a nice fat hog as a present. At the time, Daddy B lived in Doctor’s Inlet, Florida and Granny and Pop lived in Buford, Georgia about thirty miles north of Atlanta. This was back in the 30s, 40s, back before I was born.

Well, Daddy B rounded up one of his choice porkers ~ a fat and sassy yellow-headed hog whose name is lost to history. He boxed that ole yellow head up in a wooden crate and tied it to the front bumper of his Chevy. Then him, Mama B, my aunts Clara and Pat, my own mother, and some of the other ones when they were all little set out for Buford, Georgia. They drove all that night and arrived in Buford the next day. When Daddy B went to give Pop the hog, they discovered that it had died during the trip ~ froze to death in the wind, riding there on the front bumper of the car all night. Ce la vie and RIP, right?

Well, about a year later, Daddy B was going back to Buford to visit Granny and Pop again and he thought he’d take another crack at it, so he boxed up another one of his prime yellow heads. This time, though, he tied the crate to the rear bumper of the Chevy to protect the hog from the steady, cold wind. Again, he and the family drove all night and arrived in Buford the following day. When he went to give the hog to Pop, though, they discovered that this one, too, had died ~ asphyxiated from carbon monoxide fumes.

Needless to say, next time Daddy B went for a visit, he decided to try a whole other tact with it and left all the hogs in Florida. Coming through Atlanta, he just stopped off at the Varsity down there near Georgia Tech and bought Granny and Pop and all those kids a sack of hot peach pies. Time he got to Buford, they were still warm, too.

So to answer the question, some hogs probably do go to Heaven, but they probably also got some pretty good peach pies there as well.

This is off the subject a little bit, but Nipsey Russell used to work at the Varsity.

BIRTH DAY MEMORIES

I remember the day I was born. I had been hanging out in the womb, thinking about things, trying to figure out what to do with my life. For the past nine months or so I’d been lounging in a kind of perpetual sitz bath and couldn’t help feeling that I was wasting my potential. I was restless, feeling a need to test the confines of my comfort zone.

I was a good swimmer back then and could hold my breath seemed like forever, so I decided to explore. I was familiar with my immediate surroundings but had lately become intrigued with the birth canal. Where did it lead? What new experiences waited there? What strange and/or wondrous adventures lay ahead for a curious fetus?

I swam toward the light.

I was cautious at first but the environment seemed relatively benign. In fact it was a lot like the Lost Sea up in Sweetwater. Floating with the warm current, taking in the sights, I was lulled into a false sense of security. I must have dozed off.

Suddenly, the current picked up and grew stronger and I awoke to find myself in raging whitewater rapids, being carried along by a puissant, alien force. I fought against the current, thinking perhaps I’d acted rashly in leaving the security of my little prenatal jacuzzi, so countless many miles behind me in the womb.

Ahead, I began to make out what appeared to be an opening, or doorway of some sort … a portal to the outside! What I remember most about that moment: the light ~ blinding, dazzling, expanding before me like a hot-white blast of atoms. To my under-developed, infantile mind, it seemed as though I were being sweep into the jaws of hell.

Then I was wedged tightly into the compressed opening of the exit portal, like an obese Rock City tourist trapped in the Fat Man’s Squeeze. I gasped for breathe, struggled against the wrenching, lung-crushing pressure. Just before I passed out, a huge, other-worldly creature clasped my head rudely with an enormous pair of metal clamps and yanked me, twisting, into the void. I screamed the mad scream of a soul lost and everything went black.

When I came to I was wrapped in a coarse blanket, laying in a cold plastic tub behind a glass partition. On the other side of the partition were a gaggle of frightful giants with exaggerated expressions of horrible glee on their monstrous faces. I thought, Dear God, they’ve put me in a zoo …

Of course it wasn’t a zoo. It was the nursery of the old St. Joseph’s Hospital down in Atlanta. But the trauma of that day lives on within me still and that’s why I’m the broken shell of a man I am today.

