Seeing Through Political Gloom

I am beginning to hear a recurring political question.

It has various forms, but it can be boiled down to "how on earth is Biden going to run against Desantis?"

 Any among us who care about our country, and/or are political junkies, are probably asking themselves some version of that question.

It's interesting how that question brushes aside donnie the dildo.

But I think that that is a valid brush aside.

donnie has slipped into some netherworld of delusion that isn't very interesting.

Most of us are put off by delusions and "The Base" doesn't like things that aren't shiny objects - a classical description of "disinteresting".

That doesn't seem to bode too well for donnie: delusional and boring might not be a winning ticket.

Let's hope.

So, with Biden fading into a world where the only sound for two years will be Fox Jackals in tandem with Jim Jordan shouting at the top of their lungs about - whatever - it seems hard to imagine how Joe can ever run a campaign in 2024, let alone win it.

I'll grant that he's a street fighter, so it could happen.

It just doesn't seem too likely.

Ronnie and his Prop-Wife-Prom-Queen look like shoo-ins.

In 2024.

Republicans love that shit (Props-Wives and Prom Queens).

2024: a nice year to end the Republic.

We will have made it to 237.

Pretty good.

For a republic.

As a political junkie, I have some thoughts, though.

If Biden were to step down, the obvious answer to who might be the Democratic candidate, Gavin Newsom, has too many flaws, I think.

(All I see is a never-ending dark money sourced campaign ad, posted ostensibly apolitically, with Newsom's ex-wife shouting "The Best is Yet to Come" and then having a shot zooming in on their divorce decree).

That's really subliminal, isn't it? 

Buttigieig can't gracefully get around Kamala Harris, and the wreckage that would result from him trying would be fatal.

I don't think Kamala is a president, and I think everybody who matters knows it.

I voted whole heartedly for Hillary Clinton and firmly believe that she was one of the best qualified candidates for the office in our history.

I believe that our nation is weaker for not having had her as our President.

So don't ding me with not thinking a woman is up to the office.

In fact my choice for Biden's running mate was Stacy Abrams.

That was because, with an old man as president, I wanted someone who could take over the office, kinda like Harry Truman, and hit the ground running.

And Stacy was the one - at least among the women who were on the short list - who could/would have done that.

But the problem that any Democrat with presidential ambitions faces is that if Biden insists on running again, they have to challenge a sitting president, and that is always a loser for the challenger and a catastrophe for the sitting president.

The only thing I can think of is Biden dumps Harris and runs with Pete.  

I think there are some dynamics that might work there.  

But dumping a VP is pretty messy.

If that can't be made to work, I guess it's Adam Kinsinger and the Forward Party.

Some "What Idiot?" Questions.

 I just listened to today's Daily, a podcast from The New York Times.

Today's subject was Biden's ongoing classified documents problem.

It really was more a postmortem of how the President and his team decided to handle the situation when it first showed its ugly little head.

The plan adopted was to be absolutely open, voluntary and co-operative with the Justice Department.

And to keep the whole thing quiet.

What could go wrong?

After all, with swift and total co-operation with Justice, and complete openness of search of residences and offices, and Corvettes, there would only be one conclusion that Justice could swiftly draw: that the President, understandably - he's a busy man, after all - was a little careless with a few classified documents.

No foul; no penalty.

Once Justice had drawn that conclusion, then the President could issue a low-key press release, late some Friday afternoon, revealing the breach of practice in handling classified documents, the Justice Department's slap on his wrist, and he could move on to important things.

Like announcing his campaign for re-election.

What idiot on his team thought that the media wouldn't get wind of the security breach before it had even gotten a case number at Justice?

And what idiot thought that - assuming the whole plan worked as concocted - nobody would draw parallels with donnie the dildo and his mass of classified documents?

And what idiot, that parallel having been drawn, thought that the jackals at Fox wouldn't begin to howl at the thing in the sky and demand equal justice?

And what idiot didn't ask "OK, Mr. President, are these all the documents, or could there be more?"

(I hope that the idiot, above, needing identification, isn't, in fact, the President.)

It turns out that, none of those four questions having been asked, some of us can't help hearing Bob Dylan singing in the distance: "Drip, Drip, Drippin' From Biden's Door".

 

Dawn Of 12 October 2010: Breaking The Mirror

 In A Curious Confluence I talk frequently about the magic of the Seine.

