More synopses of the sessions I attended at the Mensa World Gathering at Disney World. And I'd better finish this pretty soon - things are already drifting away. My notes are starting to turn into cryptic phrases like "The doorknob comment." I don't have the faintest idea what that referred to, but it must have been pretty good at the time....
Which reminds me - I came off with one good comment that got me noticed. In one of the more popular sessions, all the seats were filled, and all the spots on the floor and against the wall, and people were still trying to get in. The speaker had to turn people away, saying "Sorry, there are no more seats", and I spoke up and said, "No, actually there are plenty of seats. Everyone here has a lap." I didn't think it was THAT good, but the whole room roared, and for the rest of the day people were coming up to me and saying "Good one!"
I'm a little surprised that I didn't get more upset about the rooms being packed so far past the allowed occupancy. Having been in a fire which resulted in a stillbirth (in 1970), I am very conscious of fire exits and clear access and so on. I complained so much at the local auction hall about people parking in the driveway, blocking potential firetruck access, that they finally put up signs. We Mensans were violating so many safety rules it was ridiculous, but for some reason it didn't bother me. Until now.
Onward.
Orange Blossom Boys - The Untold Story of the World's Most Famous Fiddle Tune
I ddn't take notes during this, so I don't have the details, but the talk was about the Orange Blossom Special, and the two men, Ervin T. Rouse and Chubby Wise, who each claimed to have written it (individually, not together). Both were alcoholics, reclusive, and neither ever made any money off the tune. The heirs of both men now claim the tune. The speaker set out to find out the true story. The talk was about the lives of the men, and the story of the writing of the tune, which has been chronicled in the book Orange Blossom Boys. His conclusion is that Rouse should get the credit.
Stem Cells: Myths and Reality
About the current stem cell lines (only three viable lines remain). Difference between embryonic and adult stem cells, and what they can do. Aging and death is mainly due to adult stem cell malfunction. There are four types of adult stem cells, and each become tissue of a particular group type - bone & marrow, muscle, neural, and smooth muscle (like heart). You can't culture stem cells to, like, build a heart. It ain't gonna become a heart, folks. However, you can strengthen existing tissue with the addition of stem cells. Don Ho recently flew to Thailand, where his heart was injected with some of his own stem cells, which then became additional heart muscle, strengthening the damaged parts. (Other countries don't have the restrictions on stem cell research that we have, and progress is being made elsewhere.) She also touched on the realities of cord blood banking, and what's going on in animal research, and the difficulties of translating it to humans.
Lawyers' Games
I don't know what I expected when I chose this, but ... it wasn't what I expected. The moderator posed a situation, like: "The music stopped, and the woman died." We had to figure out the whole story, by asking him only yes/no questions. I did pretty well, solving three of the twelve. What's really distressing is that I wrote down all twelve scenarios, but none of the solutions (thinking that they were obvious once you knew them), and now I can't remember half of them!
Ok, I'll give you one. But you have to promise that if it's ever posed to you, you have to admit that you already know and exempt yourself. In the one above, people spent a lot of time trying to pin down what kind of music, whether it was a public performance, whether the woman was playing or not, whether it was an accident or murder, etc. It was finally determined that it was a public performance, she was performing, but was not playing an instrument, or singing, or dancing, she was merely walking, the stopping of the music was the proximate cause of her death, she was murdered, she died of falling, she did not fall off the stage or down stairs. And then the room went silent. Everyone was stumped. I couldn't think of any other falling danger in a theater. I closed my eyes and flipped through the file in my head, trying to find someplace where there's music, a performance involving walking, with danger of falling, and then opened my eyes and asked, "Did this take place at a circus?"
The moderator shouted a very loud "YES!", and the rest was easy. The answer is left as an exercise for the reader.
Pre-Christian New World Megaliths (Emphasis on Dolmans)
A dolman is a large capstone resting on three stone supports. (Almost always three, sometimes four.) Apparently there are a lot of them in the Michigan/Wisconsin area. That area is also a source of very pure copper, and from around 2750 BC men mined copper there, removing more than 50 million pounds of copper, which managed to somehow find its way into European bronze age tools. Huh? Why have we never heard this before? "People don't count data that doesn't fit with their theories." Oh. Ok.
The speaker and much of the audience were fascinated by the dolmans. How did ancient peoples get those huge rocks up on top of the supports? One woman said "And it MUST be by design. I mean, all over the world, always three supports. That CAN'T be natural!"
Ok. At that point I choked. I do think that maybe some of them were manmade. But it is my opinion that most of them are in fact natural, that manmade ones were in imitation of the natural (and actually fairly easy to do), and three supports is an argument FOR, not against, a natural cause. Three is Nature's magic number for static support. If you have a boulder resting on rubble, and over time bits of the underlying rubble gets washed away or otherwise removed, eventually the boulder will remain, resting on three unremovable supports. It's almost a law! And for manmade ones, how did "they" get that huge rock to balance on three supports? You roll the flippin' thing onto a pile of rubble, then remove stones. It will automatically balance on three. Stone Age Chenga. That's probably why all the ones not near known glacier drops are round.