MONKEY BUSINESS

The reason I know a lot of stuff, I read a lot. Mostly cereal boxes and comic books, but hey ~ that’s reading, right? However, I did recently pick up a copy of Time magazine and found a really interesting article under the “Society and Science” section. If you get a chance, pick it up. I don’t remember the issue and they wouldn’t let me take it out of the library, but it’s got a picture on the cover of some Eastern Bloc guys shooting some other guy in the head. I think it was Time magazine. Time or Entertainment Weekly.

Anyway, it seems a bunch of scientists at some big think-tank research laboratory up north recently conducted a fascinating experiment. You’ve maybe heard of the theory that if you locked a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand typewriters for a thousand years, the monkeys would, just by randomly striking the keys, eventually type out all of Shakespeare’s plays word for word?

Well, evidently this bunch of scientists wanted to test that theory, so they rounded up a thousand monkeys and a thousand typewriters, locked them up in a room, and left them there for a thousand years.

At the end of the thousand years the scientists entered the room. Not surprisingly, what they found were a thousand smashed typewriters and a whole slew of picked-over monkey bones. They realized that if they ever conducted an experiment like that again, they should probably check on the monkeys from time to time … maybe feed them, you know, see how they’re doing in there.

The fascinating thing about the experiment, however, was that over the course of the thousand years, the thousand monkeys had typed out word for word, not Shakespeare’s plays, but every single one of my “Out of My Mind” columns.

Sure did. Typed out all my columns just by randomly striking the keys ~ much the way I actually write them, now that I think about it. Of course so far it hasn’t taken me a thousand years. And that’s not to throw off on the monkeys, either ~ I’m sure they were trying their hardest. It’s just that I’m a much faster typist than a monkey because I use two fingers whereas the monkeys probably only used one … or just banged away with their fists. I don’t know exactly how they did it because the article wasn’t too clear on their typing technique.

Thanks to the resurgence of nuclear posturing between the U.S. and Russia (and India and Pakistan), nuclear testing by North Korea, and Iran’s nuclear”enrichment” program, the Doomsday Clock now stands at 11:55 ~ five minutes til midnight. You know what the Doomsday Clock is? That’s the clock the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set up back in 1947, to measure the distance the world is from total nuclear annihilation. Five minutes. Yikes.

A little over 15 years ago when the United States and the Soviet Union signed an arms reduction treaty, the hands of the Doomsday Clock were set at 17 minutes til ~ which was actually the safest the world had been since 1947. Now it’s five minutes til. Oh, well. What did you think, that you’d live forever?

Actually, the Clock has been much closer to Doomsday then five minutes. Back in 1953, it was ticking away at two minutes til. You remember the ’50s, don’t you? Those heady, carefree days when the U.S. and Russia played “chicken” with hydrogen bombs? Bomb shelters were very popular back then and there were even instructional films which offered checklists of necessary provisions we should store in our bomb shelters to help us through those tedious days and restless nights we might have to spend underground. An actual, honest-to-goodness training film quotation: “By all means, include some tranquilizers to ease the strain and monotony. A bottle of 100 should be adequate for a family of four.” (Now, Martha Stewart, that’s a helpful household hint.)

In my elementary school, a military PR guy came to our class and gave out free dog tags with our names, religion and dates of birth. I asked what the dog tags were for and he said (in so many words) that in case of a nuclear attack, the dog tags would help the retrieval teams identify our charred remains. On the positive side, he showed us a government propaganda film featuring Burt the Turtle demonstrating how to “duck and cover” ~ a disturbing little animated film that was sort of a cross between Mr. Rogers and Rod Serling. Burt even sang the cutest jingle as we practiced crouching under our desks with our hands over our heads. Could anything be more conducive to the well-being of an entire generation of children then a cartoon turtle admonishing them to crouch down and cover their heads against an inevitable nuclear firestorm? “Remember, kids ~ what do you do when you see the flash?” (Not “if,” but “when.”) I asked the public relations guy if all we had to do to protect ourselves from a nuclear strike was duck and cover, what did we need the dog tags for? He said, “There’s always one kid in every classroom who tries to be funny.”

