Monty by Jim Meddick for March 16, 2023

HA! Musket Scrubber, giggity!

My great grandfather (yes only one great) fought in the Civil war and got a musket ball lodged in his hip in the Battle of Black River. He was discharged from service and lived on a disability pension. He sired my grandfather at age 62.

I’m sure for whatever reason, those Ohioans deserved it.

Monty may have forgotten that war, but I will always remember reading about the siege of Chillicothe and General McNamee leading the brave relief column from Xenia. So long ago now. It was a very different time – and, of course, a different time line.

That’s not how I heer’d it Johnny. Saayy, The way I heer’d it Most called him a boot licker.

All those other wars you never heard of? I went back and stopped them. You’re welcome.

Started when Toronto, Ohio tried to secede from the state and join its Canadian namesake.

I really don’t know if EB is serious or just making it up, but, either way, it’s awesome.

I guess Monty needs to freshen up his resume, what did you do in the war Monty? Oh I scrubbed muskets with a corn cobb, & wait for it ……….. and braided cannon fuses out of horse hair.

So, who was scrubbing the musket balls?

Lately, I’ve been remembering things that haven’t happened in this timeline. Very spooky.

Time travel paradoxes. Would anyone know if there has been many time travel changes? How many times has it changed?It may have changed many times. We wouldn’t know, De ja vu?

Isn’t Ohio a renegade Connecticut colony?

Well, if Canada had won and absorbed Ohio, would there still have been train wrecks there?

I wonder who won? ☺

Scrubbing a musket? For a reenactment of an 1872 war? Not plausibly historically accurate, I’d say.

Unfortunately, that change led directly to the invention of time-traveling wiseacre robots ten years early. :)

The term “musket-scrubber” made me laugh.

Are we living in a computer simulation like The Matrix? How would we know?

Why is there something rather than nothing? How would we know?

Was the entire world created 5 minutes ago, including each of us with all our memories intact? How would we know?

In Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, 2-dimensional beings living on a flat surface understand length and width but have no concept of height. Are we 3-dimensional beings oblivious to a 4th spatial dimension? How would we know?

Did a supreme intelligence create the Universe 13.77 billion years ago, give it a little shove to get it started, then walk away to let it wind down on its own? HWWK?

What if, every time somebody made a decision, the universe split into two separate timelines, identical but for the decision going one way on one timeline and the other way in the other one? HWWK?

Gravitational measurements indicate that the Universe is about 5% what we think of as normal matter and energy, 30% dark matter, and 65% dark energy. Are we physically occupying the same space with dark-matter people, passing effortlessly thru them without noticing, because their equivalent of protons, electrons, and neutrons have no way of interacting electromagnetically with ours? HWWK?

Notice that these questions are qualitatively different from ones like “What was family life like for our ancestors 200,000 years ago?” (past), “Is my perception of red the same as yours?” (present), or “Will I ever be able to self-levitate?” (future). Those are cases where we can at least imagine a line of inquiry, such as the one about “Is there a Contra-Earth in our exact same orbit, only on the far side of the Sun, where we can never see it?”. The answer to that was “Let’s invent space flight and go look.” (We did, and there isn’t.)

That is very funny. I don’t know why Ohio and all of Canada would be in a war, but it made me chuckle. Very good. I went back and removed the Mastadon Stampede of 1920. You are welcome

Sounds about right. “Musket scrubber” would have been Monty’s speed in that Alternate Timeline….

AN APPROPRIATE JOB FOR HIM, ROFLMAO