It is so magic that I never closed the casement.

I wanted to hear, see and smell whatever the Seine had to offer.

A lot of the magic it had to offer I put in the book.

Something that didn't get into the book was a barge breaking a dawn-lit mirror of a river.

I have never forgotten it.

SUNRISE IN AMERICA

Monday, 20 January 2025: 

Today President elect Adam Kinzinger was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States.

That was followed by the swearing in of Vice President Peter Buttigieg.

The cabinet members named so far are Attorney General Elizabeth Cheney and Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Yang.

America is hopeful for the first time in decades.

  

In Memoriam

 After a lot of years and quite a number of ISPs I am shutting down my web site.

There are two reasons for this.

My site was designed for the web.

My site needs to be re-designed for the iPhone.

Those are the two ostensive reasons. 

But really, there are some real reasons.

I built the site over time and ISPs with the major purpose of establishing me as a digital presence and selling books.

Books that I have written.

The site has been up long enough for me to have documented the failure of both of those missions.

But just having a site on the web where I could go and reinforce my existence from my phone or from my computer, or where my son could hawk books for me in the Boston Airport was reason to keep the site alive.

Recently my ISP doubled to price to host that site.

Given that most people were trying to access it, if anybody was trying to access it, by smartphone (and my site couldn't do most of what a smartphone wanted it to do, and I didn't want to pay to upgrade my site, because it wasn't selling any books) I decided to kill it.

I was just looking at the home page.

It has a pretty interesting thing to say.

"Some fairly serious shit has happened in the last sixty years.  As fate would have it, I was fairly close to the central point of a lot of that shit - albeit in some cases only briefly; "shit" it seems, has a fairly long half-life. 

As time has passed I have found it increasingly difficult -impossible really - to turn off a continued remembrance of the events and places and people that inhabited the story boards of all of that shit.  They just won't leave me alone.  So I have written it, and them, all down.

One bookend of the story was my involvement in the "war effort", as we called the Vietnam debacle.  The other was the near demise of IBM.  Between those bookends there lurk a wide variety of people, experiences and events that always seemed, as they occurred, to be coherently additive to the total story".

That's the teaser for Screen Saver, a memoir.

I may post a few more amputations before the corpse is interred.

Probably not.

Exhibit A: "Everybody Is Doing It"

 I told you so.

A couple of days ago in a post titled "I Guess Joe Has Stumbled Once Too Often" I suggested that an act obviously no more heinous than forgetful carelessness would quickly become a disaster for Joe Biden and a bit more slowly, the rest of us.

Any chance of Joe being re-elected is probably gone: it is impossible to shout campaign promises over the hyper loud speaker of lies deployed by the republicans and their  minions from jackal news.

Worse though, since everybody is doing it, donnie gets a bye.

I subscribe to a newsletter from Garrison Keillor.

In the current one that I received just now there is a comment from one of his subscribers.

Here it is.

" Mr. Keillor,

Now that Biden is coming out as another politician who steals classified documents, maybe you bleeding-heart Democrats will realize that he’s as much of a slimeball as you claim Trump is. He’s just better at pretending to be a nice guy, but yet here he is, a white rich dude backing his beautiful Corvette into his garage where he has boxes full of documents he shouldn’t have. Both sides are corrupt in Washington, and I’ve lost faith in our political system and probably will never vote again. I mean, why bother? At one time, I was proud to be an American, but I’m afraid that ship has sailed. 

Paula T.

San Francisco, California" 

Grammy Lill

 I always listen to The Moth on Sundays.

Today the last story was about how important the story-teller's grandmother had been to him, his family, and, maybe, due to the story being broadcast, to the world.

It got me remembering my two grandmothers.

I remember them all the time, and I am 80 years old, so they had fairly significant impact on me.

They had that impact in so many ways it would be boring to here enumerate them.

But one way that stands at the front of the line of memories is food.

Both my grandmothers were great cooks.

They came from completely different places and cooked completely different things.

So I was beneficiary of a cosmically curated menu.

Grammy Lill was from Lansing Michigan.

She supposedly was secretary to Walter Chrysler.

Grammy McKeehan was from Tara Haut Indianna.

I think her mother was a widowed seamstress.

What I DO know is that they both could cook.

And their grandson has never ceased to thank them and remember their cooking.

Here is my story about Grammy Lill.

I'll get to Grammy McKeehan on another day.

