2. This is now

MAMALUKE - A High Performance Racing Pipe in meerschaum
Blow thru the stem/drive shaft and smoke comes out the exhausts. Fan and exhausts are nickel plated brass. Bowl is below the air filter and carburetor. Six inches long (15 cm)

There once was a race of slaves known as Mamelukes. They were so good as slaves that they eventually supplanted their masters as the ruling class. Their Waterloo came when they got whipped by Napoleon. So I titled my little hand carved racing engine "Mamaluke". Look what we do to feed, house and maintain these internal combustion (I/C) slaves/masters.

THE IMPACT OF HUMANITY ON THE PLANET (cont.)

The time machine on our 6' earth is making it's way to today and all of a sudden you can see signs of human life. In the last 200 years human have truly rearranged the planet so much that you can see humanity at work without magnification. In fact, if you look at any sea coast anywhere you'll see vast city/suburb complexes connected to each other by tendrils of stone and metal and electricity.

Look at the east coast of North America. Since 1800 it has been developed to the point that it's one long city from New England to Florida. As you run your fingers along the coast you realize that the earth has crystalized. In sunlight it shines. There are major cities that are sharp to the touch, your fingers look like you've been crumpling up a sheet of sandpaper.Stick your nose down there. That's the smell of chemicals, some burning.

These urban complexes are surrounded with human waste so while we bury garbage in the ground we're digging up the materials to make more garbage. Hold your hand over a city and you feel heat. Doesn't heat mean infection? The east coast glows at night. From Massachusetts to Florida it humms. Bright spots show where cities are.

Everywhere you look there are those tendrils connecting everyone. Impulses race along them the same way blood flows through a vein. Whether it's stone, metal or electricity they cover the globe like webs.

There are now more machines on earth than people, all requiring power, all making heat. The number of 2 cycle engines alone is astronomical. They stink up the planet far worse than other polluters yet every one of them has a home, often as nothing more than a mechanical pet.

Humans are geniuses when it comes to developing mechanical slaves. Machines have been taught do such basic things as holding our buildings up. "Brick and Mortar" is obsolete. You can add electricity to that now. We mechanize slave labor and then extract fossil energy to feed it. Look in any city's yellow pages and you'll find machine builders. You see their work on cable television shows that show the machinery in operation. Somebody builds those machines. Strange breed, those slave builders but at least they supply us with guilt free slave labor. In the old antebellum south, the greatest fear was of slave rebellion. Machines don't rebel. They might refuse to work bur we aren't seriously worried they're gonna attack us in our sleep. The mechanical slaves pose other problems more easily ignored.

My MAMELUKE pipe is built for show, but there are plenty of real people who do put engines on display like works of art. Engines carve places in history. Ask any "Indy" fan over the age of 60 if the word "Offy" has any meaning and they'll get a little misty eyed. The Offenhauser racing engine was THE engine in the old days.

There are even different cults worshipping various types of I/C engines. They're called fans. Remember, fan is short for fanatic. If you add up all racing fans around the world you find a significant fraction of humanity is interested in motor sports. Whether it's stock or drag, formula one or sprint car, go cart or motorcycle the engines are at the heart of the sport and it's the power that captivates us. It means that everyman can be a superman behind the wheel and all you need is a heavy foot. It's real heady stuff to those vast hordes of us who never will have any real power even in our own homes. The fans may worship the driver, but it's the driver's business to master that wild beast of an engine. It's also one of the few remaining blood sports, less and less so, but the threat remains. The real carnage is among the slaves. I love to see body parts strewn on the track as long as they're quarter panels and hoods n' other car parts

So where are we? The time machine on our little 6' earth has made it to today. The atmosphere is now in permafog. We have an aura we never had before. It's not our breath or too many volcanos that's stinkin' up the joint, it's our slaves . I hope for a day when the I/C engine has a place only in the museum and the only question will be "Why'd we live with it for so long?"

Because we're human and it was so easy to ignore the unpaid costs. This is our natural state. We play ourselves to death like a good dog playing fetch. We do what we want, to hell with tomorrow. Our legacy? What will future archeologists say about our litter? Great Pyramids it aint. Mostly it will be garbage. Vast landfills oozing methane.

Our monumental architecture? Shopping malls and skyscrapers. They're also our temple complexes.The Mall of America is an Acropolis of the true American religion: Consumerism. It has come to this, globally, during the life of the USA. We live in a country with tremendous resources that was handed over, intact, by the indigents to new comers all of whom wanted a chance to live like the aristocrats back home that they hated so much. They still come for that, but less and less.

We are what we are because of things that happened thousands of years ago. Every one of us is descended from a long line of survivors. Up until 100 years ago it was common to wake up in January in the northern US and have to chip the ice off the wash basin in the morning. Life was hard.

There were even times in human history when the human gene pool was reduced by natural calamities such as earthquakes and at one least super volcano 70,000 + years ago when there were perhaps only thousands of human survivors worldwide. What do those survivors have in common? Smartest? Quickest? If surviving means eating your neighbor then you better be quickest. You can be sure it was a harem society where some bad ass got all the babes. We're all descended from him. As much as we to think we're advanced, emotionally we carry the same baggage our ancestors did. Monkeys like to think they're so superior too. It turns out that what's normal life amongst the chimpanzees is codependence amongst humans.

It could be that our legacy to the planet will be a continuous thin layer of plastic bags over the whole planet.

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