On the Metro, headed down to the Rally to Restore Sanity. We got to the Greenbelt metro station at 11am, and only an hour and a half later have we managed to get on a train -- transit is that backed up. Reports are that the Mall is packed.

We met a lady here all the way from San Francisco as we walked to the station from Beltway Plaza, where we parked. Another lady in the traincar calls out asking if there's anyone else from the Hudson Valley, two people answer.

At this rate, we may not get down to the Mall before the end of the Rally at 3pm. But it's worth it to be a part of today.

The big question, of course, is whether it will matter, whether these people will turn out and vote on Tuesday -- and get their friends to vote -- or whether it will just be a lark for them with no impact.

Tomorrow, I'll be heading for the Rally to Restore Sanity in D.C.

Now, this is being billed as a "million moderate march"...and while I fit neatly into no one's system of political boxes, a moderate I am not. I'm the small-government liberal, the gun-owning pacifist, the free-market socialist. If a Green Party member and a big-L Libertarian had a baby who was raised by gorillas, you might come out with something like my views on Practical Zenarchy and what to do until Universal Enlightenment makes the state redundant.

And while this event is intended to draw lots of people who've never been to a protest or demonstration before, I won't be one of them.

Hell, this is supposed to be a "pro-reasonableness" event, and you can see the name of this blog.

But while I think vigorous debate, and even a certain about of unreasonableness, is important, I strongly agree with Jon Stewart's call to "turn it down a notch for America." And it's not just the birthers, tea baggers, and people who think mild health insurance reform is an insidious sleeper Soviet plot (the USSR faked its death, don't you know). It's also the deep-conspiracy 9/11 truthers who think that the civil engineers at NIST are part of a convoluted "false flag" operation set up by Bush and his cronies; it's the anti-war protestors carrying Che Guevara posters; it's the self-proclaimed "anarchists" -- with no idea of what anarchy actually is -- who think that breaking windows is going to bring about political change.

So, count me as a Radical for Moderate Discourse. I say yes to vigorous debate, and no to hostile and asinine behavior. Let's argue, sure, but let's do it over a beer, not over waving guns or overturned dumpsters.

And when you hear somebody talking about refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, tell 'em to take it down a notch. For America.

And if you see somebody about to step on somebody's head, for chrissake, step up and stop 'em. Thanks.

"It might be noted here, for the benefit of those interested in exact solutions, that there is an alternative formulation of the many-body problem, i.e., how many bodies are required before we have a problem? G.E. Brown points out that this can be answered by a look at history. In eighteenth-century Newtonian mechanics, the three-body problem was insoluble. With the birth of general relativity around 1910 and quantum electrodynamics in 1930, the two- and one-body problems became insoluble. And within modern quantum field theory, the problem of zero bodies (vacuum) is insoluble. So, if we are out after exact solutions, no bodies at all is already too many!" -- Richard D. Mattuck, A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem

"But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever." -- 1984, George Orwell (one of the great socialist writers of the 20th century, but that's a rant for another time)

A few years ago, before the teabaggers got ahold of it, I wrote in praise of the Gadsden flag -- the "Don't Tread On Me" rattlesnake -- and of Benjamin Franklin's essay on the rattlesnake as an American symbol.

Now, of course, it's become a symbol for our modern Know Nothings, the Tea Party.

I have to wonder, then, whether the Rand Paul supporters who tackled and then stomped on the head of a MoveOn.org protester have Gadsden flag stickers on their cars. Ah, irony.

Paul is not responsible for his nutcase of a father, Ron Paul, and deserves to be considered on his own merits -- or rather, his own total lack of merit. Because what he is responsible for is his excreable comments about civil rights law, and his fraudlent self-certification in ophthalmology.

And he's responsible for his asinine defense of BP during the oil spill disaster, when he said "What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,'...I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business."

Apparently, though, having one of your high level campaign workers put his sneaker heel on the head of your political opponents isn't cause for apology in Paul's mind.