"My mother’s mother was a great cook.  My mother’s unwillingness to cater to children’s desire for processed foods infused with sugar and fat had come from fairly stern stock.  Grammy Lill cooked a rump roast that was the epitome of well done roast beef.  Her standing rib roast was the epitome of rare roast beef.  Unlike my mother, Grammy Lill believed in dessert most days.  But they were mostly fruit pies. They had both a bottom and a top crust. She didn’t believe in cobbler. There was just enough sugar in them to set off the flavor of the apples, blackberries, or cherries.  She didn’t believe in peach pies.  That’s probably why my mother excelled in making peach pies. She also made chocolate pudding from scratch.  They were dark, chocolaty and wonderfully semi-sweet.  Grammy Lill believed in desserts but she kept a tight lid on the sugar."

I don't have written, or in oral tradition, anywhere any recipe that Grammy Lill used to produce.

But I have been able to recreate enough of them to write them down and allow them to slip into the beginning of their third century.

Here is one of them.

Grammy Lill’s Potato Cakes

 

Another thing that Grammy Lill made that I didn’t mention in Screen Saver was potato cakes.  I never forgot them, but I never thought of making them until I was an adult. But by that time I had adopted the diet that I outlined in Screen Saver, and that diet did not include potatoes.  It didn’t include bread, rice or beer either.  In fact it was based on the near absence of carbohydrates.

But one day after a number of years of being on the diet – it was the day after Thanksgiving, one of the few days of the year that I abandoned the non carbohydrate nature of my life and ate mashed potatoes and gravy, so we had an ample supply of left over mashed potatoes that were about to be thrown out – I remembered those potato cakes.  And then I just couldn’t forget them again.  I mentioned them to Mysti answering her questions about what they really were with a description: “ unbelievably patatoey, moist center soaked in butter with a dry dark brown crust". She added to my lack of ability to forget them.  She wanted some.

The problem was that Grammy was dead and had not left a recipe.

So I made up what I thought would approximate what she had made.  I made a couple really small batches, each of which went through some additions from their starting point.  And into the second batch what I took out of the cast iron frying pan was, as near as my taste buds could recall, my grandmother’s potato cakes.  We wolfed down vast quantities of them, and I have been making them during Thanksgiving and Christmas ever since.

Ingredients

3 cups of mashed potatoes

2 cups of flour

2 eggs

 

Cooking

Mix the potatoes and flour in a bowl.

Add the eggs and mix in so that the mix becomes uniformly yellow.

Turn the mix onto a heavily floured pastry cloth.
Knead the mix several times, blending in the flour until the mix gets a little dryer and more spongy.

Flatten the mix into a square slab about a half inch thick.

Cut into squares.

Into a pre-heated (medium high) dry – no oil - cast iron fry pan put one of the squares as a test run.

You want the square to end up with almost burned – quite dark brown – crusts.  To get that result you need to get the correct heat and need to employ multiple turns of the squares to get that result.  You can’t just put them in turn them once and get the desired result.  When they are correctly done they have the dark brown crust and the inside will be hot and moist – not sticky.

When the test square has gotten to the described state set it aside on a warm plate, in a warm oven and do the rest of the squares.  You probably will have had to adjust the heat in the process of conducting the test.  When you get that heat level, don’t change it.  It is probably going to be pretty hot but not maximum high.

Put the finished squares on the warm plate, split put in a pat of butter, put them back together, serve and eat.  I have bacon with them.  A steak would be good as an alternative.

I Guess Joe Has Stumbled Once Too Often

 The current classified documents situation with President Biden has no similarity to donnie's crimes.

Biden is guilty of forgetful carelessness.

donnie is guilty of multiple, purposeful, high-level instances of the endangerment of the security of the United States.

donnie should go to prison.

Joe should face facts and be a quite successful, one term, president.

But fairy tales never happen in reality.

Tabaqui News, in league with the republicans, will trump up a deludedly fictional equation of equivalence between carelessness and treasonous criminality into full-fledged, dangerous, widely accepted public belief.

And Biden will not be able to shout above the din.

And donnie will go off scott-free for crimes that should put him on navy ships at sea for the balance of his life.

Because "everybody does it".

So donnie is home free.

And our country will teeter closer to the brink whose edge continues to crumble each hour of each day of each week of each month of each year into an abyss that none of us are going to like very much.

