I'm wearing my eyeglasses instead of contacts for a few days. I didn't realize how curved the world is. The computer screen is curving away from me at the edges and the keyboard is kind of weird-looking.
This morning, I ventured out into this curved, new world with the three dogs. Normally, the leashes, when the dogs pull on them, appear to be straight lines, the shortest-distance-between-two-points straight; but then again, in this shapely world, the shortest distance rule doesn't seem to hold true. The leashes were slightly curved, but not uniformly curved.
One would think, if this were a mental exercise, the kind that mathematicians and physicists do when they are thinking of things quantum, that they would all curve to the left or curve to the right, if only ever so slightly; but reality is quite different. One of them curved slightly to the left, and the other two curved slightly to the right; but just as I was going to try to get the ones curving to the right to curve to the left, the Beagle stopped dead in her tracks to smell an invisible, yet irresistible, fragrance on the down-sloping sidewalk.
I'm not adverse, unlike those old-age Europeans, to adjusting my thinking about the Earth being curved instead of flat, which goes with ideas that the whole universe has curves, if we are to believe geniuses like Einstein, who just thought that one up on the spur of the moment; but maybe, just maybe, I've been wrong all these years in thinking that lines are really "straight" -- by my definition, that is. I look at those pictures, allegedly from space, which show a curved Earth; and I'm not one of those Flat Earth Society people, who think that's a bunch of hocus-pocus, who-shot-John stuff purveyed by those who are in control, whoever "they" may be. No, I can dig that the good, getting-less-green Earth revolves around the Sun and spins on its axis of evil at about 1,000,000 miles an hour, or whatever the speed of that might be, and that gravity keeps me firmly planted, except if I jump really, really, really high, then I might just land the next block over -- but the plain powers of observation in my 163-square-block micro-world give me the skinny on what's straight and what's not -- and so, this morning, I was somewhat disconcerted by the curviness of the world.
And I wondered if maybe Twiggy, the angular, two-dimensional, Brit model of the late 1960's, was really not so much awkwardly angular, but that my view of her was somewhat askew; and then I calculated that I wasn't wearing eyeglasses back then, and the gauze-y remembrance of her was not so much the result of the passage of a relatively huge bulk of time, but blurry, uncorrected near-sightedness.
Posted by Bill at May 1, 2007 02:32 PMYou got close to Twiggy? Wow! I suppose anyone would look angular at that distance. Lots of my girlfriends did.
Posted by: Joel at May 1, 2007 08:47 PM