Iran

On the first day of basketball practice in my one high school Iranian town, I lined up all the prospective team members to take free shots. One after another they closed their eyes and threw the ball in the general direction of the basket. When I instructed them to hold the ball a certain way and to aim just over the front rim, I was met with looks as if I were seriously retarded.

"If Allah wills it, the ball will go into the basket."

I suggested that they could help Allah. Over half of the players did not return for the second practice. I was very lucky not to have been thrown out of town.

Iran is very much in the news lately. As a Peace Corps volunteer I spent two years in modern Persia during the Shah's reign. I found Iranians to be anything but warlike. In fact they have not launched an aggressive war against a neighbor since 1785. In that same period of time we have been in over a dozen serious conflicts and many more minor adventures. In the fifty or so wars around the globe since the end of WWII, the US, in most cases, has sold weapons to one if not both sides. Do not get me wrong, I have served my country not only in the Peace Corps but in the Navy where I became a disabled veteran. I am just stating the facts as I see them. While I am not a conspiracy theorist, the invasion of Iraq and our Iranian saber rattling do not pass the smell test.

For an insight into the Iranian people, I suggest a fun read of my book "Landsberg's Law". You can read the first chapter free by going to www.selfpublishersplace.com and followng the links.

DISCOVERIES

I have made three discoveries that could alter your eating, footwear and medical attitudes. I shall now share them with you.
1. If you peel a banana from the bottom, that is the opposite end from the stem, then those pesky strands from the inside of the peel will no longer appear.
2. Wearing Wigwam socks is like encasing your feet in the most luxurious cashmere. They are made of merino wool and besides being incredibly comfortable they are virtually indestructable. They claim you can run a marathon in Wigwam socks, without shoes.
3. A pharmacist friend let something slip that I did not believe. He said that he quite frequently filled prescriptions for Obecalp which is placebo spelled backwards. A placebo, of course, is non-medicinal but the patient believes otherwise. This seemed impossible since it could seemingly leave the doctor and the pharmacy open to lawsuits. If my Internet research is to be believed, The single most prescribed "remedy" in both Israel and Norway is Obecalp. A Los Angeles emergency room was also cited for stockng and giving out a variety of different size and color Obecalp pills. When I asked my friend how he determined what to charge for the sugar pills, he said, "The more I charge, the better the Obecalp works".

If you have discovered any such nuggets, please share them with us.

A Novel Plot

Consider the following a novel plot. Joe, a brilliant young scientist, becomes obsessed by the deadly crisis confronting our species. Over half of the more than 6,500,000,000 humans are dying, directly or indirectly, from malnutrition. Experts have attempted a reallocation of resources and other stop-gap measures with little lasting success. Joe conceives a truly transformational solution that will end hunger as well as greatly extend our life span.

Joe sees the major cause of man's abbreviated and troubled life span to be our personal system of nutritional processing. The ingestion, mastication, glutition, digestion and elimination of food is extremely inefficient. The body wears iself out processing large quantities of food in order to reap relatively minute amounts of nutrition.

Joe develops an Alternative Nutritional Delivery System (ANDS). His machine manufactures individually designed patches that deliver personalized optimal nutrition into the bloodstream, bypassing the primitive, debilitating, wasteful procedure we have unquestioningly accepted.

Powerful forces compete to capitalize upon Joe's invention while other seek to destroy the invention and Joe. On the one hand, whoever controls the patent for the individual machines will have more wealth and power than anyone in history. On the other hand, entrenched business and religious interests would be greatly threatened.

Life as we know it will alter radically. Our teeth and digestive apparatus will become as vestigial as the tail. Food markets, restaurants, dentists and toilet paper will become unneccesary to name just a few of the more obvious changes. There will be no obesity, diet related diseases or hunger. For those who say it cannot be done, in a sense, it is already being done. Coma patients are kept alive for years with intravenous feeding.

Joe evades those who would steal his invention as well as those who seek to destroy it.

Now consider that this story is not a plot for a novel. His name is false but his invention is real. I know Joe.