Shipwrecked & Comatose

Do you ever stop to wonder why in our society we view ten years as a significant and special amount of time?  Why ten?  What makes ten special?  Is it the cyclical nature of ten, that every 10 years numbers reset at zero?  Do we just like seeing that zero come back around?  Is it because we have 10 fingers and ten toes?  If we had more, or fewer, fingers, would we observe the passage of time differently?  Why is it every ten years we consider it a "landmark" birthday*?  Why is every ten years a landmark anniversary? * Okay.  Let me clarify that.  It's a landmark birthday before age ten and after age twenty-one.  Otherwise, at least in our culture, we tend to view landmarks as sixteen, (driving age), eighteen (voting age), and twenty-one (drinking age). I am no exception to this rule of course.  I saw birthdays thirty and forty as significant, just as I saw my tenth wedding anniversary significant.  When I hit the ten y...

I know I shouldn't be wasting my precious brain cells on the Duck Dynasty debacle, but I have been thinking a lot about the public reactions.  It seems this whole mess was just a publicity stunt on behalf of A&E.  Sure they preemptively punished Phil Robertson for making some rather heinous statements in order to avoid offending certain groups of people, but then they turned around and made money off the controversy. Once they saw the profit in that, they changed their minds pretty quickly.   That's television I suppose.  I don't blame them.  You do what makes money. What bothers me is how many people out there supported Phil Robertson and why. "It's his Constitutional right to say whatever he wants," you cry.  Yes, I agree with that 100%.  He is entitled to say whatever he wants without fear of repercussions from the government.  He had no repercussions from the government either.  He wasn't fined.  He wasn't thrown in jail...