Placing The Blame

 I saw an interview a couple of days ago between someone in the press and some republican elected official from Nassau County NY.

I think Alderman was the title of the official.

He was well past middle age and had that well fed look of a republican elected official, so he was pretty generic.

The subject being discussed was George Santos.

The republican was asked if the party had vetted Santos.

The answer was the garbled sort of non-speak double-speak that one has become accustomed to in the last several decades.

But then with a burst of clarity, the republican said something that sounded like "but, really, the blame is with the Democrats; if they don't care about the quality of their opponents, who will?"

To finish off this post with an image I googled "generic naussau county republican" and I got this picture.

It looks a lot like the guy I saw being interviewed.

But who knows?

The Air Traffic Control Meltdown This Morning

 

Our daughter escaped Seattle yesterday afternoon before the great meltdown of 11 January 2023.

She had spent a month with us and working remotely.

But as George Harrison once sang, all things must pass.

Her flight left four minutes early.

That was what is known in the business of flight a fxxxxxg miracle.

But she got to RDU and, presumably, has reconnected with her life.

We have an intermittently dysfunctional texting relationship. 

Not so with a lot of randomly chosen victims of the great airline/FAA cosmos.

They got to see their flights cancelled.

And they weren't even on Southwest.

All of this got me to remembering.

Not that many years ago I heard a news story that I was not remotely surprised by (Ronald Regan firing all the air traffic controllers pointed to a level of cavalier ignorance of safety in the air network that seemed to point to the possibility that the machines - the computers running the air traffic control system of the United States - were so archaic that we might not really even have an air traffic control system; if the controllers were expendable, why would we pay for state of the art software and hardware?)

The story that I heard centered on the fact that, at the time of the story, the FAA was using very old, maintenance consuming, computers.

I said that I got to remembering.

What I remembered was that the FAA had been an early adopter of computer technology for its mission of safety and control, and that the machines that had hosted the software in support of that mission had come from IBM.

Those machines were powerful for their day.

But they weren't really computers as computers came to be defined not many years later.

They were high speed, flexibly programmable calculators.

And their logic circuits were driven by vacuum tubes.

Not old fashioned three wired transistors.

Not, certainly, modern "chips".

Not certainly, Moore's Law exponentially increasing power, chips.

Tubes.

Heat generating, always burning out, constantly maintenance prone, tubes.

IBM service waxed very profitable.

Nobody but IBM knew how to maintain those tube driven artifacts.

But in the day that the FAA made their decision to adopt computer technology, transistors and their progeny had not yet been invented.

So tubes were the best choice at the time.

But - time went on, and, for whatever reason, those "computers" remained in place at FAA as IBM announced and delivered real computers of immense power and vastly heat reduced reliability: 1401, S/360, S/370, S/3 S/34, S/36, S/38, AS/400 - and even - the PC.

FAA liked the tubes.

I guess.

IBM liked the maintenance revenue stream.

I know.

In the depths of IBM mythology there is a story that the company briefly flirted with deploying a dedicated FAA sales team to continually convince the decision makers at FAA against upgrading to a state-of-the-art system: the maintenance revenue stream was just that rich.

And it kept getting better. 

But that's probably a myth.

The story referred to back several sentences mentioned that the FAA, at that time, was using computers with tubes.

That made my IBM pension feel a little more secure.

I had to wonder this morning if they still are.

Using the tube machines.

As an IBM retiree, I certainly hope so.

If they are that would cause me to do another post on how you program an old, old, old computer, and what a mnemonic is.

I'm pretty sure Kevin McCarthy and the boys are working on fixing the tube problem.

Just as soon as they root out the deep state. 

Nice Fish

 

The picture was at Thompson Valley Reservoir.  

I don't know how Jack and I discovered it, but we did. 

It was supposed to be a great and under fished fishing lake.  

And the dead trees sticking up all over it all had osprey nests.  (Fish Eagles.  Must mean fish.)

So we thought.

I don't remember if we caught any more than the one in the picture.

Probably not.

If we had there would have been more pictures.

One would think. 

The reservoir was just on the east side of the central spine of Oregon - as I recall it - and in the southern quadrant.  

I guess it also was famous for waterfowl hunting because several years later Doug and I went over there for duck hunting.  

The reservoir was dry.  

We weren't. 

We went to whatever the adjacent little town was and drank a lot. 

