Acute Angles ... A Treasury of Common Knowledge

By David Fidelman

If you go to Kenya and take a safari north from Nairobi, you’ll find that right on the equator in the middle of nowhere there is a collection of souvenir shops and photo-opportunities. There is also a gentleman with a bucket of water from which he fills a small plastic cylinder that has a hole in the bottom and two matches floating on the surface to show the direction of rotation as the water drains. He walks 50 feet south of the equator, and the matches turn counter-clockwise; then he walks 50 feet north of the equator, and the matches turn clockwise. Right on the equator the water doesn’t drain, because it doesn’t know which way to turn This difference in spin between the northern and southern hemispheres is just one of the things everybody knows. There are a lot of other things we know that make just as much sense.

We know that UFO’s exist, and that the government knows more than it is telling us. 11% of the adult American population have actually seen a UFO. Even the skeptics agree that there must be other life in the universe besides ourselves. There are billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each galaxy, so based on the sheer magnitude of the numbers, if intelligent life occurred on earth, it must also be present elsewhere. The only problem is how to contact them, and wide scale experiments are underway trying to do just that.

We live in one of a countless number of parallel universes, each of which is a little different from the other. There may be a parallel universe in which people use mainly Beta cassettes instead of VHS, and eight-track cartridges, and there would be three moons or two suns, and people would cross on the red instead of the green, and the Edsel would be a great success, and most people would be left-handed, and Gladys Knight would have an extra Pip, and the earth would rotate the opposite way. There may also be perpendicular universes in which everybody is standing up.

The New York City sewer system is full of alligators that were brought back when they were small by tourists from Florida, then when they got too big they were disposed of by flushing down the drain. The sewer system is also full of snakes, which occasionally pop up through the toilets into people’s apartments.

Shakespeare did not write any of his plays. He had neither the education nor the background for it. The plays and sonnets were written either by Edward de Vere (the Earl of Oxford), by Christopher Marlow, by William Stanley (the Earl of Derby), by Roger Manners (the Earl of Rutland), or by Queen Elizabeth.

The oil and coal interests have been sabotaging all efforts to perfect alternative forms of energy, including the development of nuclear fusion. Nuclear energy derived from the “cold fusion” process was announced by two scientists in Utah, but their credibility was attacked and nothing more has been heard about it. There is a pill that dissolves in water and can be used as a replacement for gasoline. It drives a car with better performance, at lower cost, and with less pollution. The oil companies purchased the formula from the inventor, who now lives in luxury on the Riviera, and have been keeping it safely hidden from the public to protect their fuel monopoly.

Our economic system has built-in safeguards that will prevent another major depression. A depression is politically unacceptable and is too easy to stop. In the event of a slight downturn in the economy, the Federal Reserve will adjust interest rates and the money supply to keep the economy on an even keel. It may cause inflation, but that’s preferable to a depression any time.

If we could put a man on the moon, there’s nothing we can’t do.

Because we’re so well-informed, we can be confident about making the right decisions to  ensure that things will keep getting better.