Morning Coffee (13)

Good Morning All;

I've been told my recent Morning Coffees have been laced with a little too much depressing melancholic sadness. Well, I apologize if my current brand of uber pessimism/cynicism rubs anyone the wrong way. I'm sure my demeanor will eventually improve and I'll return to being just a plain old pessimistic cynic.

I must say, XM Radio is the sweetest invention since, well, radio. Or maybe the phonograph. I feel bad for all of you terrestrial radio listeners. I recently discovered a channel on XM called "Lucy." It's like I'm back in my bedroom at 14 listening to all that music. Every song is a song that played from my cheap radio during that time. It's pretty cool. Songs I haven't heard in years flow from my Rodeo's speakers. I haven't heard a song on that station that I don't like. The songs from my youth…

I will share with you something that I find incredulous. I was watching "Lost Worlds" on the History Channel last night, and it was about Hitler's super-city Germania, which was never created as you know. His plan was to basically level Berlin and build a great city with great works of architecture - typical of dictators. The Chancellory and the Berlin Stadium were the first two buildings of this city. Hitler personally designed this one massive domed building, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. And when I say massive, I mean it. The dome was nearly 1,000 feet high, you could put a Saturn rocket in it apparently. It sat 180,000 people. So many that they feared that the breath of these people would condense on the inside of the dome and then fall as rain. The entire structure was to be made from granite - the dome alone would have weighed 200,000 tons. So they have this engineer/architect guy describing the building and he states that they ran the design through a computer to see if it was even feasible, which he didn't think it would be. Guess what: Turns out Hitler's design would actually work. As soon as they found that out, they immediately began to diminish the design. This is where I got sort of annoyed. Here's a guy with no engineering or architectural training that happened to design the plans for what would have been (and still would be) the largest domed structure in the world. That would have been a pretty neat accomplishment if it were someone else, say Roosevelt for instance. But the narrator started saying things like "while it was technically feasible, the cost would have been immense and impractical." Perhaps, but you could have said the same thing about the Colossus of Rhodes. Then the architect guy belittled the design as ugly and ungainly, a "mockery of the neat lines of the Pantheon." The commoners of Rome might have said the same thing about the Pantheon for all we know. It's that sort of subjective? Hey, I may not be an architect, and I may be a man with little taste, but I thought the thing was pretty impressive, especially designed by someone with no training in engineering. So Hitler designed it, so what? By giving the guy credit for a pretty impressive feat of design, you're not dismissing the Holocaust or World War II. And that's what these people don't understand. They're so afraid of being labeled anti-Semites or Hitler lovers that they cannot even suggest that the man did anything NOT evil. I think it's pretty well known what the man did - he was sort of nuts, yeah? So why not be objective a little and tell the good with the bad. It's not like the good will swing him into fame - his fate will always be in the realm of infamy, big dome design or no.

Well, that's all I got. I got ambushed by a co-worker and ended up BS'ing about unimportant things for 40 minutes. Wanted to get some more in here, but that's all I've time for.

Word of the Day: Uxorious (adjective): Excessively fond of or submissive to a wife.
On This Day in History: Thomas Edison announces the invention of the phonograph (1877). What a coincidence! Also, in keeping with the professional aspect of this publication, Jonathan Pollard (a Navy intel analyst) is arrested for spying for Israel (1985).

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley. Huxley might be right.
"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true." - James Branch Cabell. Told you.

Until tomorrow. Because it will surely come.