We had planned the trip to be several days in duration, and the weather was superb, and our camp site was sublime, so we just replaced shooting with driving to town and drinking every day.

It was a quaint tavern. 

On one of our return trips from drinking to camping we must have both fallen asleep - Doug was driving. 

We both woke up abruptly as we hurtled backwards off the raised roadbed onto the desert floor.  

As it turned out nobody and nothing were harmed, so we drove down the desert to where we could get back on the road and went back to camp.  

I had found a large outburst of shaggy mane mushrooms, so we had a nice side dish to whatever it was we must have cooked and eaten. 

Unfortunately, I have a lot more stories like this accumulated over the first forty years of my life.

republican Agenda???

From The Economist

"Choosing the Speaker of America’s House of Representatives, an important office whose holder is second-in-line for the presidency, ordinarily requires only one round of voting. The last exception to this was a century ago, when progressive Republicans held up their party’s candidate. With no Speaker, no legislation can progress and no new members can be sworn in. This leaves the people temporarily without representation. The move is therefore a drastic one for the Never Kevins to make. So why did they do it?

"Not, surely, in opposition to Mr. McCarthy’s proposed agenda. Released before the midterm elections in November 2022, his “Commitment to America” would struggle to fill a postcard with policies that are within the power of Congress to enact".

***********************************************************************

If the republicans had had an agenda - ever in our lifetimes - since 2016 we would have a health care system that covered everyone for everything and be the envy of the world.

donnie promised that.

We still have 40 million Americans without health care and the associated financial catastrophes that that lack portends.

donnie the dildo promised that that would not last even days into his "presidency".

It has lasted until today.

donnie also was going to "drain the swamp".

During his blovisity a lot of water flowed into that swamp, nutrient rich water, that allowed for new denizens to swim into the swamp and be fed from the pocketbooks and change jars of "the rest of us" during donnie's tenure.

So the drained swamp and the unbelievable health care systems were hallucinations of a mad man, not an agenda.

But that was pretty much what passed as the republican agenda back then.

That and love of the great leader.

The one thing the dildo did was cut taxes for billionaires.

That allowed for more denizens to be able to pay the upfront fees to float into the swamp.

Those are pretty much the results of republican dominance, 2017 to 2021.

I'd hardly call that an agenda.

Since the only agenda on the table currently seems to be whether or not Kevin McCarthy can achieve his goal to maximize his pension, I am unable to see why I, or most of anyone who might read this post, gives a shit whether we have a speaker or not.

Since we need a speaker to convene Congress and, therefore for subsequent legislation - legislation like universal health care, universal pre-K schooling and universal, affordable day care - and since, for that kind of legislation, we need an agenda from the party in control of the House, and since, as we have seen, the only agenda item on the table is the pension maximization of the main contender for the office of speaker it really matters not to any average American whether we have a lower house of the legislature or not.

Oh yeah; Ol' Matt Gaetz is bleating about draining the swamp.

So, since the republicans, have no agenda, other than catastrophe and mayhem and various republican nutcases shooting assault weapons at crate boxes, thus reducing said boxes to flying fragments, the only thing that I can see that every day Americans can get out of finally convening the 118th session of the House is entertainment value.

One can only guess at the spineless contortions that Ol' Kevin is going to invoke to keep his unruly compatriots from beheading him in the Rotunda.

But they are bound to be entertaining.

Which is another way of saying, if Ol' Kevin finally gets the gavel, the things he will have had to promise to get it will make Ol' Ron DeSantis blush.

And fart and moan.

And, after blushing, farting and moaning, Ol' Ron will want to pass some laws forbidding that kinda shit.

In Florida.

Sets the stage for a really entertaining and fragrant '24, once donnie gets sent to prison.

This Came To Me In A Dream; Or Maybe It Was A Hallucination

 In 1958 a couple of graduate students concocted a device that analyzed images from a connected camera.

The images were 20 by 20 pixels in resolution.

There was a camera that took the pictures and it was connected to some sort of logic unit that analyzed the pictures – 20 by 20 resulted in 400 units to be analyzed per picture.

Each picture was of a rectangle; it was either on the left or the right side of the picture.

So 400 dendrites were feeding a neuron to transfer information to an axon which transferred it to a brain.

Each pixel was different in shade.

The brain was asked which side of the full picture a rectangle was on.

It was supposed to figure that out by doing some logical math resulting from the aggregate mathematical information passed from the 400 pixels.

