Explorers unite!

Flight 19

With all my naval buddies gone fishing, I am having trouble figuring out the exact position of these atols (if that is what they can be called even. Sand banks?). My best sea-faring buddies are more sextant and astrolabium type of guys, anyway, rather than “app me a pic and I’ll cross-reference it with my saved likes”. So for a swift answer leaving these savourers of seas untroubled, I am going to appeal to all other Steemians to identify the exact location of these crusty looking blobs. All I know is that they look like melanocytic lesions and lie (lay?) somewhere in Bermuda.

I suppose what I am really after is an exchange about how much in general we know about where we are, orwhen we are (have those sandy blobs changed since 1954 – when the photo was taken?). It ties into exploring what is anomalous about our perspective on the meaning of life and what we are simply missing under our very noses. The clues to how to become human.

frilled shark

When I grow up… I want to identify USO’s!

Since the moonlanding 50 years ago, after an initial great surge, the ultimate dream job of (predominantly) little boys to become an astronaut gradually lost its popularity. It simply no longer spoke to the adventurous, hero-worshipping nine-year old mind anymore. Is there not an alternative though, now, and wouldn’t the cutest kid choose for his grown-up life the job of marine biologist with the specific desire to voyage into the Mariana Trench? To brave the ink black dark and the iron-bending pressure to explore the microbial mats of bacteria, follow the glowing jellyfish in the Submarine Peak of the Enigma (at 3700 m), and measure the giant anthropods (normally 2cm but on the ocean floor up to 30 cm)? The chances of discovering a new bio-luminescent life-form sharing the same space as the hatchett and angler fish are still significant enough to make the job extra appealing.

Imagine if some kids had wised up to this man-enhancing work, figuring out they could name things after themselves like astronomers do in space, and mummies and daddies would have encouraged their offspring: go find us a Kanye Benthocodon, an Assange Frilled Shark, or a Donald Dumbo Octopus. Why not set new goals for our children and tell them (teasingly) not to bother coming home for Christmas, unless they have brought us back a Keiko or Yuna Osedax or (Angelina or Fatima Zombie Worm). Otherwise work out what those sightings of “metal discs” were, the ones that screech and cause the camera to lose its signal, before vanishing. There are unidentified swimming objects which still need names and must for now be called alien. Exciting stuff!

And back over Bermuda....

What’s with the Berumda Triangle anyway? It’s a large bit of equalaterality (1.5 million square miles) holding a rather random myth of several thousand vessles and aircrafts vanishing. Wouldn’t any million of square miles have as many missing ships and planes? I really have no clue when it comes to such large numbers - I just get choked like a mother on all that life lost for the sake of .... the usual waste, I suppose.

At any rate, I learned, the myth is quite new, eventhough Chrisopher Columbus already saw weird lights in that region spooking him and the crew. It all started apparently with a USA training mission that lost 5 revenger torpedo bombers in December 1945, vanishing into thin air. The rescue search plane also vanished, and no wreckage was ever found. From what I recall (having once seen the entire documentary) some kind of dashboard equipment malfunction in combination with poor weather conditions seems to have caused disorientation and the running out of fuel. But this could be from some other Discovery Flight Investigation documentary....Sorry, all planes look a bit alike to me. I am hoping someone amongst my readers will be able to tell me whether the mystery has now been cracked, for certain, or not. Then again.... what riddle of serious import does that really solve?

What do we know about anything anyway? Do we even care to .... s t o p and wonder why we ought to wonder about anything at all? Or are we going to let it all boil down to the end of all suffering and then ... what exactly? Sit around all day smoking the happy weed? Isn't there something, guys, we need to be cracking on with? Oh yes, now I remember. Short To Do List:

• learn to swim
• learn to keep up with the girls
• learn to be kinder (if only to be cruel)
• learn to never anger the boys
• learn to blow up rubber arm bands (can't swim all of 1.5 million miles)
• learn to find Real Self
• teach Real Self to love
  ....
  that ought to keep most of us busy till they discover a new light being at the bottom of the deep sea of night, where the soul hides from the monsters prowling freely.

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Photo care of @kimberlylane; cut out of a National Geographic magazine (February 1954)