Den of Geek reports that Sylvester McCoy, who played the 7th incarnation of the Doctor in the original run of Doctor Who, is slated to play wizard Radagast The Brown in the upcoming Peter Jackson film version of The Hobbit. McCoy was a contender for the role of Bilbo in the LotR movies.

Radagast is a minor character in Tolkien's novels, and he doesn't appear directly in the original version of The Hobbit. It will be interesting to see how Jackson plans to adapt him; the little bit of him we see in the novels hints at an earthy sort of wizard, more interested in hanging out with the beasts and trees of the forest than messing about with all this war stuff.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write about a near-death experience

I suppose the closest I've come to death is about 18 inches. That's my guess at the distance I avoided the head-on collision at highway speed.

Driving to work one morning, I-70 west, suddenly crashing spinning through the bushy median another car, coming right toward me. Swung to the right, lucky there was no car there, brain too full of not dying to realize I how close to dying I was at the moment, strangely calm.

Having dodged disaster by a foot and a half, I pulled over, now worried about the other driver -- what had happened to him? How had he gone from commuter to deadly projectile? Passed out at the wheel? Heart attack, stroke? No, I saw, as I ran back toward his car, he was stepping out, fully conscious. "Are you ok?" I yelled.

"Yeah, fine."

"What happened?"

"Oh, I just lost control," he said, got back in his car, and drove off...leaving my Toyota stuck in the mud, where a few minutes later a state cop came by and harassed me, until a guy with a pickup truck stopped and pulled me out. Which is, I suppose, a different story, not one about the nearness and casualness of death.

If I haven't stated it clearly before, let me do so here: the disaster hype around 2012 is a bunch of muddleheaded nonsense. The Mayans themselves didn't believe that some great disaster was due when their "long count" calendar wraps around; it was just time for a big party, same way 2000 was for us.

And no, there will not be some grand alignment with the center of the galaxy on December 21, 2012: the Milky Way is too blobby for the idea of a visual center to be meaningful, and the winter-solstice sun will never actually eclipse the galaxy's central black hole (which shows up as a point-like radio source) -- it doesn't even make its closest alignment in the sky with that black hole for another 200 years, not that this means anything anyway.

So there's no big deal in 2012. And...it seems that maybe the Mayan calendar doesn't actually wrap around in 2012 after all. A new review of the conversion of the ancient Mayan calendar to our Gregorian one suggests that it may be off by as much as 50 to 100 years. Gerardo Aldana, associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, looked at the arguments anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury made in support of the so-called "GMT constant", and found them wanting, throwing the conversion into doubt.

So it might not wrap around until decades from now -- or it might have already happened decades ago. (Rather than taking this as a debunking, I'll bet that at least one 2012 disaster entrepreneur will try to take advantage of this when the world fails to end in 2012, and start hyping some other date for the apocalypse.)

Now, some folks think that 2012 is a convenient time to think about making a change -- just as with a New Year's resolution, there's actually nothing special about January 1, just a social convention. Fine, great, and wonderful: just don't assign unwarranted supernaturalism to the date.

Me, I'll be turning 42 in 2012, and as a big Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan that means more to me than any old Mayan calendar. Also, 2012 fits the Law of Fives: 2 + 0 + 1 + 2 = 5, so as a Discordian it's significant. But Mayan prophecy? Astronomical disaster scenarios? Poppycock.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: Pick a specific person and write about them without revealing who it is.

I thought of him the other week, as I
played the role that he once played for me
leading a young student through the movements
of a classic form of karate's art

its more than twenty years gone by since when
I met my first sensei, who taught me this
old dance of forceful punches, kicks, and leaps
I wonder where he might be found these days
indeed if he still walks the earth at all --
no young man was he when he first taught me
these ways of strong and forceful violent grace
and more than that, the spirit and the mind
and heart it takes to walk the world a man

I called him sensei when I was a boy
and now this boy I teach calls me the same
in years to come will he remember me?
a link in a great chain of legacy
that reaches back through centuries of days