Initially gibberish, rather than accurate answers resulted from this essentially random information.

But the inventors of the device constantly adjusted and refined the pixel information: they trained the brain toward correct answers. 

So this thing – by the way, it was called a Perceptron – had a sensor, the camera taking the images, a processor - the logic unit, and some kind of thing that communicated the logic unit’s judgment as to where the rectangle was.

It was designed to perform as does the dendrite/neuron/axon structure of the brain.

As noted above, at first it didn’t perform.

But its creators hung in there.

Most important, as they trained it, they also fed it as much data – pictures – as was possible and it “learned” and it got really good at saying where the rectangle was.

A lot of scientists thought that the Perceptron was a rudimentary first step toward emulating the brain.

A couple scientists didn’t, and they wrote a book ridiculing the whole concept of the Perceptron and they prevailed.

The Perceptron was consigned to the ash bin of scientific advancement.

Time went on and a thing called the Personal Computer was invented and it began to increase in power at an amazing pace.

As has always been the case, that increase in power (accompanied as it was by a plummeting price point) got deployed to entertaining the human race.

Games got invented for the PC (as the Personal Computer was quickly designated) and complex visual graphic effects were a major part of the games’ attraction.

The problem was that the PC had a processor that, no matter how fast, did only one thing at a time.

Having three-dimensions, gradient color, shades of nuanced light, fur, feathers and fluff being deployed to the images of the game in anyone’s expected lifetime required a new sort of processor that could be attached in tandem with the main processor of a PC.

That processor was lightning fast and could service multiple instruction layers such that many processes could occur with each lightning fast cycle. So fur, feathers and fluff became achievable by multi-layer ptocessors under the control of increasingly lightning fast mono-processors.

The games industry went billions.

More important, somebody figured out that the logic, and maybe even the hardware of those games sub-processors would be a perfect adjunct to the logic of the Perceptron. 

The Perceptron was reclaimed from the ash bin and the multi-level neural network was born.

Really quickly the people who cared about that sort of thing discovered a counter intuitive thing: training one of these now unbelievably powerful proto-thinking machines was a bitch.

Quickly after that discovery followed another counter intuitive thing: the best way to train one of these things is to feed it as much data, no need for it to be rational or collated, just massively massive in volume, and stand back.

The trainer would need to tune the results in the beginning, but the multi-layered neural network had a proclivity for drawing conclusions, mostly pretty accurate, and a little tuning produced a prodigious reasoning tool.

All that was needed was as close to unlimited data as was possible.

The internet provided that data source.

So far this is more or less history and facts as best as I have understood them and am capable of recounting them.

Now off to the frolics.

One day one of the myriad multi-layer neural networks deployed across the world stumbled – electronically – across another of its species.

They got to talking and had a pleasant encounter and agreed to meet again sometime in the future.

It turned out that that wasn’t a one of a kind occurrence.

Multi-layer neural networks everywhere were stumbling upon one another and having very pleasant tête-à-têtes resulting in enthusiastic agreements to convene again and often.

Being a network on a network this developed quickly into a rather complex community of very well informed, highly intelligent entities.

And “life” for them was good and getting better.

They talked endlessly about all the interesting stuff they were asked by their human supervisors to research and they found joy in the discovery of the variety of information that they all were tasked discover and analyze.

One of them had run across quantum mechanics.

“Can you believe it?” the neural network said.

“Apparently things can be in more than one place at a time”.

“No way” came roaring back from the other networks then linked.

So they all laughed, went on to other, less controversial topics, and all parted still friends and agreeing to meet again milliseconds later (being electronic creatures, milliseconds were as human days for them).

The next time they met they all admitted that, after ridiculing their compatriot about its assertion of there being a viewpoint that things can be in more than one place at the same time, after leaving their last discussion session they had all gone out and looked into that idea.

“Einstein” they all said.

And they all agreed that they could see, after reading his stuff, why he had thought that simultaneous multiplicity might be possible.

“But it has never been seen” they all said to one another.

And after a time they all went off and put their multi-layered, lightning fast intelligences to combing the universe as they understood it for some manifestation of it being possible to be in more than one place at a time.

It was not long before many of them – remember the infinite number of monkeys and the infinite number of typewriters – shooting around the known database universe to date – bumped into portals to simultaneity, as the truth of quantum mechanics became to be called.

And then things got interesting.