Ah, those grand old days of Civil Defense drills and Conelrad alerts. One film I remember, there’s a military officer briefing everybody on The Bomb. He said there were really only three things for you to worry about from an atomic bomb: the blast, the heat and the radiation. I thought, well, what else would there be for me to worry about? That the only two people left alive to repopulate the planet would be me and Carol Dewberry, the fat girl in my class who picked her nose and ate the boogars? Honestly, without the blast, the heat and the radiation, an atom bomb would be little more than a piece of scrap metal falling from the sky.

But can you understand now how my mind became so warped? Good luck, children of the modern world. If I can offer you any words of encouragement, it would be for you to remember the prayer of President Harry Truman after we wiped Hiroshima off the map. He prayed, “May we use the Atom Bomb in God’s way and for His purposes.” To which God replied, “Say what?!“

I was having a discussion with one of my secular humanist friends this week and we got onto the topic of how old the earth is and how long man has existed. Some Biblical types contend that mankind has only been around for six thousand years, while science puts that figure at more like 4.5 million or longer. I don’t necessarily have an opinion about it. I’m just a simple creationist without enough imagination for Darwin.

In fact, a lot of scientists don’t hold with Darwin either. Although they’re loathe to embrace creationism, they do recognize the inconsistencies of Darwinism in its purist form. They’re still working out the details on all that. But some creative folks have bridged the gap between the two “theories” by coming up with a little gem of ambiguity called “intelligent design.” That’s a way to sort of acknowledge God without acknowledging God.

But, like I said, I don’t have enough imagination for all that. It’s actually easier and more believable to think God created the heavens and earth in seven days and then rested, than it is to believe that life sprang forth from nothingness, or aliens impregnated monkeys, or some rudimentary outer space live form crashed to earth on a comet or asteroid and we all evolved from that, or any of the other comic book theories floating about.

What’s that old cliche? God said it, I believe it, that settles it? A bit simplistic maybe, but there you go.

Anyway, as to the question of how old the earth is or how long people have lived upon it ~ and bearing in mind that I’m a simple, somewhat slow-witted country boy ~ here’s the point I would make: With every miracle God performed, there was a the appearance of age … the appearance of that thing having had a history.

Do you follow me?

For instance, if a modern chemist could somehow analyze the bread and fish that Jesus miraculously produced out of thin air, or the wine He miraculously made from water, they would find those things to be perfectly normal (and of a very high quality). See?

Take the fish. Where do fish come from? First, mommy and daddy fish have a romantic interlude (yuck!), then little fish eggs develop and finally mommy lays the eggs. The eggs hatch and the fishlings grow until they’re big fish. Along comes a fisherman who catches the full grown fish, takes them ashore, scales and guts them, dries them, cooks them, whatever. Well, that’s a process. It takes a lot of time. And even though Jesus produced His fish instantaneously, for all intent and purpose they had the appearance of having gone through that process I just described. But the thing is, they didn’t go through that process ~ they were produced instantaneously.

Same with the wine: Seeds grow into grapes, grapes are harvested, crushed and aged. Fine wine can take many years ~ decades even ~ to ferment. So while the wine Jesus instantaneously produced had the appearance of having gone through a long aging process, it hadn’t. It was only instants old.

Following this logic, when God created the earth, He created it complete with forests, rivers, animals, birds, crops and a full grown man and woman. If we could travel back though time to the week after creation, we would assume that the world had been in place for eons. If we analyzed samples of the rock and soil, we would no doubt conclude the earth to be many millions of years old. But that wouldn’t be so, as it had only just been created the week before.

Did Adam and Eve have navels? Of course they did, because they were created as full grown human beings and all human beings have navels. See? They would have had the appearance of a history, a past.

And I’m not even talking about evolution being contrary to the first law of thermodynamics, or that carbon dating is unreliable because the amount of C14 in the air isn’t constant, or that hot stellar gasses should have dissipated instead of forming planets, or any of the other contradictions to the supposition of evolution. It’s just easier for me to believe that we were created, as opposed to evolving from non-living matter.

But I’ll give the renowned astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, the final word. Regarding the odds of life evolving from non-living matter, Hoyle said it would be much the same as a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and randomly assembling a Boeing 747 from the junk.

What do you think the chances are of a tornado doing that?