Sheesh. I said that in the session and almost got thrown out.
Cultural Diversity
The speaker is an advisor to police departments and investigative communities. She talked about how you can't draw conclusions based on demeanor, when the subject is from a different culture. She also went into how when we travel, gestures or statements can be misinterpreted with disastrous results. The American way of indicating the number of diners with innocently raised fingers, for example, is very nasty in some cultures. Many humorous examples. No notes. I was tired. Bite me.
Adventures in Condo Management
This was one of the most interesting any yet lightest attended sessions. I'm still not sure what led me to choose it - certainly not the title. Maybe the mention of the dead body in the description.
The speaker told us about starting to invest in inexpensive rental condo units. He bought a fire damaged one cheap and repaired it himself, then bought some more, then a water damaged one. After ripping out and replacing the walls and ceiling, he noticed there was still an odor, and thought maybe the adjoining condo had suffered damage too (mold in the walls), so when that one came up for sale, he decided to buy it, too. Then things got interesting.
The text of this portion of the story is, in large part, at http://www.emilylyons.com/condo. There's also a pointer there to the photographs. After reading the text, I highly recommend that you go look at the photos - that's the good part! They take forever to load on my slow connection, so if they load slowly for you, I recommend that you look at, at least:
- 3 - The trash up the wall, those dark things on the wall and looping from the ceiling are spider webs. The place was infested with spiders, living on the roaches.
- 4 - The living room floor
- 13 - Hallway to the kitchen
- 18 - Dining area
- 26 - Kitchen. The falling ceiling distracted him from noticing the body
- 27 - The sofa the man was lying on is on the right. Notice the vodka bottles, full of "reprocessed" vodka.
- 35 - Bathroom toilet, full, but long past dried solid
- 37 - Bathroom sink - note the attempt at organization, "lightbulbs go here"
- 44 - The body in the kitchen - don't look if you're squeamish
- 100 - After renovation. His advice - rent to gay guys, "they're clean"
If they load fairly quickly, I recommend also
- 7 - Trash in the living room
- 10 - Spider webs! Note the old attempt at organization - cans on one side, paper on other
- 23 - Washer/dryer. Relatively clean, clean clothes in washer.
- 24 - The bedroom
- 30 - Bed - was the pillowcase once white?
- 45 - Cleaning out
Disney "Innovations" Tour
This was one of several tours offered by Disney to members. We were taken by bus (on Sunday morning) and shown the various background innovations that the Disney people had to come up with to run such a huge operation.
We saw the laundry facilities for all the tons of costumes, uniforms, and hotel linens (the towel folding machines fascinated me - puffs of air fold the towels precisely), and the septic system, where they separate the solids from the liquid from all the hotels and grounds, and then turn the solids into fertilizer used on the grounds, and the treated water to water the plantings.
We got to see the famous "tunnel" that circles under the various kingdoms, so that cast characters can move around without anachronism. We were amused that our guide was (several times) adamant that it was NOT a tunnel. It's a corridor. It was build on top of the ground, and then filled over with soil, and then the attractions were built on top of that, so this is the FIRST FLOOR!, and Main Street and the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, et al., are the SECOND FLOOR! We all suspected this distinction might have something to do with laws and rules pertaining to "tunnels". (Snicker.)
We went through the tunnel, oops, corridor, and came up on Main Street, where the guide explained about the tricks of perspective that make the street look longer as you enter the Magic Kingdom, and shorter as you're leaving, and that make the castle look larger than it is. He also explained why the stores selling cameras and hats are on the right as you enter, and souvenirs are on the right as you leave, and so on. The names on the windows of the "offices" above the shops are honoring people that were instrumental in the development of Disney World. We found Walt's window.
I found the trash cans interesting. They are all exactly 33 feet apart. They started out scattered randomly, and the Disney folks noticed that in some areas, there was more trash on the ground than in others. So they put a lot of containers very close together. They discovered that when they're close, people will use them. Then they started moving them farther and farther apart, until litter appeared again. They discovered that the magic distance is 33 feet. A major slob with trash in his hand will walk 16.5 feet to a trash can, but no farther.
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And that's how I spent my vacation.
2 comments:
Sounds like an interesting week, and either you're being very discreet or there were no hunky bachelor encounters?
Since when have I ever been discreet?
I suppose there were several attempts, especially at the spa, when guys tried to strike up conversations, but I didn't feel like responding. These gatherings are rather famous for after-hours activities (the Regional Gatherings are "RG"s, pronounced "orgies"), but except for the fishbowl, I avoided even opportunity. In fact, I left the fishbowl during the last bathroom break, before things got more interesting.
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