Hello from the time out corner in professor Blastoff’s hatch, and thank you for joining me today. Our topic this week is on gratitude, Thanksgiving and Penn State. We also wanted to share a little history on the first Thanksgiving. Which had something to do with King James the first…and clams. But more importantly what does Thanksgiving mean to you!? What are you grateful for?

While you think of all those things, pay attention to your happiness level. Does thinking about all the things you are grateful for make you a happier person? Some neuroscientitsts believe gratitude triggers the happy centers in the brain. In this clip a neuroscientist walks us through one of his daily gratitude rituals. (He gets to it at about the 10:21 mark.)

Well, I don’t know about you but this clip triggered the depression centers in my brain. Maybe it’s my A.D.D., but I once he started talking about all the people he met who didn’t have running warm water, or hands,  it put me in a funk. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the needs in this world, all the arrears, if you will. But then, to get out of my funk, I began to think of all the compassionate people out there trying to fill those needs. And that again triggered the happy center. So, thank you to everyone who donated time, money, food or horses to those in need.

Word of the Day: Arrears

I would like to start my ritual by saying that I am immensely grateful for spell check. Before having it, I did not use words larger than five letters long. Spell check does not, however, help with those nasty homophones. For years homophones were the bane of my existence. I used to write many sentences like this:

I whoosh their was a weigh to Czech four the write home phone in witch too use.

But not anymore! Because I went to college!

I am also very grateful for my wife, Carah, who always has my back and is constantly overlooking my imperfections, while standing in amazement over my dazzling perfections. Like my top row of teeth! Thanks to 3 years of braces, which were paid for by my parents. I am very grateful to my parents for doing a fine job of raising me.

It’s easy as a kid to take for granted all things your parents do for you. That’s why I will be keeping a flow chart of everything I do for my kids. I will also make them watch this following clip bi-weekly to remind them kitchens don’t clean themselves, unless they do in the future. Then I will make them watch this so they can appreciate what life must have been like before robots.

This video is shockingly cold to me. I mean why not just shatter all of Tommy’s fantasies and tell him Santa Clause is really fat uncle Frank? Again, why not go with a flow chart? Wait till they’re old enough to have a fair amount of expendable income and then spring it on em! Guilt them into paying for your 20th anniversary getaway and thank me later.

Finally, David was grateful for speed humps. For those of you who have never seen a road hump, here you go.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Check out aaronburrellcomedy.com and professorblastoff.com.

 Listen to Professor Blastoff #30 “Gratitude.”

• Professor Blastoff

First of all, a special thanks goes out to this week’s guest Marty Yu for calling into the hatch! I would like to begin today by recapping an important point that was brought up on the podcast. Douglas Adams had this to say in an interview with American Atheists:

“I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me “Well, you haven’t been there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid” – then I can’t even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof.”

Which brings me to exhibit A…

The Norwegian Beaver. Look at her. Filled to the brim with self confidence, yet shorter than a blade of grass. Now, the moon’s mass is roughly 1/81 that of the Earth’s, and a beaver weighs, what…maybe 5 pounds and the moons mass = (1/81) X 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg.

Now I am not even going to waste my time converting pounds to kilograms here because it is easy to see that even if we managed to coerce the entire known population of these NBs into a cheesary and gave them a 15 billion years to lactate, we would still fall short of our Moon mass quota. And imagine the chaffing of their tiny little beaver nipples after 15 billion years of milking, not to mention the smell. It would literally stink to high heaven. And who would want to live in a Universe created by a God who would allow such a thing?

Then again beavers have been through much worse… consider Exhibit B

The Beaver (2011). Perhaps there is no God.

But just for the sake of argument let us burden ourselves a bit longer. On the podcast we ran out of time before we had the chance to introduce a key witness in the debate over the existence of God, Gordon Shumway, also known as ALF. In the episode called “Can I Get a Witness?” Gordon sites the Adam and Eve Story in court as a precedent to his case that he did not break the neighbor’s window, therefor if an Alien Life Form with the ability to fly across the universe and into our hearts believes in God. Well Q.E.D.

Here’s the ALF clip.  *I started watching at 8:58, plus there’s a 30-second commercial.

May I point out that Shumway looks suspiciously similar to the Norwegian Beaver? Do ALFs make cheese? Anyway, now that we have incontrovertible proof of the existence of God, let us move on to another subtopic from Professor Blastoff’s syllabus on Atheism that did not make it into the discussion.

When Man or Woman Plays God

My research led me to an interesting scientific breakthrough in the field of bio engineering. Scientists have manufactured a living organism from scratch, meaning they took some dirt, coded some DNA, and put the DNA into the dirt and it woke up… or something like that. Basically they made something not living, live. It is just a bacteria so don’t get too worked up, and I’m sure as soon as the scientists finished God was like, “hey buddy get your own dirt,” and the scientists were like “oh there you are.”

Anyway here is that clip. (God’s part was edited out.)

To wrap this up, might I just say there is a lot I don’t know. That is what has drawn me to this job as researcher. And, even though I am a believer, I am also a raging “I-Don’t-Knowian” and it gives me great joy to learn new things. I hope this life isn’t all we get, because when I look up at the stars, I long for a chance to join the Professor and Captain Kirk and explore strange new worlds and civilizations. And, more importantly, hunt down a moon made of Norwegian ALF cheese! It will be my white whale…or white dwarf, if it goes nuclear. I feel like this life is just too short for whoever created this place to tease us with the stars.

Thanks for stopping by!  Take a visit to my website at aaronburrellcomedy.com

Listen to Professor Blastoff #29 “Atheism.”

• Professor Blastoff