Confessions of a One-Track Mind

Once upon a time, when I was eight or ten or so, I wanted to be an archaeologist when I grew up. Specifically an Egyptologist. I've always been fascinated by pyramids and mummies, pharoahs and temples and hidden tombs. I love the Amelia Peabody mysteries by Elizabeth Peters (about a Victorian lady archaeologist) and the Mummy movies, and I love to watch documetaries on the subject.

In the course of watching said documentaries, I've developed a wee crush on Zahi Hawass, who is THE go-to Egyptian archaeologist. Mind you, it's strictly an intellectual sort of crush; he's in his mid-60s, which is a little older than I'm aiming for these days, and I may or may not agree with his politics. (However, I am sensible enough to realize that he's a product of a different culture and would likely not find my leanings any more palatable.)

Still, Planet Green was showing a whole bunch of documentaries about Ancient Egypt this evening, which I was loving, and feeling a comfortable frisson every time the narrator simply referred to him as "Zahi". (There's something about the familiar 'tu' form of address to such a respected scholar that tickles me.) And I was enjoying it very much, with the mildly melancholy thought that if I *had* gone into Egyptology, I might have ended up a colleague of his...and then Planet Green dropped off the face of the earth. Everything else is working fine, but PG has the black screen of death. Grrr.

Another one of those "what if"s....

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If you could turn into a automobile of any kind, what would you choose, and why?

Oooh, baby. What a great question. First of all, it would be a classic. None of your over-engineered contemporary cars. I'm into uncomplicated; a decent mechanic ought to be able to lift my hood and recognize all the parts---no goddamn black boxes, where you need a computer and an "automotive technician" to fix a problem.

My first thought was "Muscle car". Oh, there are so many sweet powerhouses from the 60s. I've been a Mustang fan for as long as there have been Mustangs, and I knew what a Shelby GT 350 was LONG before the remake of "Gone in 60 Seconds". (Yes, the Nic Cage version was a remake; the original was from 1974 and starred nobody you've ever heard of.) Plus, I've got a crush on Carroll Shelby. I don't know that that fits my personality, though.

I think we need to go back a few years. Tailfins, baby! Something a little ostentatious, offbeat, ecclectic, rare. Something like a 1960 Studebaker Hawk:



Complete with the wide sidewall tires, because a girl's got to have the right shoes. The turquoise color is just perfect, though I'd prefer a red interior. I love the combination of red and turquoise, although white and silver would do in a pinch.

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If you could travel back in time and ask any deceased political figure (famous or infamous) a single question, who would you choose, and what would you ask?

I would ask his name---so I could confirm that it was Adolf Hitler I was shooting dead. (Circa 1907, long before history would miss him.)

Conceivably, I could be stuck in that past, because that *would* assuredly change the future: time travel might not exist. It would be interesting to see what did and didn't happen next. There probably wouldn't be concentration camps, but would there still be a war? If Germany had been led by someone who wasn't afflicted with mental health problems and magical thinking, someone rational, how would that have changed the results? A truly rational leader wouldn't have gone to war at all, but if he had, he would probably have been smart enough *not* to have multiple fronts. Going after Russia while simultaneously taking on the rest of Europe = bonehead move.

I imagine returning to a discernably different future. Not necessarily better or worse in terms of my day-to-day life, but a bunch of subtle differences. There would have been a ripple effect. If all those German rocket scientists hadn't defected, would there have been an atomic bomb? Nuclear energy? The Cold War? If they hadn't had to fight the Germans, how much stronger would the Soviet Union have been after the war? If they hadn't annexed East Germany and all those republics and their resources, how much shorter might the Cold War have been?

When you think of all the benefits we've gotten from the space program (instituted to keep up with the Soviets), it's significant. I'm not saying we wouldn't have gotten to where we are eventually, but not at the same accelerated pace. I suspect we wouldn't have as many satellites---no 400 channels and nothing on, no wireless internet---internet? What's that? Computers talking to each other? That's just crazy---computers are those gigantic things that take up a whole room, regular people don't own them! You're having heart palpitations? I hope someone's gotten around to developing EKGs and all the other monitoring that harks back to the telemetry readings they did on astronauts. Nobody's ever heard of an iPod, but look at my cool new transister radio!

Another manifestation of the ripple effect---thanks to America's success in WWII, we've spent the last 70 years acting as the world's police. What if that war hadn't happened? Would we have stuck our noses into Korea? Vietnam? The Middle East?

One question. One bullet. If only.

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