Bottom’s Up! It’s 2023!

It’s 2023 everyone!  Happy New Year to all of you.  Hehehe.  Let’s drink and be merry, shall we? 

For those of you who have managed to make it alive and well to this point in history, I drink to your continued health, wealth, and happiness.  2022 was a tough year. In fact, it has been a tough 3 years, and counting. Let me count the ways.

The four horsemen of the apocalypse have been running in zig-zag patterns all over the globe, bringing tidings of misery and death. Let’s analyze them and see how well they’ve held up, as far as predictions are concerned. 

The Horsemen of Apocalypse

The Book of Revelations talked about them in terms of Conquest, War, Famine, and Death.    In fact, I am going to make a couple of quick changes. I’m going to combine two of those horsemen, because it seems to me as if they are one and the same–Conquest and War, and we’re going to add a couple more, just to update the old book a bit.

1. WAR – Think about it.  What do you need to do in order to conquer an area?  Why, you need to start a war, of course. No sane person would allow you to conquer them and turn them into slaves without at least trying to fight back, which is what a war is.  So…let’s just drop the Conquest and just call a spade a spade. Let’s just call the first horseman WAR.
2. FAMINE is the next horseman, and he gets to keep his title because famine occurs for various reasons other than war. The changing weather pattern has much to do with causing famine, and don’t forget natural disasters like floods and earthquakes and droughts that ravage farmlands. In the coming years, a lack of fertilizer is going to cause the next huge famine (and I’ll talk about that in a future post).
3. DEATH – We don’t even have to go into the significance of DEATH because death is something that eventually happens to everything that has life. He also gets to keep his title because death is an integral part of the natural cycle of the world. Of course, it goes without saying that just because death is natural does not mean that it is any less destructive and devastating to all those affected by its reach.
4. PANDEMIC – This brings us to the next horseman, and he is PANDEMIC. After having lived through the COVID Pandemic of 2020, we all saw first-hand what happened. In fact, we are still feeling the effects of the malaise, as the pandemic has crippled much of the world for the last 3 years. Methinks he deserves his own horse. This latest horse (version COVID 19) is not going away any time soon. In fact, it’s endemic and we’re just going to have to live with it, like we do the influenza virus.
5. ASTEROID – Yes, yes. I know this one is an odd duck, but if there is any horse that can possibly wipe us humans off the face of the planet, it would be one big ASTEROID impact. It would actually make a couple of the other horsemen look positively benign! Since we are now traveling through that part of the Milky Way Galaxy that is super crowded and densely littered with all sorts of trash heavenly bodies, watch out for those stray hit-n-runs!

Bottom’s Up!!!

Anyhoo, we can’t be too ‘doom and gloom’ this time of year. We should look forward to the new year with renewed hope and enthusiasm.

I’ve opened up a bottle of reserve pinot noir and pouring a glass of cheer to all my friends and readers on Taobabe.

We’re not really celebrating the wonderful year of 2022, we’re celebrating the fact that we made it through such a tumultuous year and are still alive and kicking.

In fact, we humans have lived through many death-defying events before and we’re still here, 8 billion strong. I have faith in the tenacity of the human race and the intelligence of those in power who can stave off impending doom.

May the least of us survive through the worst of whatever horseman thunders down upon us. To this new year’s resolution, let’s BOTTOM’S UP!!!

Yes, you read it correct. It will probably be the only time for me to get ‘bottom’s up‘ mixed up with ‘bottoms up‘, because I usually never place an apostrophe where it doesn’t belong. But in this case, it really is exactly what it says.  

When I say bottom’s up, I literally mean ‘the bottom end is up at the top’.

Yes siree.  We’ve been looking at the world all wrong.  What’s up is actually the downside and what’s down is actually the upside.  The north pole is technically the south pole because the north side of a magnet is attracted to it.

Think about it.

The geographic location of what we call the North Pole actually attracts the north end of the magnet. If you know anything about magnets, you would know that opposite ends attract.  If you place the north pole of one magnet near the south pole of another magnet, they are attracted to one another.

Conversely, the south end of a magnet is drawn to the south pole, making it, you guessed it, the real north pole.

Therefore, if you are a stickler for detail (which I am NOT, but I know some people who ARE), you really should insist on seeing the world from a different perspective, a new point of view–the point of view that insists on North being at the top and South being at the bottom.  It’s along the same thought process as East being Oriental and West being Occidental, except that it’s all relative to where you are standing.

Anyway, if we think of north as up and south as down, we would look at the world as such.

I know, right?  Weird isn’t it?  I almost don’t recognize my own home planet, but out in space, there is no up or down, no left or right, there just IS.  It’s also all dark and gloomy because we are the light yang dot within that huge field of yin darkness.

We should be used to this corrected visual of the Earth.  After all, the I Ching has always placed North at the bottom.

This was the diagram that was given to us, alongside all the other user’s manuals that we were gifted.  In fact, we got eight.  I was reading the Shuo Kua tonight, and marveling on how old it is, and yet, I’m still reading the dang thing.  I think it’s the oldest one of the eight Wings, but please correct me if I’m wrong…which brings me to pole reversals.

Pole Reversals

As of today, Earth’s poles look like this.  Back about 780,000 years ago, we had a doozie of a pole reversal.  Of course, this was back in the stone age, and we troglodytes had barely figured out how to keep a fire burning.

Earth has since settled in the last 20 million years into a pattern of a pole reversal about every 200,000 to 300,000 years. I’m expecting another one any minute now since it has been more than twice that long since the last reversal. It’s going to be crazy when it happens, but since it’s a major cyclical Earth change, there’s nothing we mere mortals can do about it.

In situations like that, my only advice is to bottoms up and drink to the changes! Happy New Year everyone!

[1]  NASA